Widgets and Course Content

An news item in the Chronicle of Higher Education today “Professor Uses Web ‘Widgets’ to Share Course Content” features a project by Mark Marino, a Lecturer at USC to create  “Web widgets for online course materials [to further] the goals of open courseware, efforts by professors and colleges to give away their lecture notes and other teaching materials online.”   Marino’s page uses PageFlakes.   Other instructors can build their own web pages by repurposing the widgets and creating their own.  This is something we’re talking about a lot in the library and across campus, and the project helps to get some new ideas for what modular content can be.

What is included in the collection is a lot of content related to Web 2.0 authoring, multimedia literacy, and even “ICT”  is mentioned (that’s Information and Communication Technology).  But the content related to research is pretty thin, mostly a module about Zotero.   It seems like the lack of reference to licensed content relates to the impulse to keep the widgets entirely open and portable (rather than institution-specific), but that rationale is not explicitly stated.

The move toward this kind of development seems to be a big opportunity for libraries to create their own instructional widgets, and I’ve seen some.   But what about widgets, portable/open or institution-specific, that dig more deeply into the full scope of information literacy competencies.  I would love to see some cool examples.

By the way, I feel out of my league in this area because I’m not a programmer, but Marino’s widgets are not particularly sophisticated from a visual design or programming standpoint.  Maybe we need to be bolder.

and finally, I used to work at USC and we had a great collaboration with the Writing Program.  I hope the  instruction librarians there are being invited to this project and given some resources to join in.

First Generation Students

Do you ever feel like you’re stating the obvious to new students?   Don’t take for granted that they already know it all.

A campus news item this week details a study by Claire Huhn that “takes an in-depth look at the characteristics of first-generation students at UW-Madison and the ways in which UW-Madison supports this population.”  Things I found interesting:

• 21% of our 2008 freshman class are first generation college students
• first generation students are female to a higher percentage, slightly older and more frequently come from rural Wisconsin.
• 49 percent of first-generation freshmen are eligible for financial aid, in contrast to 19 percent of freshmen whose parents have college degrees

I’ll listen for presenters at campus meetings who can talk to us about these kinds of studies, which really help to understand the students we work with.

New Faculty & TA Orientations – Shared Values?

During Welcome Week, I spoke at a number of new faculty and TA orientations.  We all know that this is an important opportunity to introduce instructors to librarians’ role in teaching/learning on campus.  It’s also a  challenge to decide what to get across in the allotted 10-40 minutes, or maybe an opportunity to decide what you really have to say in the time allotted.  Speaking to instructor groups many times in the same week, you find yourself really modifying what you’re saying based on feedback (blank looks, enthusiasm, questions, evaluations, etc.)

So what seemed really important by the last talks?  I found myself referring back to a key sequence of topics:

• Research tells us that Information-seeking has changed, and the library is no longer the primary portal to for many information seekers.  (OCLC, 2006; Ithaka, 2008).  All users link more and reflect less (BL/JISC, 2007).
• This is problematic for our students when they come to college because they do not have the background knowledge needed to know what they’re looking for or evaluate their results to select resources that are appropriate for academic research (i.e. a Google)
• We have a shared responsibility to create learning experiences that require students to master more sophisticated information-seeking and use, and librarians can collaborate with faculty to make this happen.

Not rocket science, and many of you have said the same things all week, but that seemed to be the message that resonated.  Each group had its own needs and interests, but did seem to care about this message.  Will it be enough to move them to seek out the library’s instructional services this year?  They have a lot of other stuff on their minds, but probably it will motivate them to seek out help that’s low-threshold such as web pages or maybe library instruction sessions.  Hopefully, it will plant the seeds for a few deeper collaborations in the future.