Google book search for education

Thursday, the University Library Committee meeting was devoted to a presentation about Google Book Search by Frances Haugen, who works at Google in the area of search quality and how to expose content from books.

Google is very interested in applications of book search and their other tools for education, and there are some interesting hybrid applications that I wasn’t aware of previously.   From my notes (haven’t tried these yet, so I’m sure some of them need clarification):

“Google tools can be used for collaboration, research projects, real-time feedback on essays, peer editing, cooperative note-taking, and online assignment submission.  Examples of applications for education:

• Can take a quote from a primary source document and do a book search for books that include/discuss quote and context around it.
• Can use publication date in book search: “War date:1861-1865”
• Can highlight part of the book (public domain content), create a document and paste in the link to bring in image from book / snippet.
• Can compose course packs
• Can share a “library”, labels & reviews.

Clearly, many of these have enormous potential for teaching and learning in general and especially information literacy.  I’m curious how people are using Google book search and apps in their information literacy programs.  Our Google workshop working group has thought about devoting more time to Google apps, and this seems like a great idea, particularly if there are materials already out there.

21st century literacies

Last week, I gave a talk on our information literacy program – past, present, and future – to a group of thirty graduate students in LIS 626, “information literacy pedagogy,” taught by Madge Klais.   I enjoy these sessions partly because I really reflect and learn best when I am putting together a presentation, and also because I learn a lot from the class.

In planning the presentation, I reread a book chapter on the future of information literacy by Lisa Janicke-Hinchliffe for the Information Literacy Instruction Handbook produced by the ACRL Instruction Section last year. The chapter is short in length and presents a lot of interesting ideas, so I recommend it as a discussion piece.  One idea that I have also been thinking about a lot is that librarians can’t continue to limit ourselves to instruction about publication formats that are in the traditional library purview, i.e. books and journals.   As we are all becoming producers of information in a variety of formats, the distinction between our/good information and their/bad information is increasingly artificial.  It becomes more important to help learners to evaluate the usefulness of any/all information for their needs.

Most information literacy programs have embraced these ideas, but books and journals remain “our” information and our core business.  Partly because we have so much to offer when it comes to information from library collections.  And if we are addressing information in all formats, we have a lot of new problems to solve.

There was an article on  “Becoming Screen Literate” in the New York Times this week.  I recommend this article as well, here’s a snippet: “The fluid and fleeting symbols on a screen pull us away from the classical notions of monumental authors and authority. On the screen, the subjective again trumps the objective. The past is a rush of data streams cut and rearranged into a new mashup, while truth is something you assemble yourself on your own screen as you jump from link to link. We are now in the middle of a second Gutenberg shift — from book fluency to screen fluency, from literacy to visuality.”

A lot of groups on our campus are talking about multimedia literacy, media literacy, and technology literacy.  While it’s very important not to conflate these with information literacy, we certainly can’t stand apart from these conversations and initiatives.  Instead, we’ll have to see them as opportunities to start the solving the problems (copyright, discovery of moving images, training) that are at the intersection of 21st century literacies.

Digital Storytelling

I spent Thursday at the systemwide Digital Storytelling Conference put together by Cheryl Diermyer of AT.  From the program description: “While there is no doctrine defining a digital story as a distinct genre, it has become generally associated with a short film (less than 5 minutes), which is a mixture of a written and recorded voiceover with still and moving images, and often a soundtrack. Digital stories are often told in the first person voice and can be used to create connections between students, instructors and content.”

There were many great speakers at this conference, including Joe Lambert of the Center for Digital Storytelling (why didn’t I know about this when I was at Berkeley?).  Unfortunately, I missed the faculty panel for another meeting, but I look forward to talking to Margaret Nellis of UW about her project.   Many applications of digital storytelling involve community organizing, oral history, and service learning.

The most interesting speaker for me was Liv Gjestvang of the Ohio State University Digital Union.  I originally met Liv at the Learning Technology Leadership Insititute this summer, and she has a really interesting background as a video artist and community-based work.   OSU’s Digital Storytelling Program is more academically-focused and she talked about some of the lessons learned in building faculty and staff participation in a program that both tied to the academic mission of the university and retained the personal aspect of storytelling.  Librarians actually initiated their program and remain integral to it. They’ve created an online repository and YouTube page.   I’m looking forward to talking more with Liv and connecting with the librarians she works with.

I see a lot of potential for libraries and information literacy in this kind of program:

• There’s a potential for students to develop/demonstrate a continuum of skills from information use to production of knowledge.  It would be interesting to take a team approach to developing courses that do this.   Lots of opportunities for engagement and assessment of student learning outcomes.
• Could we support people looking for images and audio and help them manage the intellectual property issues?  Some projects used geocoding, which is an intersting tie-in.
• There’s an opportunity for reflection in students telling their own stories, which is part of information literacy beyond learning outcomes that we don’t get at very well.
• We saw some examples where faculty interest students in their research / courses by creating videos.  I can see potential for using this to get students excited about their role in the research university.
• Use it to explain to students different majors or disciplines.
• Librarians at OSU created a digital story about OED and an interesting special collection, so about a particular resource or making research exciting.

The OSU examples are here, and we saw many other interesting examples I could share if people are interested.  Some intersect with other technologies like geocoding.