Learning Spaces of the Future (ComETS event)

Roberto Rengel from the School of Human Ecology provided some frameworks for thinking about spaces. His background is in interior design and architecture, as well as corporate space design. He talked about enduring characteristics of learning activities and learners.   A good place is convenient, safe, functional, comfortable, inspiring, and multidimensional. Multidimensional spaces address the person as a whole (individual, social, complex)… because people are different in their characteristics and circumstances, designers of informal spaces need to account for different personalities and tasks. Other issues include acoustical properties and luminous environment (combination of natural and artificial lighting), warmth. Inspiration can come from style, furniture, materials, colors and graphics. For a space to be used, it should be part of something bigger than itself.

Carole Turner and Tom Wise talked about “Classrooms of the future.” The learning environment should be technology-rich, take into account leraning outcomes, and blending experiences inside and outside the classroom. Every space on campus should contribute to the learning experience. We discussed whether classroom time is a chance to cover material or facilitate learning. There were two views: that a variety of learning spaces enable learning outside the classroom, so that the classroom time can be used to frame ideas; and that technology enables delivery of content outside the classroom so that the classroom time can be used to facilitate learning through a variety of activities. Tom Wise talked about the FP&M process for buildings: program statement, design development, design/drawings review, bid documents, construction process.  FP&M has “Classroom Design Principles.”   The UW Madison Master Plan includes Education (out to bid), Biochemistry, WID, SOHE, Sterling (L&S), and Union South.

Because I facilitated the panel, I didn’t take notes there or finish this post until today.  The panelists were Cal Bergman (Housing), Jo Ann Carr (School of Education), Carrie Kruse (College Library), and John Staley (Infolabs).  Each presented “on the ground” experiences designing learning spaces.

A lot of interesting perspectives were shared, but the most important outcome seemed to be communication and information-sharing.

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.

Chancellor Martin Inaugural Address

Along with a big contingent from the Libraries, I attended the inaugural address of Chancellor Carolyn “Biddy” Martin at the Kohl Center yesterday evening.   It was a really nice event that included student group performances and was attended by many local and state luminaries.

In her remarks about undergraduate education, Martin talked about the need for liberal education in general, but also specifically at some length about the need for students to be able to approach information from a variety of sources critically.

To quote from the Capital Times online, “Martin went on to talk about her desire to improve the UW’s undergraduate education — so that students are properly prepared for the challenges and opportunities of the future after graduation.  ‘That means promoting again and continually liberal arts education — or what we might call a general purpose education that allows students to develop the knowledge, analytical skills and independent thinking that are necessary for responsible citizenship,’ she said”

It’s heartening to know that this is such an important value to our new chancellor that she discussed it explicitly in laying out her vision.

Liaison Forum: WARF

WARF, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, is the technology transfer office for the university.  WARF was established in 1925 by Professor Harry Steenbock.

They take an invention by a faculty, staff, reseacher, or student to see if it’s patentable and move it to the marketplace.  WARF has 400 inventions disclosed to it each year and patents about 240.  Criteria for taking on an invention include legal test for patentability and the ability to predict whether early stage technologies will deliver.  Generally, it takes about seven years for a technology to pan out, but it can be longer or not at all.

Over $1 billion of products are sold each year under license from WARF.  Licensing proceeds are invested to fund further research at UW Madison; WARF gives the graduate school a lump sum to distribute.  Since 1993, WARF has also taken equity in 31 faculty start-up companies.

It’s tax-exempt and not-for-profit, with a board comprised of alums.   The challenges for WARF are to assure a consistent (or increased) grant to the university, particularly as state support decreases.

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.

IT Strategic Planning: Early Priorities for Teaching/Learning and Outreach

August 11, I attended the IT Strategic Planning event on Teaching/Learning and Outreach.  It would be great to see more librarians at these events so that we can share our perspectives and report back.  You can also participate by visiting the web site and giving your feedback.

This meeting was to provide feedback on an initial set of priorities; the full list will be posted on the web site in the notes section.  Items that are most related to information literacy include a focus on student and faculty technology competencies.  The purpose of the meeting was to provide feedback on an early draft of priorities related to teaching/learning and outreach.  The draft priorities for technology literacy on the flip chart read, “develop and support the technology skills of students/faculty and instructional staff,” but the handout for the session included some more nuanced language including technology literacy and competencies.

The discussion touched on models for accomplishing this and whether competencies could be defined at the campus level.  We discussed the Report of Raccreditation Team 4, which addresses competencies for global citizens and leaders and includes a section on information literacy written by a group of librarians.  Their team discovered that 80% of students take four courses in their freshman and sophomore years, so there’s an opportunity for integration there.  Although I can guess what those courses might be, I need to reread their report to be sure.

We also talked about “leveling the playing field” by providing a basic level of support/resources for teaching and learning across departments, as well as local access to support.

Teaching and Learning Symposium 2008

The Teaching and Learning Symposium was last week. The first thing I want to share is that the presentations will be archived online. The archive site is still a little glitchy, so I’ll send out a link once the presentations are all there. A few highlights from my perspective:

- In the opening plenary, Adam Nelson talked about three teaching/learning examples in UW-Madison’s past. From a library perspective, the most interesting was the debating societies in 1890s, which engaged important issues of the day, conducted a year’s worth of primary and secondary research, produced substantial published reports, and were extremely prestigious. These were extracurricular clubs that were more popular than football in their heyday. Also included were Meiklejohn’s 1920s Experimental College “Athens-America” curriclum and Otto’s “Man and Nature” philosophy course. Adam was very gracious in thanking the archives for helping to find the really interesting primary sources he shared.

- A Learning Circle on the “Essential Learning Outcomes” we talked about How/where/when we can engage the outcomes. We talked about how to make more explicit what courses and curricula do and what kinds of evidence we can look at to see if students have done this. We agreed that we can’t address all skills (or even one skill comprehensively) in a single course, but students move through the curriculum in many different ways so it’s difficult to build a sequence of experiences. So we’ll need to develop a collection of strategies that allow us to gather the necessary data and students to be more intentional about their college experiences.

- In the closing plenary, John Wiley discussed big forces that will impact the future of higher education: demographics, outcomes assessment, degrees and credentials, productivity of the educational enterprise, and technology. Outcomes assessment was the most interesting to me: Wiley pointed out that we rarely “apply our research prowess to our teaching” to analyze our effectiveness in promoting learning. His conclusions were that “we should be interested” in this question, and that comprehensive outcomes assessment is prohibitively expensive, perhaps doubling the cost of education. It’s hard to make a good decision about how much assessment is enough, in my experience, so it was useful to hear that perspective from the top.

The library was, as in past years, heavily involved in the planning of the symposium and the program. Sheila Stoeckel and I were on the planning committee and the Library was involved in two programs and two post-conference workshops that I’m aware of. I’ll try to share more about these once we have the information in the archive. I would be interested to hear what others found valuable.

Student Copyright Forum — “Culture of Sharing”

Saturday, April 12th, the library will be sponsoring a copyright forum for students: Culture of Sharing: P2P, YouTube, Open Access, Open Source, copyright and Why it Matters to You!

This is new ground for us in a few ways:

• We want the forum to be about what students can (legally) do, more than about what they can’t do
• We are planning the content to be of interest to students and have done our best to get students engaged in the planning process.
• We want to show that the library has a stake and unique expertise in the important issue of copyright education

We are grappling with the idea of how to advertise to students, so doing a Facebook group and ads, fliers around campus, “chalking” (a UW phenomenon?), and offering free food. We’re learning a lot from these forays (why is our Facebook group so buried? what is the new pricing structure for ads?). Unfortunately, we ended up with the same date as the college Jeopardy tournament, but we are hopeful that people will come and that this will be an event that we can build on in the future.