Starting a Common Book Project

UW Madison is initiating a common book program, Go Big Read and we started a little late in the year so it’s a scramble to get this major initiative up and running. I would describe my role as “project manager,” since it’s an initiative of our new Chancellor, but the library is really getting things started. Here are some interesting things about the program:

• Since we made a campus announcement and put a web form up to initiate an abbrieviated selection process, we have 600 suggestions. The Chancellor will be choosing a book in early April.
• We’re very interested in curricular integration, so I’ve been going around to meetings with the directors of large-enrollment first-year courses with the Director of the Center for the First Year Experience and the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning. It’s been interesting to “get on the same page” with such a group.
• Everyone has lots of ideas that they’re very tied to and everyone is interested in participating or helping out in some way.
• Should be interesting.

I’m not tied to any one book selection, which makes this whole thing less stressful, so far. I’d be interested to talk to librarians who have had this role in a campus common read project, if that’s you please get in touch!

Reading Books

Quite a few times people have said to me, “I’ve always wanted to be a librarian.  It must be wonderful to be around books all day!”  And I try to remember the last time I touched a book,  particularly one that wasn’t about library science or higher ed.  All that may be changing a little, though.

After talking with the new Chancellor, our University Librarian has convened a campus group to initiate a common book program.  I’ve been asked to lead the project based on my experience with what I really do all day as a librarian, which is organizing projects.   We’re starting way behind schedule with a lot of questions to answer, but what else is new with projects?

My favorite site about common book programs is Barbara Fister’s site, “One Book, One College: Common Reading Programs.”   A new National Endowment for the Arts study just came out showing that reading is on the rise among young adults.   The New York Times article says, “the proportion of overall literary reading increased among virtually all age groups, ethnic and demographic categories since 2002. It increased most dramatically among 18-to-24-year-olds, who had previously shown the most significant declines.”

I also joined a few book clubs this year (never one for moderation) so perhaps I’ll turn this book reading thing around.

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.

K-20 Information Literacy in Wisconsin

This afternoon, Jo Ann Carr and I facilitated a discussion, “Not a Bridge to Nowhere: K-20 Collaboration in Information Literacy” for the WiscNet 3rd Thursday series.   Maddy Covelli, formerly Head of STS and now at WiscNet, is working on reviving the series and this was the first session.   So I want to thank everyone who participated, including many of our colleagues at Madison. WiscNet “serves Wisconsin’s education, library, government, and affiliated organizations by: Providing high quality, cost effective network services and adding value to the network through the services we provide; Helping people use information technology services effectively; Fostering information and resource sharing; and Embracing partnerships with government, consortium, education and information provider organizations.”   We should invite Maddy to tell us more about it sometime.  She travels for work and they’re touring the supper clubs of Northern Wisconsin.

Our session was about bridging K-12 and higher ed information literacy efforts in the state: “The students and the environments of K-12 and Higher Education  are changing. The diversity and amount of information these students encounters continues to increase. What is our vision for preparing Wisconsin learners for the 21st century? How can we build the bridge of lifelong information literacy to help students at all levels to navigate these new environments?”  I learned a terrific amount in putting the presentation together with Jo Ann Carr, she is an amazing resource since she is so involved in many of these initiatives.  I’ve posted our slides and handout and I think the presentation will be archived eventually.

Here are some interesting points I think:

• There are some strong parallels between the LEAP initiative in higher ed and the Partnership for 21st Century Skills in K12.  Wisconsin is very involved in both of these initiatives.
• The framework for information literacy of educators presented by Shinew and Walter in “Instructional Literacy Instruction for Educators: a global perspective on needs and opportunties” has very interesting parallels to our interest in faculty consultation / assignment design in higher ed.
• The Council on Library and Network Development (COLAND) draft vision report is an important document for us all to read.
• We have some amazing outreach efforts already underway across campus, but particularly in College and Ebling.
• Steve Baumgart will participate in a panel on this topic at WLA, where we should learn even more.

Catching Up…

One thing I’ve always wondered about blogging is how people find time to do it. Despite my oath to myself to make it a short part of most days, or at least once a week, time is really slipping by. So I’ll just make a quick list of what’s occupying me these days that might be of wider interest and fill in some details as I can find the time. If you’d like more information about any of these, I encourage you to get in touch.

• TEL Grants: Technology Enhanced Learning Grants are administered by the Vice-Provost for Teaching and Learning to “enhance student learning by developing technology tools and
  infrastructure that help us meet our challenges and support all aspects of the classroom of the
  future.” I’m involved in two of these grants (along with other librarians and many other players), which are linked and relate to creating repositories for digital learning objects. I hope to share more information as these take shape, but my role in one of them is to serve on the Steering Committee (my current role is to draft an evaluation framework) and on the other I’m collaborating with liaison librarians (currently Erika Sevetson, and we’ll be meeting with Bob Sessions) to create information literacy learning objects related to the “OneHealth/OneMedicine” initiative.
• Library Instructional Content: After meeting with the Library Course Page Steering (LCP) Committee, we started a group to discuss our vision for how the library’s instructional content will be presented in various learning environments. The group includes Jean Ruenger-Hanson (LCP, Library Web Site Team, Research Guides), Sheila Stoeckel (Vice-Chair, LILI Instructional Design Working Group), Diana Wheeler (Liaison between LILI Coords and LCP), Jeff Bohrer (Academic Technology, Learn@UW) and myself. I’m working on a statement of what we’ll create, but our goal is to help guide conversations and design decisions about this topic.
• Learning Spaces Event: I’m on the planning group for this November 13th, all-day event and am organizing the panel. Look for an announcement in the next few days.

Other than that, I’m going to many meetings and doing a lot of talks around campus (courses, WiscNet, SLIS classes). And doing some teaching of undergrads, of course.

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.

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.

Who has responsibility for learning experiences outside the classroom?

The Chronicle of Higher Education has published an article about the debate about who has ownership over learning experiences outside the classroom.  The trend has been that Student Affairs professionals and other campus groups manage these experiences, but the National Association of Scholars has issued a statement that faculty should reestablish ownership.  On our campus, you can see the great things student affairs professionals have done (often in partnership with faculty and other groups) in the new Center for the First Year Experience.  The library participates in the planning and delivery of these programs in a variety of ways, and I would say that student affairs people are doing an amazing job leading and delivering these key, large-scale programs.  If you’re interested, the debate is raging in the comments area of the online article.

Educause Learning Technology Leadership Institute

I’ve spent this week at the EDUCAUSE Learning Technology Leadership Institute, which is in Madison this year.  This is an intensive leadership program similar in structure to the ACRL Institute for Information Literacy Immersion.  EDUCAUSE also has programs for managers and senior leaders.  We spent the week in presentations, facilitated sessions, finding out our personality types and their implications for working in teams, and working in a large team on a case study.   Right now I think the most important things I learned are:

• As a librarian, it was gratifying to confirm in discussions that I have learned a terrific amount about instructional design, teaching and learning initiatives, college campuses, working in teams, and project management.  It was nice to see that the expertise is comparable to that of people who identify as leaders in Learning Technology.
• Instructional technologists have some methods for dealing with project management that we should adopt.  Some examples are project charters and use case studies.  I’ve been thinking about a use case for our Library Course Pages, and now I know more about how to approach that.
• I like working in teams, but I’m not too sure about the whole personality type thing.  As usual, I ended up doing part of the presentation, which was fun.
• It is interesting and very instructive to hear the perspective of high-level IT folks on campus politics and a variety of projects and technologies.  Aaron Brower and Ron Kraemer came to speak with us today, and I learned a great deal about their strategies and work styles.
• It is really interesting to connect with instructional techology people as peers over a period of time.  I will be sure to call on many of these people in the future.

We’ll see what we learn on the last day, which is set aside for reflection.  It is really incredibly exhausting to participate in an immersion program as a local, and I know the other Madison people also feel it.   When you go home, your real life is still waiting, along with those 600 emails.

I was glad Kathy Christoph recommended the program and Ron Kraemer decided to sponsor the attendance of members of the ComETS Steering Committee.

ALA Annual Conference

I don’t get to learn much at ALA these days because I spend most of my time in committee meetings.  Here are a few interesting things I did, though:

• Attended both Instruction Section Discussion Sessions, one on online instruction and one on “Using the Social Web to Enhance and Promote Information Literacy These are huge discussions where you learn a lot about what others are doing, and a digest with summary is posted on the web after conference.
• Attended a kickoff meeting of the ACRL Instruction Section/ALISE Joint Working Group on curriculum.  This committee resulted from an action plan I submitted to ACRL and was made possible by the approval of the ACRL and ALISE Boards.  The group will explore good practices for preparing LIS students for careers in instruction/information literacy in academic libraries.
• Started my year as Chair of the ACRL Instruction Section, which will be a big job!  If you’re interested in getting involved in any way, let’s talk