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.

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.

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.

ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and IT ‘08

The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and IT 2008 was released today.  You can link to the key findings here, but the full findings are also freely available online.

This year’s study includes some information literacy questions based on the ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education.  At first glance (I haven’t read the full report yet), these look like student self-report of selected items related to searching web-based sources (freely available and licensed databases).  Here’s what they found:

• 79.5% rate themselves highly for their ability to “use the Internet effectively and efficiently to search for information,” with almost half rating themselves as “very skilled” and another third rating themselves as “experts.”
• About half of respondents also say they are “very skilled” or “expert” when it comes to “evaluating the reliability and credibility of online sources of information” or “understanding the ethical and legal issues surrounding the access and use of digital information.”

I’m looking forward to examining this section more closely, but if anyone else gets to it first I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts.

This year’s report also includes a special focus on social networking sites.  One of the PIs for this study, Judy Caruso, is right here at Madison and I heard her talk about ECAR last year at a brownbag.

“Innovation, Learning, and Learning Spaces”

At lunch, I participated in this Malcolm Brown ELI Web seminar. UW is an institutional member of the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative.  I was interested in this one because Malcolm Brown was on the faculty of the ELI Institute I attended, and his explanations of abstract ideas work well for the way I learn.  A few interesting snippets:

• “The best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas.”  Linus Pauling.
• “Implementation is the hardest part of innovation.”  This is interesting to me because I usually think of myself as an implementer, which doesn’t have the glamour associated with new ideas, R&D, etc.  I like the idea that implementation is part of innovation.  There are so many decisions and abilities required to keep a process open but moving toward a successful outcome.   I think there’s an interesting study in how “big ideas”/implementation are valued in an organization, if anyone wants to chat about it more.
• Librarians were mentioned often in this talk as key collaborators and stakeholders.
• There was some discussion of motiviting faculty to use “incubator classrooms” and diffuse innovations.  This is a discussion we had here last week at a meeting about the incubator classroom idea, and I got some new lingo to describe those ideas…. “observability,” for example.
• Apparently, Crit Stuart from ARL talked about Learning Spaces at the ELI Fall Focus Session: “The Research Library as a Center of Learning: Noteworthy Trends and Complementary Assessment Efforts.” Something I’ll look at more later.
• In evaluating innovations, focus on what people do, not what they say.

The web site at the top includes the slides and a lot of good resources.  There are a few campus events about learning spaces coming up: a Delta dinner and a ComETS event.

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.

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.

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.

NCSU Course Views Project

Joe Ryan spoke to a group today about his experience developing the “Course Views” project at NCSU. The pages developed for courses are similar to UW’s Library Course Pages, but they were developed from the ground up to achieve some specific goals:

• create a “course view” for every course at the university
• develop a scalable/sustainable system for library course content delivery
• pages customized as much as possible to the course

The course view pages are generated based on a course’s code that indicates department and level. Librarians may then add additional customization. The team developed “widgets” for the various components of the course pages to make the updating process scale up. They also created a course views “widget” that will display in the campus pilot of Moodle for course pages.

I like many things about their approach: the widgets, the descriptive naming conventions, the clean presentation of the information, and the idea that some level of customization can occur through programming. There is a tension between this approach and higher levels of customization faculty want, and some questions about campus process that they are just beginning to think about.

I like their project page a lot, also, we should do that for our projects.  I also met Joe’s colleague Kim Duckett, who also worked on this project, at LOEX.  It’s an interesting library that sounds like lots of fun to work in.