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.

“Managing the Rogue Assignment” and research assignment design

I’ve been subscribing to ACRL RSS feeds for awhile, and the ACRLInsider blog includes tables of contents and links to full text for both College and Research Libraries (requires ACRL login for full text) and C&RL News (appears to be free).    This month’s C&RL News includes an article and accompanying author podcast about steps to dealing with “rogue” — poorly planned or constructed — research assignments.   I’m not sure all of the advice would work in every situation, but I believe that research assignment design and consultation is a key area that we need to be more deeply involved in.

I’ve been working with Brad Hughes of the Writing Center/Writing-across-the Curriculum to design and facilitate faculty workshops on library research assignment design.   Brad has agreed to collaborate with us this summer on workshops and other training tools for librarians who would like to be more engaged in and knowledgeable about assignment consultation.   Ideally, we’ll be involved not just in assuring that students are directed to the appropriate discovery tools, but also helping faculty develop learning outcomes and assessment strategies.

Scholarly Publishing, Reading, and Library Professional Organizations

Slightly off-topic, there is an interesting post on ACRLog reporting the results of an informal survey on the journal-reading habits of academic librarians who read ACRLog. The short summary is that many of the unrepresentative sample who responded (I responded) “read” journals, primarily College and Research Libraries followed by Journal of Academic Librarianship and portal. I “read” these by skimming the table of contents and reading one or two articles at a surface level. I really like the idea of having a learning community/journal club so that we can read a few things more in depth, and maybe that’s something we can set up in the future. A few of the librarians participate in reading groups in their subject areas.

The comments on the ACRLog post include a lively discussion of why we (librarians, ACRL) do not make our content open access when other professional organizations share much more (e.g. EDUCAUSE), particularly when we are so engaged in promoting open access.   Some content, including the very impressive Studying Students: A Research Project at the University of Rochester, is free from ACRL.