First-Year Conference Keynote

The keynote, “The First Year at the University of Wisconsin: Building a Foundation for Student Success,” was given by Betsy Barefoot, EdD.   In the 80s, an ACE survey showed 37% of institutions were taking steps to improve outcomes in the first year, increased to 82% in 1995, today probably all would say they are taking some steps.  However, first year programs occur in much larger system with other, more engrained elements and attitudes about student success.  First year programs may take place as “innovations on the margins” rather than insitutionalized, large-scale improvements.  A new, more complex definition for the first-year experience is everything that happens to first year students, both significant and mundane.   A common experience would be one class or out-of-classroom experience required of ALL students, which we don’t have at UW.

“Foundations of Excellence:” A Nine-Part Model for First-Year Excellence.

1. Collective Sense of Purpose of the first year and acknowledgement of everyone’s role in fulfilling that purpose.  Historic purpose may be “cash cow” with very large classes not necessarily designed for optimal outcomes for first-year students, although some may be effective.  How might the “Wisconsin Experience” tenets inform our goals for the first year.
2. Rethinking how the first year is organized.
3. A focus on learning.  UW has intentional learning outcomes in the “Essential Learning Outcomes” which include knowledge, skills (including information literacy), attitudes, integration.  Which of these have special relevance for the first year?  Could any of them be postponed to the later years?   What do we know about how first-year classes are being taught?  Are the teaching/testing methods (i.e. heavy reliance on multiple-choice testing) most likely to result in student learning and engagement?   Learning goals should be staged and more tightly defined for first-year students.
4. Rethinking the transition experience.  When does the transition begin?  How are institution’s expectations communicated to students?
5. Role of faculty.  Do faculty understand the breadth of students’ first year experiences?  Is there an embedded disincentive for getting too involved with new students?
6. Service to ALL enrolled students.  How does the campus meet the needs of unique sub-populations and the common needs of all students?
7. Appreciate diversity of all types.
8. Roles and purposes of higher education.  More than preparing for a career; we need structured opportunities for students to explore other purposes.
9. Assessment for continuous improvement.  First step to invformed change and knowing where to allocate resources.

We’re often missing a clear sense of what all our innovations add up to.   There are many payoffs for a big picure view.  At UW, the Center for the First Year Experience is a reorganization of resources/initiatives toward that purpose.  For information on how you can be involved in first-year initiatives, there’s a web page for faculty/staff.  Sheila Stoeckel from the LILI Office is the libraries’ liaison to the center and a member of the Advisory Board.

Sifting and Winnowing

Hi all, I think the “Sifting and Winnowing” quote is a great tie-in to information literacy. For those who have some literary theory background, the quote has its problems (the idea of “The Truth” is kind of problematic; there are many truths). Still, perhaps we should use it more often in the future.

In preparing our talk for the New Faculty Orientation, I ran across this great retro photo of the plaque with a young woman that’s credited to the University Archives.

Lunchtime Listening — “More Information, Less Knowledge”

Here are a few interesting tidbits from the webcast, “More Information, Less Knowledge?” It was hard for me to concentrate for the full hour, my mind must be warped by Google and multitasking!

Nicholas Carr, who wrote the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” was one of the panelists. He said, “one thing we know from neuroscience is that the human brain is very adaptable. … Reading .. and other patterns of thinking aren’t hard wired into our brain, they’re learned behaviors …. New technologies can change, at a very deep level, the circuitry of our brains…. Although it’s too early to have proof that that’s happening with the Internet at a biological level, there are some important clues out there that the internet is beginning to have an effect on cognition and memory ….”

Understanding Students & Faculty: Susan Gibbons talk at CUWL Conference

Today at the statewide CUWL meeting and conference , Susan Gibbons, Dean and Vice-Provost at the University of Rochester River Campus Libraries, discussed their user research program. They are a small residential campus but an ARL member. The library’s work with anthroplogist Nancy Fried Foster is the subject of a recent monograph (free for download from ACRL) and a lot of positive press.

The presentation began with a discussion of characteristics of the “Net Generation.” As a group, these students are relatively more sheltered than previous generations. For example, they regularly seek advice from their parents on their schoolwork and have absorbed Mr. Rogers’s “you are special” message. They expect services to be customized, personalized, one-stop shopping, and in the “Mommy model” of service. These students feel pressured to succeed; 21% of those aged 15-17 have been diagnosed with some type of emotional disorder. They want to know the rules, are team-oriented, and want to collaborate in person and online. They tend to ask peers, not experts, for information. They are multitaskers, and value speed over accuracy in their work.

The next topic was techniques we can use to understand our students…

“The Research Library in the New Age”

This article by Robert Darnton in the New York Review of Books reaffirms the role of the research library and has many sections that relate to information literacy.  I’ll just pick out a few:

• “News in the information age has broken loose from its conventional moorings, creating possibilities of misinformation on a global scale. We live in a time of unprecedented accessibility to information that is increasingly unreliable. Or do we?”
• “I would argue that the new information technology should force us to rethink the notion of information itself. It should not be understood as if it took the form of hard facts or nuggets of reality ready to be quarried out of newspapers, archives, and libraries, but rather as messages that are constantly being reshaped in the process of transmission.”
• “As a citadel of learning and as a platform for adventure on the Internet, the research library still deserves to stand at the center of the campus, preserving the past and accumulating energy for the future.”

The article includes a lengthy analysis of the Google book project that I can’t really do justice here, but essentially takes on the Google/libraries dichotomy to explore the relationship in a longer view…. what will be the role of each in the fullness of time?

Undergraduate Symposium and Debut of College Library’s Undergraduate Research Award

On Wednesday, I attended UW-Madison’s 10th Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium.  I was blown away by the sophistication of the research students were doing and the quality of the posters they had produced.  As a humanities person at heart, I was a little saddened by the total domination of the STEM fields.   After all, the library is a laboratory for the humanities, so  it would be nice to see the products of that research. Overall, I would say that students seemed a little sad that so few people were stopping by their posters.  Every student I talked to had very interesting and ambitious plans for the future, many including research building on their experience.

It was also the first year for the Undergraduate Research Award.  Carrie Kruse made a nice presentation at the symposium and we showered our two winners with attention.  I think you will see some news stories on this soon.  I enjoyed being on the committee that reviewed these and so impressed by the work Kelli Keclik and her committee put in to create the process and criteria.  We will appreciate it even more next year when we get fifty applicants.