Tag Archives: 2015

My first ACRL WA/OR … in the Pack Forest!

Leave a reply

On the way to the Pack Forest for the ACRL WA/OR joint conference, Uta and I visited a few academic libraries  — slide show will be forth coming.  But this post is about my first visit to the amazing retreat center, in the woods at the Center for Sustainable Forestry at Pack Forest.

 

22474032581_c949635a2e_z

 

22449711892_a5d5b0abeb_z22449739432_948f8f794f_z

 

There were about 90+ people in attendance, from a variety of academic libraries including research libraries and community colleges, for this 2 day event.  OSULP had about 7 of us in attendance (including our ACRL OR President Uta!).  Susan Barnes Whyte was the keynote to open up the day  “Your ACRL: An Update from the Board” so she mainly talked about ACRL nationally – its mission,  goals, demographics in the association etc. There was some discussion on ACRL nationally, should it be a part of ALA or its own entity (I feel strongly it should stay in ALA as we can learn from each other regardless of what type of library we are working in currently and we NEED to work together not in silos!) . Another short discussion was on if ACRL is supporting/recruiting  more paraprofessionals and offer more continuing ed leading to certification (not much time to discuss and this could be a great small group discussion at another time).  An interesting note in the national ACRL membership trends shows membership drop off after 5 years  is this perhaps until they get tenured?  What can ACRL do to keep people involved regardless of tenure?  Susan also noted that the  ACRL Plan for Excellence might be adding a 4th goal relating to how libraries effectively navigate changing landscapes.  She mentioned some upcoming library themes  (external pressures)  ACRL was researching:

  • credentialing/badges – might relate to non MLSers
  • curriculum/assessment
  • changing roles of librarians
  • future roles of conferences?
  • academic library as publisher
  • other HE organization
  • budgets!!!
  • professional ethics and large corporations and privacy

———————

Session 1: BLURRING THE LINES:  Encouraging Undergraduate Student Success Through Partnerships  (U of W librarians)

Key themes:

  • odegaard library  — focuses on UG/student learning focused
  • partnerships – for diverse viewpoints + collaboration –but be prepared to collaborate DEEPLY (more than colocation); sharing cultures, do not underestimate culture clashed, rethink what you want to assess together.
  • holistic view of the student – student support must transcend divisions
  • A need to support the “Hidden Curriculum” – understanding scholarship and inquiry which use to be the expectation by college – and includes subject content, college prep, working with new populations (1st generation, transfers), no GED curriculum —  so, how to transfer skills across courses?

odegardresearchwriting They created the OWRC (Odegaard writing and research center) 70+ tutors, 5 LIS students, 4 librarian tutors. both writing and research tutors collaborate: key:  “writing is where research issues come out, librarians need to be in the midst of that process”   … metalanguage for processes of inquiry – threshold concepts, joint writing and research librarians, recursive process employing reading, writing and discussion to create knowledge.

Other collaborative programming ideas from UW:

  • Health and wellness programming:  peer health educators in the library
  • Music Programming: 1 hour pop up performances such as a campus String Quartet.   “take a study session with a soundtrack”   Quiet areas for students too. Assessment show it calmed students and made them feel good while studying; Also it  connected them to the space and was a shared experience.
  • The gallup purdue index 2014 states  “feeling supported and having deep leaning experiences mean everything when it comes to long term outcome for college graduates” 

—————-

Session 2: Let Your Love Open the Door To – Student Development Theories  (OSU Librarians!)

Their presentation will be better than me summarizing… and since they are local, just go ask them about it! https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_xclEG6DYt7Rng1SVgyOVJoOEE/view

—————–

LIGHTENING ROUNDS

1 – Emma at Pierce College discussed opening doors to work with adjunct faculty in teaching and working at the ref desk.  Spend time on boarding, allowing them time to share ref desk questions and project work, give them a chance at co-teaching,  integrated reflective practices, and host an in-service. Adjuncts need to be part of and understand the culture of the library, they need time to debrief on ref questions etc.  See more:  goo.gl/1FimYU 

2 – Beyond Academia “what happens after I graduate?” AND #3 – University of Western States in PDX  both spoke about similar ideas:   why not teach a workshop/class for those getting ready to graduate. They will not have access to library resources so show them Open Access resources, ILL options, where is your local public library, information through their prof organizations, etc .  One library now offers a class the last quarter of their study  “so you are graduating now what?”  Students are surprised they can’t access literature after graduating!  It’s about managing vs meeting expectations.  Offer them options to help guide them once they graduate. She actually shows them a license agreement contract that says “no alumni”  (so they know we arent just being mean 🙂  She also shows how to set up alerts for TOCs and RSS/Feedly and of course open source and government stuff.

DAY 2

Library as a Lightning (talk) rod for Cross Campus Collaboration (Poppy, UW Tacoma) 

  • determine the gaps saw in grad students
  • created TAC  talks (as in Tacoma – aka “TED talks”
  • like Scholars Studio at UW Seattle
  • one topic 10 lightening talk events, 20 slides, 15 sec each, timed
  • gives grad students a chance to practice presenting
  • why the library? already the connecting to research, neutral territory, interdisciplinary
  • refreshments and reception afterwards
  • materials added to the IR
  • then integrated a peer review process as well

Reference in your Pjs (Nano Burling WSL)

virtual reference – after hours references study what was asked during the night. found they asked a lot of high level research questions

Bringing the stacks to Buzzfeed (Emily, UW)

Taught 5 sessions of a course that was in both jewish & Spanish departments that was everything from stacks to spec collections.  Cool idea – had them do a browsing activity instead of scavenge hunt – send to a general section in the library to review books related to their specific area. She also asked them : where are you actually doing your reading (buzzfeed, blog, facebook, etc). She let them posted their final work on Blogs or Buzzfeed.

Library as Open Education Leader Grant Summary (CC librarians)

LSTA grant  for CC in WA – a need to put librarians within the Open Ed process; a need to create open education advocacy plans by librarians . These librarians  created a course to teach how to talk to people and create your advocacy plan (beyond what is OER).  They used Press Books for it. Suggested best practices:  envio scan and find your support networks;

22449742242_a70337e006_z

Trivia Night was also a lot of fun!

 

AMICAL 2015

Leave a reply

This is a little late, but better late than never?

I was lucky enough to be invited to give a workshop at the 2015 conference for the AMICAL Consortium.  AMICAL is a consortium that serves librarians, faculty and technologists who teach and work at American international liberal arts institutions (like the American University of Cairo, of Nigeria, of Paris, of Afghanistan, and so on).  This year, it was hosted by the American University of Bulgaria, which is located in Blagoevgrad, about an hour south of Sofia.

a quickly moving small river, with trees on both banks and a bridge in the distance

View from city center, Blagoevgrad

I can honestly say that I have never been so well treated by confernece organizers.  They were kind enough to allow me to come in a couple of days early to manage the jet lag (Bulgaria is ten time zones away) so I flew into Sofia and stayed there overnight, instead of moving on directly to Blagoevgrad.  In Sofia, I met up with another attendee, Lori Townsend from the University of New Mexico who you may know as the librarian who first introduced threshold concepts into the library literature — a topic that has come back to the forefront as part of the new ACRL Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education.  Lori and I spent some time walking around Sofia before making the trek to the conference site.

This was the view from my hotel —

Hotel room view — the plaza in front of the National Palace of Culture

We saw a lot of extremely old churches — the coolest one had an archaeological level dating back to the 3rd century below an actual, working church — but I wasn’t allowed to take photos there.  This is The Rotunda St. George, which dates back to the 4th century

It is believed that this is the oldest building in Sofia

There are also miles and miles of public parks — some all manicured and park-like, and others foresty and wild, like this one –

a gravel path leading away through a green forest

After a day of walking around Sofia, we arrived in Blagoevgrad for the conference.  My workshop was scheduled on the first day, before the opening keynote.  If you can arrange that kind of schedule for yourself – I HIGHLY recommend it.  Finishing with all of your responsibilities before the conference actually starts makes for an extremely enjoyable conference!

My workshop was in two parts — the first part was about developing good research assignments, and the barriers that students face when they’re handed badly designed assignments.  The room was jam-packed full, which made for a great atmosphere, but which made it difficult to get around to all of the students!

A white classroom full of students, sitting in small groups at individual tables

Information Literacy workshop, part 1 – AMICAL 2015

About 2/3 of the attendees stayed for the second part of the workshop – which focused on curiosity and imagination.  I’ll admit it — this part was more fun!

One of the great surprises of this experience happened at the beginning of the workshop, when I was introduced by one of the conference facilitators — who turned out to be one of my library school professors, Rebecca Miller. She’s now the Head of the library at the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul!

a small group of librarians discussing research assignments. A red arrow is pointing at a young woman with brown hair and a black shirt.

Dr. Rebecca Miller, The American University of Afghanistan

Once my talk was over, I got to sit back and enjoy the rest of the conference.  The opening keynote from Lori Townsend was great — and did a really good job of highlighting the barriers I had described in my workshop.  The closing keynote was from Nancy Fried Foster, who reported on some new research that she’s done looking at the research habits of faculty.  Nancy has been to five (!) AMICAL conferences now, and has also done site visits at several AMICAL campuses, helping libraries around the world use ethnography to inform their space decisions.

In some ways, I think that it would have worked better for my workshop to happen at the end of the conference — Lori and Nancy did such a good job making the case for doing the work I was advocating for in my workshop, that I think it would have been a really effective progression.  One thing I didn’t realize before attending the conference was just how recently some of these campuses have started working on information literacy as a goal.  Some, like the American University of Cairo have been doing library instruction for decades now — but others have programs that have launched in the last couple of years!  I think i could have done a better job bridging those gaps.

The rest of the conference was a variety of shorter papers and talks where faculty and librarians shared case studies about the work on their campuses.  I got to meet some amazing educators — like Gohar Stepanyan, who teaches finance in Armenia, and who conducted one of the more interesting studies of student resource use that I’ve seen. Anguelina Popova is Bulgarian, but she runs the center for teaching excellence at the American University of Central Asia AND she’s pursuing a PhD from the Open University of the Netherlands!  She’s doing some amazing work in information and digital literacy, almost exactly on the other side of the world from us (and she also helped me navigate traditional Bulgarian cuisine). And Joyce Rafla has an extremely interesting job supporting pedagogy at the American University of Cairo — and is a definite kindred spirit when it comes to research assignment design!

This is just the tip of the iceberg — notes and summaries from all of the conference sessions are available at the AMICAL blog.  This is a fascinating organization and a really effective conference.  Highly recommended!

34th Annual Conference on the First-Year Experience

Leave a reply

This was the third Annual conference I have attended, and my last as ACRL Liaison to the National Resource Center for the First-Year Experience and Students in Transition, the sponsoring group.  This year’s conference was held in downtown Dallas, Texas.

This was the best coffee I found.  It was very good.

Iron sculptures depicting a herd of Texas long-horned cattle being driven across a creek bed

Cattle drive art in Pioneer Plaza, next to the conference hotel

I facilitated a discussion on the new ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education on the last day of the conference, but I forgot to take a picture of the room.  In small groups, we focused on designing course and class activities.

Here’s the handout summarizing the Framework (PDF on Google Drive)

Group 1’s Daily Show activity.

Group 2’s first-year seminar focused syllabus investigation activity.

Group 3’s 21 Questions activity.

The conference never has a specific theme limiting the scope of the presentations, so there’s a wide range of talks, posters, workshops and discussions focusing on all kinds of issues of interest to those who work with first-year students.  The attendees are teachers, students, student affairs professionals, program administrators, institutional administrators and more.  Some sessions are designated as research-focused, while others synthesize information on rising trends.  A few things I took away from this conference:

  • Common Reading Programs are still a very important part of the first-year experience on many campuses. There is a significant publisher presence on the vendor floor at the FYE conference, and it’s clear that these programs have become a major industry. There were Common Reading sessions in every timeslot – some examining program logistics, and others focused on effective ways to build supplementary programs around the common book. I did not attend many of these sessions, but it is also clear that there is still not a lot of assessment data about the impact of these programs.
  • Peer Leaders and peer-to-peer learning is a major theme. There were sessions on training, recruiting and working with peer leaders in a variety of contexts (including one from librarians at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, who brought some of their peer leaders as co-presenters).
  • Financial literacy is an increasingly important topic. Always a part of the conversation, there were more standalone sessions on this topic than I remember before. In addition, there were more products and services on the vendor floor focused on this area.   Given that this was also a priority for ACRL in recent years, there is an interesting point of convergence there.
  • Many of the sessions continue to be focused on the logistics of creating, implementing and running specific programs: orientations, seminars, bridge programs, etc. There are always a significant population of FYE administrators who attend this conference, and a noticeable group of faculty members recently tasked with building FYE programs.
  • First-year study abroad programs continue to grow. There are a few schools with long-established programs, but many of the programs presenting here were created in the last few years. There were no library-specific examples of these, but in out of session conversations I met multiple librarians who have partnered with FYE trips abroad. Here’s some sample programs:
  • There is also a sizable group of faculty who teach in FYE programs who attend this conference and as a result, there are always sessions focused on pedagogy and teaching practice. Two of the sessions I attended illustrate the diversity of approaches you can find in these sessions:
  • I had worried that the library and information literacy sessions would be down this year because of ACRL, but that was not the case. There were a variety of sessions focused on information literacy and inquiry. Librarians talked about their collaborations with First-Year Seminars and Common Reading programs and new student orientations. They discussed student publishing and Open Textbook projects. Attendees learned about Kansas State’s library-created Alternate Reality Game, and the University of Toronto’s Personal Librarian program.

AAAS Annual Meeting 2015

Leave a reply

By Laurel Kristick

February 12-16, 2015

San Jose California

Summary:

This was an excellent conference for librarians interested in science, communication, policy, education and related issues. The theme of the meeting was Innovations, Information, and Imaging. The sessions I attended were focused on research integrity, diversity in STEM, outreach and engagement, and science communication. I was able to attend three sessions where OSU faculty were speaking or moderating: Francis Chan (Integrative Biology), Paul Farber (History), Anita Guerrini (History). There were also a number of sessions that I would have liked to attend but conflicted with other sessions.

Key Takeaways:

  • Outreach and engagement are important for academics and other researchers. If you want involvement from others there are 3 models from citizen science: contributory (citizens contribute data), collaborative (citizens take part in planning or analyzing), Co-created (2-way learning process between scientists and citizens)
  • In scientific outreach and communication, the LIVA strategy can help with addressing the biases of the audience: LIVA = Leverage scientific credibility and Involve the audience in Visualizing scientific evidence and making sense of an illustrative Analogy.
  • Research Misconduct is a systemic issue, not just a few bad apples, and organizational change and mentoring may be needed to fix systemic problems (SIDENOTE: on the flight home, I was readingMistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), which reflects many of the ideas I heard at the conference about research integrity)
  • The “leaking pipeline” analogy related to diversity in STEM education is flawed as it only considers the path from doctoral student to full professor in a research university; need to include alternative career paths (policy, science communication, liberal arts schools, community college, industry) – are the graduates utilizing their education and experience; are they doing what they want

Further Reading

Books:

Articles:

Websites: