An apple a day?

On Thursday, May 24th I had an opportunity to sit in on a round table discussion.  I was a little hesitant at first, having never participated in an open format discussion before.  I selected the topic "Apple Store Vision for Libraries and Services" as it seemed like it might generate a lot of discussion.

The first aspect that was covered within our group was the idea of wearing uniforms and/or name tags and the benefit of having a library greeter in much the same way that the Apple store has a greeter. 

Those on the pro side of the argument stated that wearing a name tag meant that they were easily identified by library patrons and that it eased library anxiety for the patron by knowing who to approach.  Those on the con side wanted to remain more anonymous (one individual had been stalked by a library patron in the past), and questioned why do we need name tags when we sit at a service desk?  Personally, I have always been on the pro side of this issue and happily wear my name tag with pride.  I am not so sure how I would feel about a uniform...

We then chatted about the idea of a reference triage point person.  Dr. Michael Eisenberg had promoted the idea in his keynote address of having a point person, similar to an Apple store greeter, who would be responsible for directing individuals to the appropriate service desk or individual.  You need this, go here kind of idea.  We questioned the viability of utilizing a business model in a library.  Some individuals felt that they were inundated upon arrival in an Apple store and that there was a sense that you had to get in and out as quickly as possible.  The individuals in my group felt that the personal connection was incredibly important and that it might not be possible utilizing this model.

More discussion is required!

MOOCs

Massive! Open! Online! Understanding MOOCs and Their Impact on Library Instruction and Services

Presented by: Kevin Stranack, Simon Fraser University Library
Barriers to teaching and learning: money, time, geography, authentication, teaching methodology
MOOCs - examples include Udacity, MITx, Coursera
Open, course based courses that are available to anyone

Decoupling university education:
• Content no longer has to come only from one place
• Support - study together on open study, inviting students to study groups
o Answer questions really well, students can earn badges and be seen as an expert within the community
• Accreditation and Evaluation - advent of robo-graders
• Badges - online badges when you have completed a course
• Prior Learning Assessment from Athabasca University, pay to be assessed and not have to take certain courses based on previous learning

Mind the Gap
• Information Literacy and Librarians
• Content Focused Pedagogy
• Community of Learning?
o Social presence, huge factor of success
o Teacher presence well beyond a video

Opportunities for Libraries
• Study spaces - outreach to wider community who may be taking these courses
• Reference
• Information literacy instruction
• Programming

Possibilities for MOOCs
• Networked Learning - knowledge exists between nodes and grows through the community (professor and students). The greater the community the greater the possibility of learning
• Open enrolment - combination of credited students and interested individuals from the global community
• Open Tools for learning
• Open Learning Objectives as determined by the participants
• Open Content
• Open Assessment - reflective papers and self-graded

Opportunities for Libraries
• Talk it up - how can we facilitate this from the library’s perspective
• Focus on openness
• Information Literacy? Could we do a massive MOOC for IL?
• Professional development

Authentic and Active

Authentic and Active: A Pilot Project to Access a Large Scale Information Literacy Program
Presented by Jessica Knoch, Richard Hayman, Lisa Shamchuk and Leah Townsend, Grant MacEwan University


Active learning activity: write a question/comment or concern you have about assessment or active learning. Share the question with your neighbor. Think about that question throughout the session. In a classroom, you could have students crumple up the question and throw it across the classroom.

Librarians used the research literature to provide a foundation for the project, for example, Student Learning Assessment Cycle (Gilchrist and Zald, 2008) and Authentic Learning (Burke, 2009).

Context:
• Choose English Library Instruction Program to pilot the project
• Already have faculty buy-in (recommendation within master syllabus that professors expose students to information literacy instruction and the online tutorials; not required, but strongly recommended and supported)
• Provides baseline IL skills
• Recognize the need for assessment

Areas of Inquiry (research questions)
• Are students achieving the IL related outcomes?
• Are we providing baseline IL skills?

Build Your Toolbox
• Curriculum
• Pedagogy - used a hockey metaphor (Pre-Game: Jeopardy, Shoot Out, Press Conference, First Period: Taboo, Synonym Race, Second Period: Human Booleans, Shuffle and Deal, Coloured Shapes, Third Period: Sorting Journals, Wanted Ad, Resource Referee, Overtime: Scrimmage, Librarian Needs a New Car, Resource Referee)
• Evidence Collection - students fill in a worksheet discovering their topic, library instructors committed to provide written feedback
• Rubric (Emerging, Developing or Competent Skills)

Assessment
• Teaches us to become better teachers
• Challenges our values and assumptions about teaching

Active Learning Activity Reflection
• Discuss with your neighbor
• Answer to your questions
• Conclusions
• A-ha moments

Why reinvent the wheel?

Aren’t We All Trying To Do the Same Thing? Four Alberta Post-Secondary Institutions Collaborating to Create an Information Literacy Assessment Tool
Presented by: Nancy Goebel, University of Alberta; Jessica Knoch, Grant MacEwan University; Michelle Edwards Thomson, Red Deer College and Rebekah Willson from Mount Royal University

This was my frst chance to see clickers in action within a classroom activity as they were utilized throughout the session!  It was very cool to see live polling and results generated by the audience.

Context:  

• Increasing emphasis on accountability and learning outcomes
• Increasing calls for assessment
• Lack of assessment tools that meet needs
• What is that we want to do in terms of assessment and how can we collaborate as a group on this topic 

Goals:

• Create shared vision of IL
• Create an assessment tool
• Focus on lower level undergraduate students
• How we can benefit from this collaboration?
• Shared vision through the dissection of the ACRL standards
• Learn from each other, value differing perspectives
• How can our institutions benefit from this collaboration?
• Shared solution to the problem of assessment
• Shared implementation costs - created a low cost tool, think tank between 4 different institutions
• Has already produced results and individual results are comparable to these other institutions

Post-test assessment which were mapped to ACRL performance indicators, developed to address a wide variety of IL skills that is delivered by librarians
• 2 demographic questions
• 17 multi-choice summary questions
• 2 open-ended feedback questions

Feedback from students:
• Citation
• Evaluation (key area of focus)
• Access
• Need to time to process info - so much information to take in one session, yet I know where to go for help

Future Directions:
• Validate survey questions
• Expand question bank
• Develop a process for rolling the assessment tool out to other libraries
• Need to focus on the research process and not so much on the tool itself

Choose Your Own Adventure

Choose Your Own Teaching Adventure: A Resourceful Way to Balance Content Consistency with Teaching Styles in a Library Orientation Program

Presented by: Katherine Hanz and Vincci Lui,  McGill University

Library Orientation broken into three components: tour and basic orientation, getting started and then finding the right stuff (starting to write my research paper). Each session was specifically branded and marketed. The key to the success of the program was a bookmark that was also ballot; prize for participating in all three sessions and also entered in a draw for 1 of 2 iPad 2.

Struggled with the third component workshop on finding the right stuff as it entered into the grey area of ILI, yet it was decided to keep it as it was a chance to interface with students

Goals for moving forward for revamping orientation program:
1. Incorporate more active learning opportunities
2. Update content and look
3. Keep 1-hour limit
4. Save time of our colleagues by creating a template that could be used within the orientation session
5. Empower librarians with workshop personalization

Choose your own adventure approach so that the instructor could pick and choose (through comment bubbles and notes section within PowerPoint) alternative activities from the standard template as appropriate for their class; including suggestions for different class sizes and disciplines.

The liaison librarians also created a one page handout highlighting key points for each session that included the library contact information, as a take away for students.

Part B: Recognized the importance of surveying librarians querying teaching experience and preferences as well as satisfaction levels and thoughts of the new program offering, utilizing an in-house survey mechanism

Positive Feedback:

• Good basic introduction, foundational IL content
• Explanations in the notes fields
• Options for activities
• Ready-made and customizable 

Needs Work:

• Editing capability on certain aspects within the template
• Handout too busy
• Not enough subject specific options 

Orientation Kit and Training

• Group training session for all librarians who provided orientation sessions
• Bin included all supplies that would be required
• Thorough discussion of how the “choose your own adventure” template works
• Chance to ask questions and receive further information 

ACRL Standards

Informed Practice: Using ACRL Information Literacy Objectives to Redirect Library Instruction
Presented by: Jessica Lange and Dawn McKinnon, McGill University 

• Within the Faculty of Management, Bachelor of Commerce Degree program (highest academic requirements currently in the country)
• Discussion around following students throughout their time in the college
• How we were reinforcing the ACRL standards and where are the gaps? 

Investigate the standards, and plan the IL session accordingly

Standards are made up of performance indicators and outcomes

Context:

• Invited into a classroom to facilitate an IL session, and then interest spread by word of mouth 
• Research-focused core classes in selected concentrations 
• IL session related to a specific assignment, 3 opportunities to interface with students and engage them in library services; try to ensure that they are not duplicating materials when the student participates in more than one class offering. Librarians mapped the courses that they were working with, looking at touch points and the types of information that was covered in each session. 
• Went through the ACRL standards to determine what standards were being reinforced and what was being neglected. 
• Discovered that the first and second standard were being taught with first year courses; the fifth standard was reinforced in the upper years of the program. They were hopeful that by the time a student graduated that they would be exposed to all of the standards.  
• The fourth standard falls in the instructor’s realm and was a noticeable gap in their current IL sessions 
• Prioritized standards that had not been previously taught to focus on going forward

This next section contains the standard and then the activities that were used to illustrate the standard

Standard 1
Define the information need
Identify Sources
- Cephalonian method - plant the correct answers in the audience
- Information timeline with slips of paper posted on the white board (specific to non-specific)
- Think-pair-share

Standard 2
Select the best tool
Create effective search strategies
Retrieve information
Refine the search
- Direction question
- Group sharing

Standard 3
Evaluate
Satisfies need
- Compare two articles excerpts and determine which one is academic and which one isn’t
- Illustrate bias

Standard 5
Cite sources
- Identify errors in citations
- Compile a citation out of parts
- Inserting in-text errors - what is missing from this statement?

Upper level group activities

Concentrating on all standards

- Own research questions, students determine what information they need and what resources will provide it
- Groups are given questions on different resources; students find answers and report back to the class

Recommendations:
- Implementing changes
- Faculty buy-in - not possible for one individual to teach all ACRL standards
- Assessment

For more information:
Guillikson, S. (2006). Faculty perception of ACRL's information literacy standards for higher education.  The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 32(6), pgs. 583-592.

Lightening Strike Poster Sessions

Sharing Knowledge: Knowledge Mobilization and the Academic Librarian
Presented by: Laura Koltutsky, University of Calgary

Granting agencies are requiring evidence of knowledge translation. Knowledge Translation is about opening up information to academics, stakeholders and the public; moving knowledge into active service.

Laura recommends attending workshops on grant applications. There is also a two day training session on knowledge translation within Alberta through the Alberta Innovates Health Sciences group.

Grant Application Process

• Work as a collaborator
• Literature / systematic reviews

Knowledge Translation / Mobilization Steps

• World Café Structure

Resource Creation

• Libguides 

Ultimately, this work leads to a greater understanding of the grant process and how best to work with researchers and faculty members.

Applying Universal Design to Information Literacy Instruction
Presented by Andrea Miller-Nesbitt, McGill University

Universal Design is defined as “the design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaption of specialized design” (Connell et al, 1997).

As instructors it is important for us to think of the diverse group of participants that may be attending our session and how these differences might affect how the learning takes place.

Universal Design for Instruction

• Equitable use - verbally spell words and well as adding the word to the search box
• Flexibility in use - html instead of PDF because of use of screen readers
• Simple and intuitive - avoid library jargon, build on past experience of the student - individual practice
• Perceptible information
• Tolerance for error
• Low physical effort
• Size and space for approach and use - lighting and sound, are you aware of specialized equipment and how to use them
• Community of learners - encourage collaboration, bring a sign-up sheet to instruction so that students can sign up for individual sessions, webinars
• Instructional climate

Information Instruction that is designed and accessible for all students, so that no special accommodations are required for individual students. Andrea does acknowledge that in specific cases certain accommodations may need to be made due to the special need for equipment that is required by the individual. Making these changes will benefit all students.

A Sampling of Post-Secondary Integrated Information Literacy Programs in BC
Presented by: Jennifer Brownlow, Vancouver Island University and Jennifer Sigalet, Okanagon College

• Gather information about best practices for integrating information competencies into first year curricula
• Outline how other launched their grassroots programs with a limited supply of librarians
• Learn more about creating an information literate institution

Integration of information literacy skills into all first year research based English classes at Okanagan College
In a five year timeline, the process included a case study, action plan, pilot project, formal review and implementation, and finally the ongoing evaluation of program and exploration of possible expansion into other disciplines.

Another model explored by University of the Fraser Valley
Collaborative course redesign, pilot program and then implementation system wide

Kwantlen Polytechnic University
2 - 3 credit units courses containing an IL assignment worth 5% that is graded by the librarians (first and third year)

Vancouver Island University
Permanent IL module in English and liberal arts courses reaching all students containing an IL assignment worth 10% but the librarian was not involved with the grading of the assignment.

Ongoing discussions:

• Integrating IL
• Incorporating active learning techniques 

Success:

• Incorporating IL into academic strategy for the university  

Unshelving the Human Learning Library at Your Institution
Presenting by: Robyn Hall and Sona Macnaughton, Red Deer College

http://rbc.libguides.com/HumanLibrary  
http://humanlibrary.org/

The Human Library goal is to encourage individuals to be living books and to engage in small group discussions; greater appreciation of diversity. Red Deer College used the concept as a professional development activity and created book covers to market the event.

For their second event, RDC librarians worked directly with the Education Undergrad Society and promoted the event through posters, social media, the Public Library and the Public and Separate School Systems in Red Deer. 13 human books with a total of 19 titles were offered at the event. Participants were provided with an icebreaker bookmarks, but the human books liked to talk and ended up not requiring any prompting.

Recommendations:

• A human what? Clearly define the event, creating, recruiting, and promoting the event by the event
• What’s in it for me? Try to incorporate a human library into a classroom assignment or partner with campus student organizations
• Plan ahead - up to 8 months in advance 
• Timing is everything - beginning of either term would have been more beneficial to attract a larger audience 
• Location, Location, Location - need a lot of nooks for private discussions with smaller groups of individuals 
• Go with the flow - be flexible - some discussions happened organically and not within the time limitations 
• Provide refreshments 
• Use our stuff! 

Access Denied

Open Literacy & the Problem of Access Refusal
Presented by: Robyn Hall, Red Deer College

The goal of this presentation is to look at the dysfunctional relationship between open access and information literacy.  For more information, check out, http://robynhall.ca/openaccess. 

Robyn questions why the costs of journal articles continue to raise, when increasingly they are available online.  High costs make it prohibitive for many libraries to subscribe to these titles.  Currently 30 academic institutions in Canada have an institutional repository publishing the work of their own scholars and making it freely available over the Internet. 

Information Literacy standards are provided by the ACRL, stating that individuals have a foundation for continued growth throughout their careers and are informed citizens and members of communities; yet their need for relevant and accurate information is not adequately satisified once they graduate.

So what happens when a student graduates from university? They suddenly lose access to everything that they previously had access too at university. They have to deal with real world research… which is limited to materials that they can access on their own through the Internet or through their local public library or perhaps their organization.  But what if their organization does not have money to pay money for subscriptions or doesn't see the importance of having such materials?

Open literacy

• Helping students acquire the skills to recognize and contribute to open access
• Open domain, creative commons, open source software and other applications

She was curious how others were providing instruction on open access, so she ran a survey of health sciences librarians throughout Canada.  She chose this group of librarians as they tend to work with students throughout their academic career and there is a need for credible resources in the students' professional careers.  She used http://fluidsurveys.com/ to conduct her study.  Below you will find a summary of the results.

Problems of adding instruction on open access:

• Students need to take baby steps when learning about different resources when this might be the first time that they have been taught information literacy skills - need to have the basics first before they can learn additional skills
• Information noise - just more stuff
• Not relevant to students - many titles can be obscure or not in English
• Paid vs. unpaid - the need to promote titles that we are already paying for
• Not a lot of support for open access from the faculty - institutional culture, publishing or perish, respected titles within the field
• Not enough time

Yet when asked should librarians do more to do teach students about OA? 92% of survey participants said yes.

Suggestions:

• Celebrate Open Access expand to student oriented events
• Including open access in online subject or resource guides
• Adding Open Access to OPAC
• Use open access at the reference desk or in instruction sessions
• Evaluate open access with students; show examples of traditional articles and open access articles
• Question who is the author and what is their authority
• Publish open access assignment in the class, peer-reviewed within the classroom
• Work with individuals in the upper years of their education, or graduate students
• Open access in the context of their future workplace - what they will need to know once they get out into the "real world".
• Work with the alumni office
• Create a lib guide as an outreach tool for graduate students
• Just tell them…

Further Information:
http://righttoreasearch.org/ educates students about open access and engage them in the effort to support these activities. 

http://access2research.org/ is as petition.You do not have to be American to sign this petition.  They need 25,000 signatures and it has to be done by June 19.

Literature Map

Literature Mapping: A Visual Exercise of Advanced Information Literacy
Presented by Maura Mastesic and Gina Mastesic, York University

What is a literature review? Maura described a literature review using a parlour metaphor.  When you walk into a party you immediately notice or observe what discussions are happening, and then ponder, where do I fit in; which discussion is appropriate for me to join?

For undergraduate students: they need to ask themselves, what is the academic discussion going on as they typically concentrate only on the facts.  Graduate students have a greater understanding of the dialogues that are happening at the academic institutions.

Opinions and academic knowledge are slanted to the era, culture and the knowledge that was available at the time.  These factors become part of the larger academic discussion representing all of the information that is available to scholars.

A literature review is more than the bibliography

• A literature review is about the relationships, about making connections not about making lists
• Illustrating connections between articles, authors and concepts
• Illustrates the gaps - we need these gaps in order for our research will be significant

Thesis statement: this study will do this in order to achieve this...

• Enables students to focus their research
• Organizational tool 

Different types of literatures such as historical, methodological, contextual, and theoretical

• Not one perfect type of literature review
• No standard template 

Literature Map

• Transformative exercise
• How to organize what they are going to do
• Conceptualize how new information will be fit into the map
• Not comprehensive - not possible - recognizing this will help students move past the research phase
• Show relationships between ideas and documents
• Blend of concept map (hierarchical) and mind map (expanding out, more loosely structured) 

How to create a map

• Start with literature and let the categories emerge organically, organize your ideas 
• Realize the scope of the project, may need to narrow the focus of the project
• Identify themes by colour, etc.
• Clarify the conversation
• Relationships between authors and ideas - who is saying what, who is responding to whom, who disagrees with whom, and who is off on their own
• Identify a gap in the research field 

Arrange individual sources in a diagram which illustrates their relationship to one another: agrees, disagrees, etc.  Allows the student to structure your literature review based on the map and the connections that were made.

Depends on perspective and what topics are chosen to focus on.

Online tools:
http://cmap.ihmc.us/
Hierarchical
Cross linking
Words that identify the relationships
Can include images, videos, etc
Can collaborate

http://mindmapper.com/

Open documents and web pages

Convert map to table

For more information:
http://mindmappingsoftwareblog.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mind_mapping_sofware
http://wik.ed.uiuc.edu/index.php/concept_mapping

Final Thought: Use post-it notes for more physical students - great opportunity to collaborate within the classroom

Pattern Recogition

Pattern Recognition: How a Rhetorical Approach to Sources can Transform Information Literacy Instruction
Presented by: Joel Burkholder, York College of Pennsylvania

I was off to a somewhat shaky start attending a pre-conference session at WILU 2012 on Wednesday, May 23rd as I was feeling a bit under the weather.  Luckily, I preserved and by the time the afternoon rolled around, I was my typical upbeat self.

The goal of this first session was to view patterns that we interface with daily from a slightly different perspective; thus creating a novel way of framing information literacy instruction and effectively engaging students. 

The discussion began with a definition of rhetoric as the way in which language is used to influence others.  Joel's first example of a rhetorical situation was to state that all of us just failed his class.  He then asked us to postulate how we were going to persuade him in an email to let us pass.  What kind of language would we use?  What would the tone of the email be?  What greetings and closing statements would we use?  There are three components to a rhetorical situation which are: purpose, author and audience.  Using the example above; the purpose would be that we would like to pass the class; the audience is our professor who we have previously established a formal teacher/student relationship with and the author.  These three components need to interact with one another in order for the purpose to be successfully achieved.  If one of the components changes, then it affects the other two components and the entire situation. 

We discussed popular vs. scholarly journals next by examining the covers of three popular women's magazine.  The covers were formulaic and covered routine material from month to month, so that if you were to read one of the magazines you should pretty much know what to expect of the content on a monthly basis (sex, body image, personal improvement).  Students need to understand the underlining context of information in terms that are important to them.  For example, a civil engineer needs to use scholarly materials in order to create bridges that don't collapse.  Using scholarly materials allows a student to also identify and make use of the discipline's language, so their own writing will take on its own air of credibility.

Genre Theory

• genre as a social act
• it is the language a community uses to accomplish specific tasks
• provides guidelines for participating within the culture / community / context

Patterns of Social Action
Joel made use of this quick video segment Newswipe Parody - how to be a reporter to illustrate that there is a known structure or standard format in news reporting.  Individuals need guidance or specific instruction when trying to understand an unknown format, such as a scholarly journal article for undergraduate students.

Authority
Authority is dependent on bias (what organization is sponsoring the research?), credentials of the author or agency and their reputation.  Three articles discussing the link between autism and vaccines were provided to illustrate the varying levels of authority.  We were asked to consider who is the author?  And how is their argument supported?

Accuracy
Evidence is built upon trust (I know what I am talking about), credibility (use of scholarly references to support and enhance your research), and context.  Truth plays a different role depending on the context, such that, photoshopping in Cosmopolitan is socially acceptable whereas photoshopping in a news report is not.  The example used to describe accuracy was the use of one Wikipedia reference along with 49 scholarly peer-reviewed references within a published paper.  Did the one Wikipedia reference infect the credibility of the entire article?

Bias

• selection and omission
• placement
• headlines
• photo / graphic / caption / formatting
• names and titles
• statistics
• sources
• word choice and tone

In a scholarly article, bias appears in the discussion section of the paper, but steps are typically taken to minimize that bias.

There are times when quality does not equal value.  There are circumstances when crappy research may have value in proving a point or framing an argument.

Identify and Analyze (Closing Remarks)

• how do we access information?
• understand how information is used and identified within a discipline
• each discipline uses information differently