The Circulation of Information: A Library Blog

A blog of reflections about librarianship, teaching, technology, being a professional, and more.

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Thing 2

For my first blog post, I’ll just reflect in brief on how I benefited from going through the first Rudai 23, a couple of years back. At the time, I was looking for both opportunities to network, as well as to refresh my awareness of current information technologies. I was in the midst of two years being away from library work. I had followed my wife, who had taken up a post as a lecturer, to Ireland in 2013, when Ireland was probably near the very bottom of the economic downturn.

It was a great networking opportunity, as I had the chance to meet a lot of very energetic professionals working in the west of Ireland (particularly as I had volunteered to become a moderator, as well as going through the course). Very fortunately, while Rudai v. 1 was going on, I managed to land a position at NUI Galway, alleviating the need to network a little bit (although, of course, it’s always part of the professional work). Yet having made the connection to the project, I was able to help bring Rudai v. 1′s certification event to NUI Galway, which in turn helped me make my case when the permanent version of my post came out in July, about a year ago now. So being involved with v. 1 has been hugely impactful in terms of professional connections I have made, as well as the course of my career.

Freshening up my skills in technology was incredibly handy once I did start my post. Part of the expectations on me was to use knowledge of technology in both the contexts of a job that has two aspects: as a kind of instructor of information literacy and academic skills, and on the marketing and engagement side of the shop. In discussions about what technologies to use, I have rarely found myself not knowing about a technology under consideration, and a lot of that had to do with the knowledge I gained at just the right moment going through Rudai 23 v. 1.

I’m late out the gate with v. 2, but as I have assured other participants, our deadlines are very flexible! Looking forward to carrying on the conversations with other Rudai’ers this time around, and sharpening up yet again my professional, critical and technology skills.

Image: Bubbles, by Julie Jabolnski, CC BY NC 2.0

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NPDF Domain 4

I would like to include a reflection on a recent workshop that I held in Domain 4. The workshop that I held was on the theme of plagiarism, the first of this workshop that I have held. It was a good example of how I try to work technology into my classrooms, as a means of creating environments that are “inclusive, innovative...problem-based” (4.7).

The tutorial was based on material projected to the front of the classroom. Rather than lecturing, or demonstrating, I try to use projected material to encourage active student engagement and group (including peer-to-peer) learning. In the context of this tutorial, I attempted to do so in three different ways.

I started out with a Kahoot quiz. I say ‘quiz’, but I have been trying to use Kahoots more as a means of starting discussion rather than as a ‘quiz’. So, to ask a question where the answers might be ambiguous, or where some answers are partially correct. I’ve had reasonable success with Kahoots as quizzes, i.e., with perhaps a nine-question quiz, with the questions run through quite quickly, and students compete to get the most points. These have been quite successful particularly with groups larger than 10 or so -- with groups smaller than this, people tend to get increasingly self-conscious that they will get an answer wrong, and that others will know (the anonymity decreases the more the numbers drop). 

I can’t say the Kahoot was hugely successful as a means of starting discussion, nor did people really seem to enjoy it as a quiz in this case (the group was small, around seven, the topic one that people are quite anxious about). I wound up going through the questions quite quickly, basically talking to myself while the students looked on.

The second activity was to run through a series of exemplary passages projected onto the screen, that is, an original passage followed by a passage that was an attempt at paraphrasing the first. I then asked students what they thought about the paraphrased passage -- were there elements of plagiarising in the passage? This exercise was useful in reviewing the idea that reproducing the structure of a passage amounts to plagiarism. This was a concept that I had included in the earlier quiz, but from the response I got from the students, it wasn’t necessarily something that they clearly understood: that reproducing the structure of an original passage could amount to plagiarism.

The big problem with the above exercise was that, in preparing the workshop, I neglected to include an example of an entirely non-plagiarised passage! This resulted in some regretful confusion, and is something I have since amended in the presentation.

The most successful element of the workshop was the third and final component. To start this component, I explained that really the best method to appropriately paraphrase a passage -- and to practice paraphrasing passages -- is simply to read the original passage over several times, then flip over the paper and attempt to write out the gist of the passage from memory. This isn’t an easy thing to do, but there really is no mechanical way of producing a non-plagiarised paraphrase of a passage! 

I then gave the attendees exemplary passages for them to try out this method with. Once they had an attempt at a paraphrase, I got volunteers to hand me their written work, for us to examine using the projector and a document camera.

I’ll turn to the document camera for a moment. A document camera is simply a camera (like a web cam) that is set up on a prop so that it will ‘look’ at a document set on a surface, which is then projected onto a screen. I was introduced to document cameras when I was an academic writing instructor in Turkey. At first, I thought the device was faintly ridiculous, an attempt at a fad for classroom teaching. Yet when I tried it out in the classroom, I found that it was quite useful in gaining the attention and focus of students working in English as their second language.

I wanted to use the document camera in this case so that we could have a group discussion about passages written by students in class as cases, to see whether they could get the method of paraphrasing a passage above to work, whether it did work. I was a little bit worried beforehand about whether students would actually volunteer their work to be projected onto the screen. In fact, students were very keen to have their work projected and evaluated by the class (myself included). So that was very good, and I think the fact that they knew they would be asked to put their work up motivated them to try out the method as well as they could.

The most successful or at least interesting moment was when one of the students, on seeing her work come up on the screen, gave a kind of gasp of recognition, which came because, once the work was up there, projected largely, she was able to recognize where she had reproduced parts of the passage that was overly close to the original. This was very interesting, and unanticipated. I had anticipated that projecting the texts on the screen would be useful in terms of focusing group attention to the piece and encouraging group discussion. But what I think happened in this case was that, for this student, seeing her work outside of its usual context -- small, close and within her own field of work -- now, projected in large letters on to a lightened screen, enabled a new kind of recognition, where something that was previously invisible to her was freshly apparent. In other words, I’m gesturing to a kind of Gestalt effect, where she was able to piece together meaning within the discursive and logical domain of academic integrity and originality from seeing her written text in two different visual contexts.

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Reflection: LILAC Day 1

It’s my second year at LILAC, and once again, I find myself trying to manage all of the ideas and insights I’ve gained after the first day (of 3!). After walking away from last year’s session completely inspired but entirely knackered, I made a comment in the feedback to the effect that it would be nice to build in a bit of a break for people to think. Lo and behold, this year there is a half hour in a room at the end of day 1 specifically for reflection. So, I’ll take credit for this then, although not for the tremendous charts and markers and things that have been laid out for reflective purposes (there is in fact only one other person here, this may not have tapped into the pulse of something enormous, my fault!).

I started the morning off with an excellent workshop from Sheila Corrall and Alison Pickard at the University of Manchester. We look to U Man from time to time, particularly as the developers of their award-winning eLearning Essentials programme. The activity today was a very useful tutorial on how to go about reviewing workshops. I learned not only about an excellent way of going about a workshop on presentations oriented to undergraduates, but the advantages of undergoing a routine peer review process of such workshops. I hope that we can implement both of these in one form or another at my own library.

There were a couple of sessions this morning that made use of Google Apps, using them as a means of extending the content of a one-shot session (Julia Glassman and Doug Worsham), and then in the context of creating collaborative in-class activities. My concern over this kind of collaborative in-class activity stems from my experience trying to use padlet, which immediately got vandalized by (anonymous) classroom users. But it sounds like the functionality of Google Apps can be replicated using Office 365, to which we subscribe institutionally, and thus to which I can attach students to their online identities. A ha! I’ll be exploring that option this summer hopefully with some pilot material for the fall.

There was also an excellent keynote from Josie Fraser, which was an excellent review of concepts and developments in open educational resources and practice. I’ve been very fortunate to be in a classroom or lecture theatre with a number of OEP luminaries in the last couple of weeks, so a lot to chew on, but again, the sessions on Google Apps in particular, above, give me some clear ideas on how to proceed in practical ways with some open approaches in my classrooms.

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NT&LPDF D1

I actually found a teaching philosophy statement that I wrote in 2010 as part of a job application! I have to say, I’m still beating down the same old straw man. I’ll reflect on this, and any aspects that might have changed in the ensuing seven years (!) in a future post.

STATEMENT OF TEACHING PHILOSOPHY Kristopher Meen One way I have heard others describe the teaching process is that conveying knowledge is like filling up an empty cup—i.e. the students—with water; such an analogy is problematically based on the belief that a student’s mind is a tabula rasa waiting to be filled with the wisdom of an all-knowing instructor. Over the course of my working life, I have interacted with students ranging from young children with severe learning difficulties, to high school students learning reading and writing skills in a second language, to adults working in advanced postsecondary settings. In no case has the metaphor of the empty vessel waiting passively to be filled adequately described my students, nor does the filling process accurately capture the nature of our engagement with one another.

Instead, I conceive of teaching as an interaction between social subjects, or individuals, between whom there is a knowledge gap, and wherein every participant brings a reserve of knowledge, experience, and life history to the interchange. Thus, the methods involved in bridging the gaps between my students and myself are essentially dialogic ones. Through the processes of communication and exchange the gap between social subjects is reduced. This dialogic vision informs all of my activities as an instructor: exercises conducted live in class, as well as the assignments I design and the projects on which I work with my students.

As an instructor, it is my responsibility to encourage student participation and establish the framework for dialogic interactions. I view the classroom as a discursive intellectual forum in which students can develop skills of consideration, evaluation, argumentation, and effective self-expression. Such a dynamic intellectual forum can only be brought into being by an instructor who is sensitive and responsive to a wide range of outlooks, experiences, beliefs, and learning styles. As a teacher, I aim to foster diversity and to create an inclusive and collegial classroom environment in which all students can comfortably and meaningfully participate.

An inclusive, dialogical outlook also informs the nature of my classroom activities and formal assignments. At the university level, I have prior experience instructing tutorial sections of approximately twenty to forty students. In the past, my tutorials typically combined a mixture of lecture, group discussions, classroom debates, and real-time conceptual exercises. My recent training and work in library sciences has enabled me to expand my knowledge of new media technologies, and I see enormous potential for developing class exercises that involve collaborative technologies such as wikis, blogs, websites, and easy-to-use Web 2.0 applications. In Koç University’s communications classes, I envision assignments that could include group presentation projects, in-class essays, short reading responses, and hands-on assignments engaging library resources, in addition to written papers. When providing feedback to my students, I consistently strive to clearly demonstrate the reasoning behind my evaluations. Students benefit enormously from hearing the ways in which they have been successful in communicating their ideas as well as the ways in which they might improve their future work. I have continued to hone my own abilities as an evaluator and effective assessor of written work, in particular, through my ongoing employment as an editor for numerous academics.

In conclusion, the dialogic orientation of my teaching is advantageous for students because the activities of the broader academic and professional worlds are likewise predicated upon intellectual exchange and the effective sharing of ideas. Research and communication skills developed in the classroom can enable students to join in and contribute to the long-standing dialogues of academia, the professions, and, perhaps most significantly, their social communities. This possibility is exciting to me, and it is to my students as well.

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NPDF Domain 2

This post will be a reflection on a workshop I attended, one that I relate to Domain element 2.4 of the Professional Development Framework.

I was very fortunate to be able to attend a very interesting workshop called Student as Partner, Producer and Assessor: Exploring Domain of One’s Own, led by instructional technologist Jim Groom. I learned a lot about some teaching technologies that I wasn’t aware of, including the A Domain of One’s Own project, which gives undergraduates a domain and web hosting account. We also discussed eportfolios, and more. Driving the examination and exploration of these technologies was a discussion of open pedagogy, what it means to be teaching and learning ‘in the open’ and different ways of proceeding with that.

An ongoing thread of conversation throughout the day was one involving the ethics of open pedagogy, and this is why I connect the day and how I engaged wih it with domain 2.4. There was a certain amount of back and forth about the enthusiasm, or non-enthusiasm, of students in terms of actually doing their learning out in the open, i.e., by means of conducting assignments consisting of blog posts that are accessible by the public, for instance. Different people had different experiences with this, with some stating that students are enthusiastic about this, while others saying that their students hated the idea and refused to do it. This leads to ethical questions. If a student finds open-learning objectionable, can we demand that they do assignments that are out in the open? What is our responsibility in terms of outlining the risks involved for students whether or not they initially like the idea? Is it ethical to conduct any kind of assessment ‘out in the open’ -- to public a grade, or even critical comments about open work?

My own experience with open pedagogy is not substantial. I did, however, engage with a faculty partner while I was finishing library school in an assignment that would, I think, be considered open pedagogy. It involved a website that I was designing for a web design course that I was completing, a website tied in with a course on Chaucer being taught by my faculty partner. Students were asked to submit a piece of their own writing, with the content of the website in its entirety to consist of student writing.

I never met the students, but my faculty partner asked for signed, written permission from students to include their work in the website -- they were free to decline if they wanted to. As far as I remember, every student, or nearly every student, was happy to give consent, and my faculty partner said that there was actually quite a lot of enthusiasm expressed for the project.

As an instructor of information literacy, I think the theme of ‘open’ versus ‘private’ discourse, and all the shades of grey in between, is an important one. It’s important to make students aware of who has access to what they say in what circumstances, and how things said in different scenarios can work out to their advantage; or, the reverse. I’m not sure I believe that students ought to be forced point blank to participate in open discourse if they don’t want to. Yet, as an educator of information literacy, I think it is important to coax students out of their comfort zones when it comes to communicating out in the open in ways that they might not be used to. I think it’s going to be more and more an essential skill, and the value in being able to deftly and creatively manage the channels of one’s communication should be brought to the attention of students, and those skills developed through their academic work.

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NPDF Domain 3

I’ll take 3.4, Alex.

An excellent project I’ve undertaken recently to develop skills in curriculum team discussion and on-line forums/ communities is for the upcoming, revamped Rudai 23 programme. In advance of the Rudai team running the programme, we have to put it together! So this involves the creation of a curriculum for an online continuous professional development course. The curriculum team currently consists of a team of four, all of whom work for different institutions from one another that are, in fact, cross-sector as well; meanwhile, not all of us are in the same city.

In proceeding we need to take advantage of both online collaboration technologies as well as the opportunities that we do have to be together in a room. We recently got together to put together the list of lessons we wanted to include in our programme, as well as figure out how we wanted to embed a sequence of Digital Badges. 

Once we had a draft of the programme, we took it back to our virtual project management environment, which is Basecamp. In Basecamp, we had a discussion with one another that consisted of a review of our draft into a more formal draft ready to circulate to others.

The sequence involved, on the one hand, being aware of the communicative resources available to us given our distributed structure -- but one that nonetheless affords occasional meetings in person. We maximized the value of that in-person interaction by setting goals and using a collaborative work-place approach, particularly the use of colored stickies on a whiteboard which we then rearranged as we discussed the programme.

Awareness not only of Basecamp, or, more generically, of online project management tools, was essential. This also entails becoming au fait with the communicative affordances of this tool, and coming to grips with how to communicate in as clear as possible over its particular channels.

In the past I’ve had the opportunity to do a fair bit of peer observation, but have not done a lot of it lately. A question is how to undertake this given that a lot of my teaching is going to be done in virtual environments. What are some examples of peer review of online teaching?

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NPDF Domain 2

Looking at element 2.1 here.

My current role is as an Academic Skills Librarian (that is in fact .6 of my role, the other .4 is as a Marketing and Engagement Librarian). This is a recent change from my initial role at the James Hardiman library, where I was hired on as a subject librarian for business and natural sciences.

I haven’t encountered this particular job title before, of ‘Academic Skills Librarian’, but it is reflective of recent shifts more generally away from the subject model of organizing libraries. Other job titles might be ‘liaison librarian’ or ‘teaching and learning librarian’, ‘instructional librarian’, or other. This specific job title aligns well with certain institutional discourses and objectives to NUI Galway.

In general, my own duties as an academic skills librarian might break down into teaching and curriculum development. The shift away from the subject model has necessitated a lot of thinking in terms of how to develop and deliver information literacy that does not depend on being embedded or closely articulated with subject-specific curricula. Fortunately, this hasn’t involved coming up with a whole new programme from scratch; there are plenty of generic materials available that I have been refocusing upon, revamping and reusing.

There are two other broad shifts in the overall profession of librarianship that have intersected with my own roles and responsibilities. On the one hand is a shift from the construct of ‘information literacy’ to that of ‘digital literacies’. There are quite a few definitions of digital literacy floating around out there, but my own thinking on digital literacies puts ‘information literacy’ within digital literacies as a higher level category. While information literacy includes traditional domains of skills such as searching for information, evaluating information and being selective about sources, digital literacies addresses a broader range of technologies than the library catalogues and databases with which one gains access to bodies of literature. In particular, there is a shift of emphasis towards technologies of a more active engagement -- technologies by which people can share, collaborate, make, build and be creative with.

One expression of this latter shift would be this model of Digital Literacy from Jisc, seen at the following page: https://www.jisc.ac.uk/full-guide/developing-digital-literacies

The shift to thinking about digital literacies and skills has necessarily involved a lot of activity relating to developing technological competencies. It has also involved a lot of thinking about priorities -- ‘digital literacies’ is a very broad area compared to information literacies. Given traditional competencies and roles, what territory within the domain of digital literacies should I focus on? How do I need to rethink strategies of delivery and priorities in order to be any kind of effective instructor of digital literacy?

The other broad shift has been in the engagement on the part of the profession with new ways of thinking about critical thinking. This has expressed itself in a new framework on information literacy conceived by the Association of College and Research Libraries, a body of the American Library Association. The framework articulates six key ‘threshold concepts’ of information literacy around which libraries around the globe have been reconsidering and revamping their instructional offerings. As ‘critical thinking’ is also a major byword at my own institution, the new framework and the subsequent engagement in that framework by my peers has begun to inflect how I think about my own pedagogy.

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NPDF Domain 1

Whenever I’m in a classroom, I try to think of the classroom as a dialogic space. I don’t think of myself as an all-knowing provider of ontologically straightforward knowledge to be poured into students, conceived as empty receptacles. Few teachers probably do, these days. I think of myself as a social subject occupying a social position that is in some ways distinct -- but not altogether different -- from the students in the classroom. What we’re trying to do is to mediate a kind of gap, to try to come to a kind of mutual understanding about something.

My ideal classroom scenario is one where I’m engaged in a series of questions and answers with students, in a way that takes place as a kind of game. The game is not a competitive one, but one of feeling out a conceptual space within which we can come to an agreement about the shape or texture, or some facet of an object of discussion or interrogation. The object under question might, for example, be a subject-related text. I want to know what different readings students have made of the text, and how these are oriented when it comes to my own reading. To do that, I might have students 

I have a reasonably diverse teaching background that has thrown up how different teaching contexts present different challenges to how trying to create a classroom-as-dialogic space. The kind of dialogic environment that I envision certainly has a lot to do with the kinds of classroom spaces that I’m used to given my Canada-based education (I completed all of my primary, secondary and third-level education in Canada). Classroom, back-and-forth Q&A type scenarios are typical of the ‘game’ of classroom behaviour in the Canadian learning contexts (it’s also my impression that it is widespread in the US, and accords roughly with my experience as a third-level student in the UK, where I spent a single year on exchange).

There were different kinds of games afoot when I was teaching in Istanbul, where I spent two years teaching academic writing. The ethos that invested the teacher-student relationship there was substantially different, with an normative affective register that I would describe as much more ‘caring’ than in the anglo environments within which I did most of my learning (and teaching). I admit that this was not something that I felt I came well to grips with in terms of adjusting my teaching strategies, other than clumsily trying to behave in nicer ways to my students (not that I try to be ‘mean’, but Turkish students can find the behaviour of North American instructors to be ice cold and highly alienating, so I made attempts to be somewhat warmer than how they found me initially).

A difficulty that I did have more success with in Turkey was in getting around awkwardness when it came to language issues. I taught students working in English as their second language, and as difficult as it is getting any student to pay attention in class these days, it was pretty disconcerting in the early days to see how quickly students there turned to their smart phones the instant I opened my mouth (having been a learner in a second-language scenario myself, I can identify with how hard it is to pay attention when someone is speaking in that second language, it is exhausting). 

This was a situation where classroom technology turned out to be very handy. We spent a certain amount of time looking at texts, including both texts for reading, as well as student writing. In both cases, it helped a lot to have a document camera on hand. When discussing specific parts of a text, it was extremely helpful for me to be able to show, visually, what text I was orienting the discussion around. Much of the student frustration and tendency to instantly give up on a class turned out to be simply a lack of ability to follow along with what was going on. Being able to point to the texts with the document camera helped to focus attention and thus enable discussion to ensue.

I am thus a believer in the judicious and thoughtful use of technologies in classrooms in ways that enable dialogue to take place.

In my next post, I will turn to a complementary aspect of my approach to the classroom to that of dialogue, by talking about an interest in experiment in the classroom. I’ll do so with reference to my current teaching role, which is as an instructor of information literacy sessions as a librarian. This has particular challenges, including that most of my teaching takes place in the context of ‘one-shot’ instructional sessions.

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The time was when a library was very like a museum and the librarian a mouser in musty books. The time is when the library is a school and the librarian in the highest sense a teacher

Melville Dewey

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Thing 23: Making it all work together

I was hoping to find time to do a really deep dive into some of these tools, because they do all sounds potentially quite useful. Alas, it’s January 30, time is almost up, so I’m afraid I just have to knock this post off.

My previous experience with a social media aggregator consisted simply of Tweetdeck, which allowed you to track and manage Twitter feeds, hashtags, lists, what-have-you. You could also tweet out from it, including scheduled tweets. I tried it out for quite a while, keeping close tabs on hashtags of interest, like #infolit, and did a scheduled tweet regime, putting together a schedule once or twice per week. It did make things reasonably easy to do things in a systematic way, although I didn’t wind up keeping it up.

I’m mostly going to talk about Hootsuite, which I actually tried out quite some time ago, near the beginning of the Rudai 23 project, as one of the organizers mentioned it as something potentially handy to use as one of the Rudai moderators (I think...long time ago now, can’t quite remember). Obviously, Hootsuite has an advantage over Tweetdeck in that it can handle more than one kind of social media. While it would be just super if it would let you use more than three social networks for free, what you can do with Twitter is essentially unlimited, and why not add in a couple more.

A limitation at the time (and maybe it’s changed since then) is that I didn’t seem to be able to add the Facebook group that I wanted (i.e. I wanted to include the Rudai 23 group to a tab including the Rudai23 Twitter hashtag and the Rudai FB group). I wasn’t over the three limit, so I’m not sure what the issue was / is. Today I tried Hootsuite out on my phone (previously I had used in on a PC), and the LinkedIn that I had connected seemed actually to be working better than when I used it on the PC.

I will investigate all this further. I have recently found out that I’ll be playing more of a significant role in the communications and marketing at my current post, and I think Hootsuite et al have a lot of potential in organizing the social media and using it in a more substantively interactive way.

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Thing 22: Mobile things

I really like the idea of Mobile things, and I feel like there is actually a great deal of potential that I am not tapping right now that I could at work with a mobile phone / iPad.

For this Thing, I did the first option and went ahead and downloaded Gum to my iPad. For some reason writing Gums about objects appeals more to me than books, I don’t get that. That’s good, as it turns out, because the first thing within reach was a cheap plastic stool my wife bought the other day from the Mr. Price down the road. I successfully scanned the code, and wrote a moderate review of the stool’s performance.

I would like to use this at work. I would like to recruit faculty members to scan their books or, better, books they’ve taken out from the library, and write some pithy notes or reviews using Gum. I think this would be really appealing to students. It’s like a kind of marginalia, but without having wrecked the book. (I wonder if there is a similar app for doi numbers? Could be used to share short notes about journal articles and such).

It is a bit limiting that it’s only on iPhone / iPad.

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Thing 21: Creating Infographics

Above is an infographic from easel.ly, from a template called ‘Songs’ that I made a few adjustments to to reflect my own listening habits over the years (well, not really, but these are songs that for some reason came to mind). Obviously, there is a lot of potential with these in terms of the visual impact, you can make data very user-friendly. 

I can think of a couple of scenarios where I would like to make a set of data look ‘catchy’. One strategy I take in my information literacy classes, for instance, is to find data about skills that employers look for that are related to information literacy. It is handy to be able to present that data in a user-friendly, visually stimulating manner. Another would be to present feedback data from those information literacy classes, if I were presenting that data in the context of a conference presentation, for instance. There are all kinds of situations where data visualization can come in handy.

I’m not sure I’m convinced that using something like easel.ly would be necessarily any easier than using the graphing / illustration capabilities of Word and / or Excel. The template above is pretty elaborate, and making even minor changes was a bit finicky. Between finding a template that was appropriate for the data that I wanted to present, getting images and text shifted around to be appropriate for the content of that data, I can see this is being potentially as time consuming as putting together something similar using tools in Word / Excel (and images available on the open web -- as we’ve seen, usable images at this stage are plentiful).

If I have time, I would like to compare the two processes with one of the above examples -- creating visualizations to present the data for employers’ info lit expectations with Office tools versus one of these infographics makers. 

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Thing 19: The Legal Side of Things

Top: The original uploader was MPshofer at Serbian Wikipedia [CC BY-SA 3.0 rs or GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons

Bottom: By Marko Jotić (Own work) CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons w

Continuing on the ‘nibus’ theme from Thing 18, here are the top two results for a search for ‘Nibus’ when searched in my old standby, Wikimedia Commons. Aside from the images being not overly interesting (the Commons project on the part of libraries and archives at Flickr really has put up a lot of great images), there wasn’t too much that went wrong here, I don’t think. WC makes it pretty easy to pop up the create attribution, although it does involve a lot of cutting and pasting to get links into all the right places (I tried to paste the html that WC gives as an attribution option into this post, but it didn’t take…there must be a way to do that).

It takes a little getting used to, but Wikimedia Commons as a CC source I still think can be quite handy.

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And Thing 19...

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Thing 18 part b: Instagram

Done! I have opened an account and made a comment on my friend Stirling’s account (he is a librarian at the Ottawa Public Library). I also asked whether the apple that Eve at was really a pomegranate as there seems to be some speculation about this on the NYPL Instagram, where they have posted an image of an old query asking what kind of an apple it was that Eve ate.

I have to admit I’ve been a bit stubbornly resisting starting up with Instagram, but now that I’m there, well, I guess I’ll give it a go. I know there are those in my current workplace that would like to start up an account for the library, so maybe I’ll even volunteer to do that, see how it flies with our users.

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Drat, blogged this in the wrong blog again. Here’s Thing 18b!

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Thing 20: Presentations

I’ve had opportunities in the last couple of years to put together some reasonably high-pressure presentations, and I think I’ve actually improved quite a lot in putting these together. One of them was the basis for my successful application for the post that I’m currently in. Below is a presentation for a job interview that I didn’t get, but still did quite well on the presentation aspect of the interview. I’m not having any luck getting the presentation embedded into Tumblr, so I’ve just cut and pasted in images of the slides, below.

This was a tough presentation, mostly because of a very tight time limit that was asked for : 5 minutes. That is very short. But I stuck with it, and the panel seemed quite impressed with this, I don’t think a lot of the other applicants did. As an audience member, this is certainly the piece of advice I wish people would listen to more than anything else, stick with the time limit. One definition of boredom that I think is a paraphrase of Heidegger is that it is the awareness of time passing. Few situations make me more aware of time passing than a Powerpoint presentation gone over time.

There are a lot of prescriptions out there that I dislike about what makes a good Powerpoint. “Never use effects” and “never use bullet points” are two that I’ve ignored in the Presentation, below. I think a good Powerpoint (or Prezi or whatever) will have a variety of approaches to each slide, and I think that’s in part what was successful with this Presentation (I do agree that neither effects nor bullet points should be overused). Slide 4 uses effects, groups of images appearing in a sequence, I think they are faded in. The idea was to give a visual impression of the kind of competing distractions faced by libraries when trying to get the attention of first-year undergraduates. 

Slide 7 features a dreaded bullet-list. I think this one illustrates one point, which is that a bullet list doesn’t have to be boring. Second, a bullet list can be used to vary the pace of the slides going by. The first six slides of this presentation went by quite quickly, but then I stick with slide 7 for quite a while. Each bullet summarizes a point I am making in a little bit more depth orally.

I do completely agree that there should be something like a ‘story’ written out, and that the slides in a presentation should ultimately enhance what is being said. My process isn’t exactly to write out the story then do the slides; like all writing, doing up a presentation is all about revising, in fact. In the case of a presentation, it’s a kind of back and forth process of revising the script, then revising the slides, back and forth, back and forth. Depending on what’s at stake, I’ve done this up to six or seven times before I’m happy with a presentation.

[thecirculationofinformation]

Thing 18 Communicating Through Photographs. 

I  was searching for ‘Turkish minibus’ in the Flickr Creative Commons, and through a series of errors, wound up searching for ‘nibus’. The above was the top result. It’s from the Internet Archive Book Images collection, and has no known copyright restrictions.

I’m already using Flickr in my library. I had been using Wikimedia Commons to get images for presentations and such. But then I tried the Flickr, and it seems easier, the search functionality smoother, the images that result from searches more interesting.

I should probably be somewhat more rigorous in my attributions. I can think of a Powerpoint I’ve made recently that, while it listed the source, didn’t link to the source, nor did I note where I had made a change and thus that the work was derivative. I have been using images where there are no known copyright restrictions, so these are not being asked for by the image sources, but, of course, these are still best practices.

Right, still need to create an Instagram account. That will be Thing 18 part b.

[thecirculationofinformation]

Thing 17: Reflective practice

I’ve decided to rewrite Thing 8 on curation tools; the curation tool I chose to work on for that post was Pinterest.

 I created a Pinterest account, the URL for which is here: https://www.pinterest.com/krismeen/

This is one of the posts that I’ve been most looking forward to. I like the idea of curating; when I was a kid, I would say that I did a certain amount of curating of my comic book collection. I wish I had time to do more curating, and I think sharing curated collections on topics of interest has a great deal of potential in terms of the professional sharing of ideas. I’m less certain of how curating tools could be used to engage users of libraries, beyond certain cohorts of hobbyists who also use Pinterest as a means of supporting their interests.

Myself, I have used Pinterest from time to time in the past, but just as a viewer or lurker or whatever you want to call it. I have used it to look up recipes, for instance; that’s probably what I’ve used it the most for. This was particularly useful in the early days of my couple of years as a dad-at-home, when I was trying to figure out how to make stuff for my twin babies to eat. I have also had a peek at certain DIY home renovation Pinterest boards. I have yet, however, to actually have my own Pinterest account, which is of greater value now that Pinterest seems to have shut down the ability of people without their own Pinterest accounts to have a look at peoples’ boards.

I wasn’t really concerned about Pinterest being difficult to use. It is a well-established social network at this point, oriented to users with potentially limited technical skills; the barriers to use it should be quite low. This is indeed what I found as I used it; boards were reasonably simple to create, pins pretty simple to pin. I had to ask some questions of myself about certain features that I wanted to use; should I download the browser button, or just pin things via the normal Pinterest route (the browser button turns out to be great).

The organization and content of the boards was more difficult to think through than any of the technical issues that presented themselves. What should I include as boards? There are a number of subtopics within librarianship that I’m interested in, so those seem like good candidates: information literacy, marketing and communication, those seem to make sense. What about a board about academic librarianship itself? Or even librarianship more generally? Does it make sense to have a board about such a general topic? Ultimately, I’ve decided to just try out a couple of very general ones along with a few more specific boards, and just see what happens as I collect materials and pin them.

Another issue requiring a certain amount of thought is, what about content that isn’t particularly visual? Even if something doesn’t have an engaging visual attached to it, does it make sense to pin it? And if it doesn’t have any image at all, how should I go about choosing a visual to go with it? If it has a visual, but one that isn’t particularly compelling, should I replace it with something that is?

The latter involves a certain amount of trickiness given that the information literacy content that I’m most interested isn’t particularly visually compelling. The content about Il in the context of academic or government libraries (which are the library scenarios that I have and am most likely to continue my working life within) tend to be quite dry, without too much in the way of compelling images. This is probably different than Il in public or school library scenarios, which probably have a deep history of creative and engaging ways of doing IL, for their younger audiences. I do think this is one of the greatest areas of potential for Pinterest for someone interested in information literacy in academic libraries; Il in the third-level academic library context are moving towards more fun, engaging ways of teaching, so I think there’s potential for cross-fertilization of ideas between the different sectors of libraries in the context of information literacy.

That said, there is the difficulty of whether or not there is a community of academic and / or government librarians sharing ideas on Pinterest. My initial impressions are that it is much more school and public librarians using Pinterest, using it as a platform to share ideas. Do I try to be a pioneer among academic / government librarians and spend time working on Pinterest in the homes that others will join me? I think there is enough value with the librarians that are on Pinterest already for me to continue to try to use it anyways; and it’s a nice way to organize resources of my own interest anyways.

I’m not sure that I would necessarily approach the task any differently were I to do it again. I generally approach any technology with a pretty open mind; I understand that it’s going to take some play and experimentation to use. Figuring out how to use it in different scenarios for different purposes can take time, it won’t be completely obvious right off the bat. It is important to think about all the different ways that it might be used, all the different contexts – engagement with other professionals versus engagement with user groups (I didn’t wind up talking much about the latter in either of the reflections on this topic; I’m still struggling to figure out how to use Pinterest to engage user groups in an academic / government library, given how oriented it is to hobbyists, and that library resources in the academy is oriented to certain fundamental tasks related to that institution, as opposed to public libraries, for instance, or even school libraries, the mandates of which might be--and to me, should be--more oriented to helping people enjoy and grow the things they enjoy in their spare time).

It is the case that I haven’t actually used Pinterest since posting Thing 9, way back in August or whenever it was! So something I didn’t do, and still haven’t done, is to come up with a plan that I can stick to to keep engaging with Pinterest, as without a sustained effort, it might fall flat, when with a certain amount of creative energy and thought, then it might be something that could be successful, even if not as easy to engage with a something like Facebook or Twitter.