PREZI ALERT!

Craziest Library Instruction Module You've Ever Seen!

Maybe?

I have been on a serious blog hiatus due to instructing and movie creating for an Art100 course and the Cherry Hill project. I knew what I was in for with the Cherry Hill project, but I wanted to top the year before, and am pretty sure I did. The new "movie" is more than twice the length of the last, includes voices and great information, but is actually too big to post online. (Working on that.)

As for the learning modules for an online Art100 course, I got extremely ambitious when asked by a wonderful instructor if I could take the reigns on teaching and assessing the students for the first 4 weeks on the research process, finding resources, and plagiarism and citation. It was about 4 times the work that I thought it would be, but I am SO glad I did. I was very naive in thinking that I could just create and construct 1 or 2 interactive videos every week for a month. (Each accompanied with a short quiz.) Sometimes people are frustrated by naivete, I find that it commands innovation within myself. I'm not going to NOT do it, after all.

Hopefully this will be helpful to my fellow librarians that are trying to figure out how to ramp up their library instruction this fall. I try to accommodate different learners when I'm constructing these and attempt to keep things light while conveying the importance of each activity. The following is the first instruction module; an introduction to the research process. I did email and attain permission when I used outside video. The students completed an accompanying quiz for each of the modules. The initial feedback has been very positive, so I hope that you feel ever so slightly inspired. A couple of my lovely librarian colleagues have used it for professional development activities, and I only ask any other librarians for large sums of money. However, if you do not have large sums of money to give to random art librarians, I just ask that you give me a little credit.

If you're new or newISH to Prezi, please make sure that you watch the first video on how to use Prezi so you don't miss anything. It may take a moment to load once you press the play arrow, so give it a moment. If you want to watch it again, you may need to refresh the page. I hope you enjoy!

The Research Process on Prezi

Keeping the Angry Birds at Bay: The Art of Delicate Librarianship

Many people have their own opinion about the way governance should work in their country. Given the U.S.' current divided political climate it can be very difficult to find anyone that doesn't have strong opinions on either side. Librarians, of course, have their own opinions and ideas, as well. However, expressing them, on the job, is not always acceptable. Sure we get together and sign petitions and picket and email like angry birds when our budgets are threatened, and thereby our jobs. However, outside of budgetary concerns, we're really supposed to be kind of mum when interacting with our patrons on political issues. So, when an interesting political movement comes along, of which many people have questions and are looking for resources, we have to provide suitable information while trying to be, or at least appearing to be, neutral. No matter what side of the spectrum we lean, this can be a challenge. 

So this came up recently for a couple of us, and I love the result. We've started doing some really general resource guides, (I hate using the term LibGuide because only librarians know what that means and we're not making these things for each other -or at least we shouldn't be most of the time). As a sort of off-shoot of the marketing committee we've decided to try to post resource guides on our web page about newsworthy and/or hot button topics. Professors are often discussing these events in their classrooms and so providing a tool like this is a great marketing tool, as well as instructional and research tool.

Amanda Youngbar, my partner in crime on this endeavor, made a few suggestions and we both got really excited about creating one for the Occupy Wall Street movement. Seeing as how this group has stirred up a lot of debate we wanted to be fair to the group, those genuinely interested in understanding the movement, as well as those opposed. After looking at a number of guides already available, we also realized that with something like a "movement" there is an ebb and flow to the news information available. So we felt challenged to try to provide resources that continually aggregated information on OWS, as opposed to just a news article here and one from there, that would be outdated in a week. Unfortunately we were unable to pin-point a site from the opposition that continually aggregated news pieces, so the guide might seem a tad unbalanced. That said, we added a disclaimer at the top, introducing the guide and asking those that examine the links, to do so with a grain of salt.

And so blossomed our immediately popular Occupy Wall Street Resource Guide. I must admit, that this might be the first time I've been a part of putting a resource guide like this together, to which even I return repeatedly for the information. It was really nice to participate in something of a somewhat delicate nature that seemed to come out so well. The popularity of the guide soared from the moment we started publicizing it. I hope it continues to provide the information people are looking for on this topic and I think we provided a nice template for addressing hot button issues in the future. Cheers, Amanda!

English 102 Deers -the post where I return to my insatiable inclinations toward exclamation points and CAPS!

I suppose it's that time of the semester. You know that, Hurry-up-Thanksgiving-and-get-here-already-time. Which will soon be followed by that Hurry-Up-End-Of-The-Semester-Time. Which is invariably followed by that, Do-You-Think-The-One-Inch-Of-Snow-That-Is-Predicted-For-Tomorrow-Could-Actually-Turn-Into-Two-Feet-and-Close-The-School-Time. But until all those times come true, all I dream about is laying in bed and reading graphic novels. I am not ashamed or frightened to admit that I am burned out. TIRED!

But, I have to cop to this one useful thing that I did while teaching a couple of English 102 sessions this week.  I tricked the students into finding books in the catalog and then locating them in the stacks! Hee hee! It was awesome. I talked to them about the catalog and books versus articles, blah blah blah, and then asked them to find some books in the catalog on their topics and showed them a couple of tricks. 2 seconds later they were all staring at me bored. I asked if they'd found books they could use in their papers. Bored nods. 

Photo by Jim Champion

I directed, "Great! Go get them!"  Followed by an enthusiastic sweeping gesture that was accompanied with a lunge. The total deers in headlights looks were priceless! Of course they had not ACTUALLY found books, they were only humoring me so that I could move on with the class. (How sweet.) Once they realized I was serious and they really had 7 minutes to find a book on the shelf there was frantic typing and hand raising and questions and pointing and eventual leaving of the classroom. [Exasperated sighs and stomping.]

I went up to the stacks and quickly walked through, seeing if anyone needed help. Most of the students were helping each other and I went back to the classroom. I thought that something magical may have occurred when the students started trickling back with hard rectangular objects in their hands, but when I overheard a young woman tell her friend, that she, "Really found the right book!" I knew the magic that occurred in that classroom was of Disney proportions. But, it gets better. I locked the classroom and was on my way back to my desk when I noticed A LINE, an actual cue queue, (as they say in the U.K. or pool halls if you fall victim to homonyms, like me), of those same students at our circulation desk, incredibly and actually CHECKING OUT THE BOOKS! I was floored. After all, class was over, they had facebooks to check and naps to take, but instead of all that, they were actually checking out the books they had found. That made my week. Oh, and, our circulation numbers.

Here is a picture of a cue queue in a library with a Brit. Check out Bowling Green's Library SleeveFacing Blog where this pic is from. Hot new trend alert!

Pedagogy and Learning Theory

Some of the stuff that I'm passionate about are learning theory and learning styles and pedagogy.  They used to call it teaching, but now that's kind of a dirty word.  I think the study of how people learn is absolutely fascinating.  I'm putting the finishing touches on an article with a colleague on the subject for academic librarians, (this thing seriously should have been submitted weeks ago - gosh darn formatting! for the love of Pete!) I sincerely hope that more and more students leaving library school will have a greater understanding of how to be effective in the classroom -where many of them will be spending a lot of time in the near future. 

So imagine my surprise this morning, when I discovered that the "Super Librarian," as a colleague referred to her, Char Booth, has an article in American Libraries this month that gets down and dirty about Instructional Literacy.  I'm so glad that this is becoming a more and more popular subject and I hope librarians are paying attention.  Perhaps this will be a nice compliment to the survey and article we're working on. (Fingers crossed.)

Link to Char Booth's blog here.

PS Closed my survey with 1020 responses! I'm amazed!