Group items tagged

written from a school district perspective but core elements are relevant to any professional development efforts

The accumulation of feeds becomes one more thing to check, one more inbox to process. Nobody likes seeing their unread items count spiral out of control, and quickly skimming headlines to catch up doesn't feel like engaged reading. Brett Kelly has recently described why he quit RSS in an effort to read more intentionally: I realized that, for some reason I couldn't quite recall, I felt obligated to stay abreast of new developments in technology and such. That fabricated obligation led me to routinely scan big lists of headlines and, more often than not, mark the whole mess as "read" and go on to something else. Imagine this happening 2-4 times per day and I was spending between 10-30 minutes per day skimming or ignoring stuff that, for the most part, wasn't what I wanted to read. Instead of obsessively checking his RSS feeds, Brett has committed to reading longer material (in his Kindle) and to using Instapaper for managing blog and news posts that he'd like to read. How does he discover those posts, if he's not subscribed to hundreds of feeds every day? Twitter:

concept map for thinking about the various pieces of the liaison librarian role, focusing on visibility, relevance, usefulness, and timeliness. used for conversation with team of librarians to take a higher altitude view of what we're trying to accomplish and then specifically how we go about doing that

""Academic libraries are encountering a critical inflection point. In our case it isn't a single technology that is disrupting our established system, but a barrage of advancements in publishing, pedagogy, and user preferences. The landscape is shifting around us, and the future of scholarship requires us to develop new skills, design new environments, and deliver new service capacities. In short, we need new operating models.""

Thoughtful discussion of some key issues in the development of digital scholarship

The introduction of information technologies into higher education added new dimensions to the educational enterprise and led to investigations into how the design of learning spaces affects teaching and learning. The time has come to broaden the scope of that inquiry and consider factors beyond space, including learning culture and the changing roles of instructors, students, and other people involved in teaching and learning. The effort to understand and develop effective learning environments includes more individuals and more roles than have generally been involved in the discussion about teaching and learning, and the factors at issue include, but go beyond, technology.

Abstract: On March 3 and 4, 2010, the ELI community gathered for an online focus session on mobile learning. This white paper is a synthesis of the key ideas, themes, and concepts that emerged from those sessions. The white paper also includes links to relevant focus session materials, recordings, and archives. It represents a harvesting of the key elements that we as a teaching and learning community need to keep in mind as we work to integrate mobile technology into teaching and learning in higher education. It is clear that while the application of mobile technology to learning is just now getting under way, the potential is enormous and we can expect that the rate of development will be very rapid indeed.

"It's also not the only way to build institutional unity. What if instead of devoting time and resources to making analogies about customer service, we put learning first? What if the conversations, the trainings, the memos, and even the job descriptions emphasized this simple question: How does what I do make this a better place for students to learn and develop?"

A report of findings from 2,318 respondents to a survey carried out among college students on six campuses distributed across the U.S. in the spring of 2009, as part of Project Information Literacy. Respondents, while curious in the beginning stages of research, employed a consistent and predictable research strategy for finding information, whether they were conducting course-related or everyday life research. Almost all of the respondents turned to the same set of tried and true information resources in the initial stages of research, regardless of their information goals. Almost all students used course readings and Google first for course-related research and Google and Wikipedia for everyday life research. Most students used library resources, especially scholarly databases for course-related research and far fewer, in comparison, used library services that required interacting with librarians. The findings suggest that students conceptualize research, especially tasks associated with seeking information, as a competency learned by rote, rather than as an opportunity to learn, develop, or expand upon an information-gathering strategy which leverages the wide range of resources available to them in the digital age.

Interesting article. UNLV Libraries are engaged in similar curricular mapping work.