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Contents contributed and discussions participated by Sara Thompson

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Sara Thompson

Think Like a Start-Up: a White Paper - The Ubiquitous Librarian - The Chronicle of High... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...k-like-a-startup-a-white-paper

libraries innovation management professional planning ideasfile resources

shared by Sara Thompson on 09 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • I’ve been fascinated with startup culture for a long time and as I considered all the changes happening in academic libraries (and higher ed) the parallels were quite stunning.
  • we are being required to rethink/rebuild/repurpose what a library is and what it does. The next twenty years are going to be an interestingly chaotic time for the history of our institutions.
  • In concise terms: startups are organizations dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This sounds exactly like an academic library to me. Not only are we trying to survive, but we’re also trying to transform our organizations into a viable service for 21st century scholars and learners.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • I’ve found that entrepreneurs tend to love talking about the future of higher education, largely because it didn’t work well for them and they want to see something different.
  • Let me know if something resonates with you or your workplace. I’d love to hear from libraries practicing a similar R&D methodology.
  • Sara Thompson on 09 Apr 12
     
    Deb, I think this would be right up your alley. He's asking a lot of the same questions you ask, with some interesting links on the last page to other resources. Sections: 1. Is higher ed too big to fail? 2. Innovators wanted 3. Think like a startup 4. Lean startups 5. Build, Measure, Learn 6. Three Essential Qualities 7. Too much assessment, not enough innovation 8. A strategic culture (not plan) 9. Microscopes and telescopes 10. Real artists ship
Sara Thompson

CARL Conference 2012, San Diego, California - 0 views

www.carl-acrl.org/...virtual.html

innovation userstudies libraries conference presentations

shared by Sara Thompson on 05 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Sara Thompson on 05 Apr 12
     
    Bookmarking this so I can check back later to see if any presentation materials are added afterward.  Several presentations sound like they'd be awesome. 
Sara Thompson

The Future of Personal Information Management, Part 1; William Jones - 0 views

www.morganclaypool.com/...S00411ED1V01Y201203ICR021

wishlist books PIM workflows productivity organization

shared by Sara Thompson on 04 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Sara Thompson on 04 Apr 12
     
    I would love to get this but cannot find any information about the difference between PDF and PDF Plus, and really don't want a whole new account just for this ebook. Why you so difficult, publishers?
Sara Thompson

Student success courses catch on, slowly, at community colleges | Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

www.insidehighered.com/...atch-slowly-community-colleges

education instruction transliteracy teaching

shared by Sara Thompson on 03 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Sara Thompson on 03 Apr 12
     
    Community colleges can improve graduation rates by offering a course that teaches students how to navigate college with lessons on study skills, time management and how to find the bursar's office. Yet while "student success" courses are increasingly common, resistance remains strong at many community colleges.
Sara Thompson

Course Planning & Teaching Resources :: Iowa State U, Center for Excellence in Learning... - 0 views

www.celt.iastate.edu/teaching

teaching learning edtech prof-dev education resources to-read instruction

shared by Sara Thompson on 03 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Sara Thompson on 03 Apr 12
     
    Incredible list of resources about teaching -- course planning, classroom management, learning activities, assessment and more. Wealth of information here. 
Sara Thompson

The Future of the Book Is the Stream - Megan Garber - Technology - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...252001

books ebooks business libraries coll-dev future

shared by Sara Thompson on 01 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Sara Thompson on 01 Apr 12
     
    Would I subscribe to my books instead of outright purchasing them? We subscribe to Pandora, but we consume that music in a wholly different, almost mindless way. Books require a much more deliberate investment of time, no matter how easy it might be to get them. I'm not sure it's really the same model as the author here implies.
Sara Thompson

How Turning My To-Dos into a Story Boosted My Memory and Solved My Procrastination Problem - 0 views

lifehacker.com/...ved-my-procrastination-problem

productivity storytelling organization GTD todo lifehacker ideasfile

shared by Sara Thompson on 01 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Sara Thompson on 01 Apr 12
     
    This sounds like something that would easily take me half an hour the first several times.  Intriguing, but .... I don't know.
Sara Thompson

A Model of Learning Objectives : Revision of Bloom's Taxonomy - 1 views

www.celt.iastate.edu/...RevisedBlooms1.html

education teaching visual psychology examples images

shared by Sara Thompson on 29 Mar 12 - Cached
  • Sara Thompson on 29 Mar 12
     
    Really great visual cross-section of cognitive process with knowledge dimensions.  Fascinating way to think about learning activities. 
Sara Thompson

Bring back the 40-hour work week - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...singleton

productivity history business professional management people

shared by Sara Thompson on 25 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • This is what work looks like now. It’s been this way for so long that most American workers don’t realize that for most of the 20th century, the broad consensus among American business leaders was that working people more than 40 hours a week was stupid, wasteful, dangerous and expensive — and the most telling sign of dangerously incompetent management to boot.
  • By 1914, emboldened by a dozen years of in-house research, Henry Ford famously took the radical step of doubling his workers’ pay, and cut shifts in Ford plants from nine hours to eight. The National Association of Manufacturers criticized him bitterly for this — though many of his competitors climbed on board in the next few years when they saw how Ford’s business boomed as a result.
  • One is that increasing a team’s hours in the office by 50 percent (from 40 to 60 hours) does not result in 50 percent more output (as Henry Ford could have told them). Most modern-day managers assume there will be a direct one-to-one correlation between extra hours and extra output, but they’re almost always wrong about this. In fact, the numbers may typically be something closer to 25-30 percent more work in 50 percent more time.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • By that point, there were a solid five decades of industrial research that proved, beyond a doubt, that if you wanted to keep your workers bright, healthy, productive, safe and efficient over a sustained stretch of time, you kept them to no more than 40 hours a week and eight hours a day.
  • The other thing about knowledge workers is that they’re exquisitely sensitive to even minor sleep loss. Research by the US military has shown that losing just one hour of sleep per night for a week will cause a level of cognitive degradation equivalent to a .10 blood alcohol level. Worse: most people who’ve fallen into this state typically have no idea of just how impaired they are. It’s only when you look at the dramatically lower quality of their output that it shows up. Robinson writes: “If they came to work that drunk, we’d fire them — we’d rightly see them as a manifest risk to our enterprise, our data, our capital equipment, us and themselves. But we don’t think twice about making an equivalent level of sleep deprivation a condition of continued employment.”
  • Another is that overtime is only effective over very short sprints. This is because (as Sidney Chapman showed in 1909) daily productivity starts falling off in the second week, and declines rapidly with every successive week as burnout sets in. Without adequate rest, recreation, nutrition and time off to just be, people get dull and stupid. They can’t focus.
  • The Business Roundtable study found that after just eight 60-hour weeks, the fall-off in productivity is so marked that the average team would have actually gotten just as much done and been better off if they’d just stuck to a 40-hour week all along. And at 70- or 80-hour weeks, the fall-off happens even faster: at 80 hours, the break-even point is reached in just three weeks.
  • Wise managers who understand this will a) avoid requiring overtime crunches, because they’re acutely aware of the serious longer-term productivity hit that inevitably follows; b) keep the crunches as short as possible when they are necessary; and c) give their teams a few days off — one to two comp days per overtime week worked is about right — at the end of a hard sprint. This downtime enables them recuperate more quickly and completely. It’s much more productive to have them gone for the next week — and then back on the job, rested and ready to work — than have them at their workstations but too fried to get anything useful done for the next month.
  • After WWII, as the GI Bill sent more workers into white-collar jobs, employers at first assumed that the limits that applied to industrial workers probably didn’t apply to knowledge workers. Everybody knew that eight hours a day was pretty much the limit for a guy swinging a hammer or a shovel; but those grey-flannel guys are just sitting at desks. We’re paying them more; shouldn’t we be able to ask more of them? The short answer is: no. In fact, research shows that knowledge workers actually have fewer good hours in a day than manual laborers do — on average, about six hours, as opposed to eight. It sounds strange, but if you’re a knowledge worker, the truth of this may become clear if you think about your own typical work day. Odds are good that you probably turn out five or six good, productive hours of hard mental work; and then spend the other two or three hours on the job in meetings, answering e-mail, making phone calls and so on. You can stay longer if your boss asks; but after six hours, all he’s really got left is a butt in a chair. Your brain has already clocked out and gone home.
  • Here’s why. By the eighth hour of the day, people’s best work is usually already behind them (typically turned in between hours 2 and 6). In Hour 9, as fatigue sets in, they’re only going to deliver a fraction of their usual capacity. And with every extra hour beyond that, the workers’ productivity level continues to drop, until at around 10 or 12 hours they hit full exhaustion.
  • For these people, work wasn’t just work; it was their life’s passion, and they devoted every waking hour to it, usually to the exclusion of non-work relationships, exercise, sleep, food and sometimes even personal care. The popular stereotype of the geek was born in some real truths about the specific kinds of people who were drawn to tech in those early years.
  • Companies broadened their working hours, so programmers who came in at noon and worked through till midnight could make their own schedules. Dress codes were loosened; personal eccentricities were celebrated. HP famously brought in breakfast every morning so its engineers would remember to eat.
  • There were two problems with this. The first is that this “passion” ideal didn’t recognize that the vast majority of people have legitimate physical, emotional and psychological needs — things like sleep, exercise, relaxation and the maintenance of strong family and social support bonds — that these engineers didn’t have to nearly the same degree. The second was that most managers, lacking windows into their workers’ souls, decided to cut corners and measure passion with one easy-to-chart metric: “willingness to spend your entire life at the office.”
  • The unions — for 150 years, the guardians of the 40-hour week — were falling under a conservative onslaught; and in their place, the new cult of the entrepreneur was ascendant.
  • “working 90 hours a week and loving it!” (an actual T-shirt worn with pride by the original Macintosh team. (Productivity experts estimate that we’d have probably had the Mac a year sooner if they’d worked half as many hours per week instead.)
  • Within 15 years, everything America’s managers used to know about sustaining worker productivity was forgotten. Now, 30 years and a few economic meltdowns on, the cafeterias and child-care centers and gyms are mostly gone, along with the stock options and bonuses that were once held out as the potential reward for the long hours. All that remains of those heady, optimistic days is the mandatory 60-hour work-week. And, unless you’re an hourly worker — still entitled to time and a half by law — the only inducement employers currently offer in exchange for submitting yourself to this abuse is that you get to keep your job.
  • There are now whole industries and entire branches of medicine devoted to handling workplace stress, but the bottom line is that people who have enough time to eat, sleep, play a little, exercise and maintain their relationships don’t have much need of their help. The original short-work movement in 19th-century Britain demanded “eight for work, eight for sleep and eight for what we will.” It’s still a formula that works.
  • And it hurts the country, too. For every four Americans working a 50-hour week, every week, there’s one American who should have a full-time job, but doesn’t. Our rampant unemployment problem would vanish overnight if we simply worked the way we’re supposed to by law.
  • But the bottom line is: For the good of our bodies, our families, our communities, the profitability of American companies, and the future of the country, this insanity has to stop. Working long days and weeks has been incontrovertibly proven to be the stupidest, most expensive way there is to get work done.
  • Sara Thompson on 25 Mar 12
     
    Just in case we ever need more fodder for hiring...  "But the bottom line is: For the good of our bodies, our families, our communities, the profitability of American companies, and the future of the country, this insanity has to stop. Working long days and weeks has been incontrovertibly proven to be the stupidest, most expensive way there is to get work done."
Sara Thompson

Net Smart: How To Thrive Online - 1 views

ogilvynotes.com/...net-smart-how-to-thrive-online

transliteracy info-literacy books visual images infographic ideasfile

shared by Sara Thompson on 25 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Sara Thompson on 25 Mar 12
     
    Interesting visual spin on the various literacies we want our students to learn. I'm hoping to find a video of the author speaking about this before diving into the book. 
Sara Thompson

Embedded Librarianship in the LMS Survey Results - 1 views

instruction LMS libraries info-literacy
started by Sara Thompson on 19 Mar 12 no follow-up yet
  • Sara Thompson
    #1 Sara Thompson on 19 Mar 12
     

    Some interesting comments from a listserv message...




    ---------- Forwarded message ----------
    From: Burke, John J. <burkejj@muohio.edu>
    Date: Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 9:03 AM
    Subject: [lita-l] Embedded Librarianship in the LMS Survey Results
    To: "Tumbleson, Beth E. Ms." <tumbleb@muohio.edu>





    Please pardon repeated posts. 


     


    From the middle of September to the middle of October 2011, we conducted a web-based survey on embedded librarianship in the learning management system (LMS) or virtual learning environment (VLE).  The questions used in the survey are available here.  Respondents were solicited from 12 electronic discussion lists.  We greatly appreciate the time that participants took to complete the survey.


     


    280 librarians responded to the survey.  72% of the respondents are currently embedded with classes in their institutional LMS (8% had been embedded in the past and 6% plan to start an embedded librarian program in the future).  30% of the respondents started their programs three or more years ago (36% started between one and three years ago, and 15% started within the current year). 


     


    Embedded librarians are operating in a number of different LMS environments.  56% use Blackboard, followed by 16% in Moodle, 14% in ANGEL (now owned by Blackboard), and 10% in Desire2Learn.  The most popular elements of library service that are embedded in the courses are:


     


    ·         Links to library databases and other information resources (76%)


    ·         Encouragement to contact the embedded librarian for further reference assistance (76%)


    ·         An individual librarian is assigned to one or more participating courses (73%)


    ·         A library tab or link to the library website appears in the LMS for all courses (72%)


    ·         Tutorials, embedded or linked, in the course (69%)


    ·         Information on research concepts (66%)


     


    Respondents reported how many courses on average an individual librarian is embedded in per semester at their institutions.  The majority (44%) were embedded in five or fewer courses, while 24% participated in between five and 15 courses.  70% of respondents are embedded in online or web-based courses, and nearly the same percentage (69%) are embedded in traditional, face-to-face courses. 


     


    Respondents reported a number of different methods for marketing embedded librarianship.  The most common option was “Word of mouth – faculty encouraging other faculty” (70%).  Email from librarians (65%) won out over marketing through Facebook (11%) or Twitter (6%). 


     


    Assessment of embedded librarian programs is most commonly done through surveys.  48% of respondents used surveys of participating students, and 33% surveyed participating faculty.  Solid percentages of respondents also conduct analyses of student research assignments (24%) and conduct information literacy assessments of students (20%).  Many respondents commented that they hope to increase and diversify their methods of assessing the impact of embedded librarians.


     


    Respondents offered many favorable comments on the service that they have received from faculty and students and also offered their own perspectives, including the following:


    ·         “Our faculty and students love this service.  When asked how he did research, one student said he decided on a topic and then talked with "His Larry" - the embedded librarian.”


    ·         “It changed my relationship with the students. I went from being just a librarian to being an instructor. I already had a good relationship with the prof, but this made it better--and we were able to work together in a different way.”


    ·         “in the one course I have done this, the students were very enthusiastic about being exposed to research methods. I was shocked! They said they wished that they had been forced to learn how to find maps, articles, and data much earlier in their academic careers.”


    ·         “We offer it in place of f2f library instruction so faculty need it to get library support - students often tell us they love having a librarian because it gives them a place and a person to get help with research.”


     


    They also identified several challenges that they face in growing embedded librarianship:


    ·         “Librarians don't want to do it because they're already over-worked with too much newly-added responsibilities (chat, "outreach," etc.). Profs are resistant to having librarians meddle in their course pages. Students are ambivalent about the librarians' presence on their course pages.”


    ·         “resistance to the idea by director; lack of additional support for the service from other librarians/director; other librarians' attitude that ‘this isn't what I was hired to do’”


    ·         “Once librarians ‘prove’ themselves valuable, the floodgates start crumbling with a number of small requests that can (not always) turn into significant instructional collaboration - with students and their faculty.”


    ·         “Spreading the word among faculty and/or convincing them that this can help improve their students' work and research. Some faculty seem reluctent to work with librarians. Defining what research is, at times seems to be another problem. Finally, time -- there's an element of time commitment that can hinder such approach.”


     


    Despite these issues, 49% of the respondents believed that the numbers of courses they are embedded in would grow in the coming year, while 37% believed that the number would stay about the same.  None thought that their programs would cease.


     


    More details from the survey will be available in the forthcoming book Embedding Librarianship in Your Campus’s LMS: A How-To-Do-It Manual, by Beth Tumbleson and John Burke (to be published by Neal-Schuman Publishers in the summer of 2012).  We hope these results are of interest and advance our collective understanding of how embedded librarianship is being practiced and continues to develop in academic libraries.  We would be happy to answer any questions you might have on the survey.


     


    One further note, the authors will be presenting at LOEX this May in Columbus, OH on the question of scalability in embedded librarianship.  Please drop in  if you are planning to attend the conference.


     


    Beth E. Tumbleson, M.A., M.S.


    Assistant Director, Gardner-Harvey Library


    Miami University Middletown


    4200 North University Boulevard


    Middletown, OH  45042-3497


     


    513-727-3232


     


    tumbleb@muohio.edu


    http://www.mid.muohio.edu/library


     


     


    John J. Burke, MSLS                                                      Phone:  (513) 727-3293


    Director, Gardner-Harvey Library                            Email:  burkejj@muohio.edu


    Miami University Middletown                                  Meebo:  infomanjjb


    4200 N. University Blvd.                                                Web:  http://www.users.muohio.edu/burkejj


    Middletown, OH  45042-3458                                     Text your questions to 513-393-9141                       


     






Sara Thompson

Information Literacy: A Neglected Core Competency (EDUCAUSE Quarterly) | EDUCAUSE - 0 views

www.educause.edu/...199382

info-literacy instruction libraries education transliteracy

shared by Sara Thompson on 12 Mar 12 - Cached
  • The findings are troubling. College students think of information seeking as a rote process and tend to use the same small set of information resources no matter what question they have: The primary sources they use for course work are course readings and Google. They rely on professors to be "research coaches" for identifying additional sources. They use Google and Wikipedia for research about everyday life topics. They tend not to use library services that require interacting with librarians.
  • The Association of American Colleges and Universities identified information literacy as one of the essential learning outcomes that prepare students for 21st century challenges.2 The"2010 Horizon Report," a collaboration between the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative and the New Media Consortium, indicated that the need for training in the related digital media literacy is a critical challenge in education for the next five years. The Council for Independent Colleges offers annual workshops for chief academic officers, librarians, and faculty on integrating information literacy at their campuses.3
  • Sara Thompson on 12 Mar 12
     
    Researchers at the Information School at the University of Washington released an important and thought-provoking report in late 2009: "Lessons Learned: How College Students Seek Information in the Digital Age."1 The study confirms and expands on the results of other reports. Its particular value is the size of the population studied, the diversity of institutions represented, and the use of both a survey and follow-up interviews for data collection.
Sara Thompson

Information Technology and Libraries: Vol 31, No 1 (2012) - 1 views

ejournals.bc.edu/...current

articles usability webdesign libraries research to-read

shared by Sara Thompson on 06 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Articles Copyright: Regulation Out of Line with our Digital Reality? PDF Abigail J. McDermott 7-20 Library Use of Web-based Research Guides PDF Jimmy Ghaphery, Erin White 21-31 Investigations into Library Web-Scale Discovery Services PDF Jason Vaughan 32-82 Usability Test Results for a Discovery Tool in an Academic Library PDF Jody Condit Fagan, Meris A. Mandernach, Carl S. Nelson, Jonathan R. Paulo, Grover Saunders
  • Sara Thompson on 06 Mar 12
     
    First open-access e-version issue
Sara Thompson

10 Amazing Uses for Wolfram Alpha - How-To Geek - 0 views

www.howtogeek.com/...amazing-uses-for-wolfram-alpha

search webtools data research statistics

shared by Sara Thompson on 02 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Enter two terms with a vs&nbsp;in between them and you’ll get a comparison. For example, you could compare websites to see the differences in traffic between them.
  • Enter a type of food and Wolfram Alpha will provide you with its nutrition information. You don’t have to stop at one — enter multiple types of food and Wolfram Alpha will compare them for you.
  • Ask where you are and Wolfram will use your IP address to track you down. You can also enter an IP address into the box and Wolfram will track that IP address down and tell you where it is.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Wolfram Alpha can come up with a random password and estimate how long it will take to crack. You can even tweak the rules used to generate the password.
  • Have you been drinking? Wolfram Alpha can estimate whether you can legally drive home. Ask it if you’re drunk and you’ll get a form asking for more information.
  • Enter a name and you can see how common it is, complete with a graph showing you how popular the name has been over time. Enter multiple names and Wolfram will compare how common they are.
  • Type body mass index&nbsp;and Wolfram will present you with another form. After you provide your weight and height, Wolfram Alpha will calculate your BMI and tell you whether you’re within the normal range.
  • Want to find words that begin with a certain letter, end with a certain combination of letters — or both? Just ask Wolfram Alpha in plain English.
Sara Thompson

Findings: How We Will Read: Laura Miller and Maud Newton - 0 views

blog.findings.com/...d-laura-miller-and-maud-newton

books ebooks iPad reading future publishing

shared by Sara Thompson on 01 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Welcome to the second installment of “How We Will Read,” a series exploring the future of reading from the perspectives of publishers, writers, and intellectuals. This week, we talked to Laura Miller and Maud Newton, founders of The Chimerist, a new blog dedicated to exploring the imaginative potential of the iPad.
  • There’s some sort of disgrace to being a reader, or a viewer, or just absorbing some work of culture — it’s this lesser activity, by that rationale. I really disagree with that. I feel like reading and looking at art and all of these things are creative acts in their own way. The experience of a piece of culture being appreciated takes two people.
  • But it is a special kind of canvas. It is a device that enables you to focus on one thing at a time, and I know some people have a real issue with that, that you can’t open another window inside what you’re doing, but I actually find that really refreshing. Even as someone who loves the internet. When I turn to my iPad, I’m looking for a different kind of distraction-free experience, for whatever I’m working on at the time.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • LM: Everything that Maud said. I wrote a piece about enhanced fiction e-books for Salon a couple of weeks ago, and I have one on nonfiction coming up any day now. I have been thinking about the whole narrative issue. I think there is a huge difference between fiction and nonfiction
  • MN: The pleasure of surrender, in fiction, is the exact opposite of interactivity. It’s this sinking in to the pleasure of the story
  • LM: I wrote a piece years before the iPad ever existed, actually, on hypertext fiction for the New York Times Book Review.
  • There’s an app called Once Magazine that’s mostly photograph-based. It is an iPad-specific magazine that reports on various happenings around the world. It’s a very interesting product, and I’ve been really impressed with all the issues so far.
  • MN: I’ve been playing around this app called Meanwhile, which is based on a graphic novel by Jason Shiga produced in 2009 as a really complicated choose-your-own-adventure book, evidently. I became aware of it through my friend Chris Baker, who’s an editor at WIRED. I’ve been playing around with that and enjoying it. The cartoonist is also a mathematician, so there are a lot of complex and frustrating story loops that you can get caught in.
  • I do think this speaks to what Laura was saying about the tension between trying to solve something and trying to experience it.
  • And, the thing about Chopsticks is that some of it is inherent to the iPad’s touchscreen technology, but it could have been a website or something. A lot of things you see on the iPad are different kinds of web art that’s been ported into this new format. And you absorb it in a different way because you’re holding it in your hand, and you’re touching it.
  • And then I became really interested in the size of some of these devices. Somebody in the London Review of Books made the observation that the old cuneiform tablets that the Babylonians and other ancient cultures used were actually about the same size as the iPhone. [Peter Campbell, “At the British Museum.”] So I’m interested in this different way of experiencing story and technology.
  • We’re both a little odd in that we don’t necessarily fetishize the object. I read so voraciously and indiscriminately as a child that my mother was constantly buying books at yard sales and the goodwill, and whatever. And a lot of times they were falling apart — literally. I would just hope the spine wouldn’t completely come off by the end of it. So I have a somewhat utilitarian approach to the object itself, even though I appreciate a beautiful book — and I can of course be swayed to pick up a book because of the way it looks. But I don’t really care what it looks like, once I’m reading it, if I like it.
Sara Thompson

Canvas: Syllabus for Introduction to Research - 0 views

canvas.instructure.com/...syllabus

LMS canvas examples courses libraries

shared by Sara Thompson on 29 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Sara Thompson on 29 Feb 12
     
    A short class on using library services, with just one assignment and a quiz; lots of information in the syllabus. (example using Canvas from Instructure)
Sara Thompson

New interactive teaching techniques | Harvard Magazine Mar-Apr 2012 - 0 views

harvardmagazine.com/...twilight-of-the-lecture

teaching learning education online-learning bcushare future

shared by Sara Thompson on 23 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • The epiphany came via an article in the American Journal of Physics by Arizona State professor David Hestenes. He had devised a very simple test, couched in everyday language, to check students’ understanding of one of the most fundamental concepts of physics—force—and had administered it to thousands of undergraduates in the southwestern United States. Astonishingly, the test showed that their introductory courses had taught them “next to nothing,”
  • “They had a bag of tricks, formulas to apply. But that was solving problems by rote. They floundered on the simple word problems, which demanded a real understanding of the concepts behind the formulas.”
  • More important, a fellow student is more likely to reach them than Professor Mazur—and this is the crux of the method. You’re a student and you’ve only recently learned this, so you still know where you got hung up, because it’s not that long ago that you were hung up on that very same thing. Whereas Professor Mazur got hung up on this point when he was 17, and he no longer remembers how difficult it was back then. He has lost the ability to understand what a beginning learner faces.”
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Reviewing the test of conceptual understanding, Mazur twice tried to explain one of its questions to the class, but the students remained obstinately confused. “Then I did something I had never done in my teaching career,” he recalls. “I said, ‘Why don’t you discuss it with each other?’” Immediately, the lecture hall was abuzz as 150 students started talking to each other in one-on-one conversations about the puzzling question. “It was complete chaos,” says Mazur. “But within three minutes, they had figured it out. That was very surprising to me—I had just spent 10 minutes trying to explain this. But the class said, ‘OK, We’ve got it, let’s move on.’
  • This innovative style of learning grew into “peer instruction” or “interactive learning,”
  • Interactive learning triples students’ gains in knowledge as measured by the kinds of conceptual tests that had once deflated Mazur’s spirits, and by many other assessments as well.
  • Peer-instructed students who’ve actively argued for and explained their understanding of scientific concepts hold onto their knowledge longer.
  • Interactive pedagogy, for example, turns passive, note-taking students into active, de facto teachers who explain their ideas to each other and contend for their points of view.
  • “Now, think of how you became good at it,” he says next. Audience members, supplied with wireless clickers, can choose from several alternatives: trial and error, apprenticeship, lectures, family and friends, practicing. Data from thousands of subjects make “two things stand out,” Mazur says. “The first is that there is a huge spike at practicing—around 60 percent of the people select ‘practicing.’” The other thing is that for many audiences, which often number in the hundreds, “there is absolutely zero percent for lectures. Nobody cites lectures.”
  • The active-learning approach challenges lecturers to re-evaluate what they can accomplish during class that offers the greatest value for students. Mazur cites a quip to the effect that lectures are a way of transferring the instructor’s lecture notes to students’ notebooks without passing through the brains of either.
  • So I began to ask my students to read my lecture notes before class, and then tell me what questions they have [ordinarily, using the course’s website], and when we meet, we discuss those questions.”
  • Students find a neighbor with a different answer and make a case for their own response. Each tries to convince the other. During the ensuing chaos, Mazur circulates through the room, eavesdropping on the conversations. He listens especially to incorrect reasoning, so “I can re-sensitize myself to the difficulties beginning learners face.” After two or three minutes, the students vote again, and typically the percentage of correct answers dramatically improves. Then the cycle repeats.
  • ‘We’ve never done a problem of this kind.’ I tell them, ‘If you had done a problem of this kind, then by definition, this would not be a problem.’ We have to train people to tackle situations they have not encountered before.
  • “It’s not easy. You get a lot of student resistance,” he continues. “You should see some of the vitriolic e-mails I get. The generic complaint is that they have to do all the learning themselves. Rather than lecturing, I’m making them prepare themselves for class—and in class, rather than telling them things, I’m asking them questions. They’d much rather sit there and listen and take notes.
  • In addition to student resistance, there is architectural resistance. “Most classrooms—more like 99.9 percent—on campus are auditoriums,”
Sara Thompson

Unbundling Higher Education | From the Bell Tower - 0 views

lj.libraryjournal.com/...-education-from-the-bell-tower

libraries education online-learning future

shared by Sara Thompson on 23 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • You can still buy albums, but what Jobs and Apple did was completely unbundle how music is sold. We now buy just those songs we prefer from individual artists, and create our own playlists. Now apply that idea to higher education.
  • but for the most part only a single institution can provide the whole bundle. This makes a great deal of sense for accreditation purposes. If your university is accredited, then every course and degree earned from it has the seal of approval. Now a new group of providers are bringing courses to the market, and their goal is to do to higher education what Apple did to music.
  • What they all have in common is unbundling. None offers degrees, and even if they did there’s no accreditation to back them up. In time that barrier will likely be eradicated. Recall that for-profit online universities once faced challenges obtaining accreditation in many states, but it is a thing of the past. Their growth was unstoppable, and in time states and accrediting agencies has to capitulate.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Khan Academy is equally well known, and an Inside Higher Ed news report shares some of the founder’s views about how his open learning website could provide competency-based credentialing as opposed to traditional accreditation.
  • Then there are some new entries into the open course market, such as Udacity, Coursera, Good Semester and Udemy.&nbsp; These newer competitors are starting off with just a few courses, mostly free, but they give the impression that as many different providers become available a strikingly different model of higher education – alt-HE – could emerge.
  • An unbundled system of higher education might require academic librarians to think more entrepreneurially about how they operate.
  • The growing popularity of unbundled higher education also demonstrates there is a huge global audience for these courses; citizens around the world are seeking higher education that is unavailable or too costly in their own community. The forward-thinking traditional universities are looking at how they can capitalize on that market.
  • Sara Thompson on 23 Feb 12
     
    Steven Bell looks at trends in unaccredited education (OER, for-profit) and postulates on what it might mean for academic libraries. 
Sara Thompson

Nobody cares about the library: How digital technology makes the library invisible (and... - 1 views

www.foundhistory.org/...isible-and-visible-to-scholars

libraries usability userstudies training professional

shared by Sara Thompson on 23 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Yet, while it is certainly true that digital technology has made libraries and librarians invisible to scholars in some ways, it is also true, that in some areas, digital technology has made librarians increasingly visible, increasingly important.
  • The invisible library
  • Let me offer three instances where the library should strive for invisibility, three examples of “good” invisibility:
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Search:
  • APIs and 3rd party mashups:
  • Social media:
  • The visible library
  • Focus on special collections
  • Start supporting data-driven research
  • Start supporting new modes of scholarly communication—financially, technically, and institutionally.
  • Here I’d suggest tools and training for database creation, social network analysis, and simple text mining.
  • Sara Thompson on 23 Feb 12
     
    Skip the first bit about the Chuck clip - not important and too long. Scroll forward to the part starting with "The Invisible Library" -- excellent food for thought about the roles we play. 
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