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Sara Thompson

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

  • 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:
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  • 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.
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    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. 
Sara Thompson

EBSCOhost Integration Toolkit Support Center - 1 views

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    EBSCO search widgets to embed on websites or guides -- step-by-step instructions
Sara Thompson

DNLTechTeam - YouTube - 1 views

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    Videos about using various Library equipment, including iPad projection and other tools
Sara Thompson

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

  • 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.
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  • 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.
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    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
Mark Lindner

New: "Key Issues for e-Resource Collection Development: A Guide for Libraries... - 0 views

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    Electronic resources represent an increasingly important component of the collection- building activities of libraries. "Electronic resources" refer to those materials that require computer access, whether through a personal computer, mainframe, or handheld mobile device. They may either be accessed remotely via the Internet or locally.
fleschnerj

Watch | Everything Is a Remix - 0 views

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    An ambitious four-part documentary on the history and cultural significance of sampling and collaborative creation. The latest installment covers the three basic elements of creativity and explores how innovations emerge.
Sara Thompson

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

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    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

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

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    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

CARL Conference 2012, San Diego, California - 0 views

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    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

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

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    Incredible list of resources about teaching -- course planning, classroom management, learning activities, assessment and more. Wealth of information here. 
Sara Thompson

Microsoft launches no holds barred anti-Google campaign [video] - 0 views

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    "Googlighting Stranger" ... to the tune of the theme song from the old Moonlighting TV show.  Love that. Also love that Microsoft feels this threatened. 
Sara Thompson

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

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    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

Unbundling Higher Education | From the Bell Tower - 0 views

  • 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.
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  • 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.  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.
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    Steven Bell looks at trends in unaccredited education (OER, for-profit) and postulates on what it might mean for academic libraries. 
Sara Thompson

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

  • 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.”
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  • 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,”
Deb Robertson

Balancing Act: How College Students Manage Technology While in the Library during Crun... - 0 views

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    Our major findings are as follows: 1. During one of the busiest times of the academic year, the students we interviewed were mainly using different IT devices to stay in touch with their friends while they were in the campus library. In the hour before we interviewed them, 81% of the students in our sample had checked for new messages (e.g., email, Facebook, IMs, texts). 2. At the same time, many of the same respondents who said they had checked for messages had also prepared assignments for submission (60%), studied and reviewed materials for class (52%), and satisfied personal curiosity with a computer search (e.g., sports score, news, gossip) (45%). 3. Despite the pressing need to complete assignments at crunch time, few respondents reported having used the full range of library resources and/or services during the previous hour. Many more respondents said they had used library equipment (39%) such as computers and printers than anything else, including scholarly research databases (11%), library books (9%), face-to-face reference (5%), and/or online reference (2%). 4. Overall, we found most respondents (85%) could be classified as "light" technology users. These were students who used "only" one or two IT devices primarily in support of coursework and, to a lesser extent, communication. The most frequent combination (40%) of devices being used was a cell phone (including smart phones) with a personally owned laptop computer while they were in the library. In stark contrast, only 8% of the sample could be classified as "heavy" technology users. 5. For over half the sample, a personally owned laptop (58%) was the primary-most essential-device in use at the time of the interview. A smaller percentage of respondents (35%) were using a library desktop computer. 6. More than any other combination of applications, respondents had both a Web browser and a word processing program open at the same time (47%) while they were in the library. 7. Despi
fleschnerj

From the Frying Pan Into the Fire (and Back Again): Adventures in Subject-Based, Credit... - 0 views

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    Here's a fun one about a credit instruction class.
fleschnerj

Behind an Online Giant's Accreditation Bid Is a Small Brick-and-Mortar Campus - Governm... - 0 views

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    And now for your daily dose of scary...
Deb Robertson

The Higher Education Compliance Alliance - 0 views

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    The Higher Education Compliance Alliance was created to provide the higher education community with a centralized repository of information and resources for compliance with federal laws and regulations.
fleschnerj

Could Many Universities Follow Borders Bookstores Into Oblivion? - 0 views

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    I actually disagree with a few of their arguments, but thought it was worth a share.
Mark Lindner

British Library - Press and Policy Centre - Free access to 65,000 19th century books fo... - 0 views

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    Free access to 65,000 19th century books for HE users [maybe only in the UK]
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