Using Google like a librarian: a model workshop for teaching faculty [Panel]
This session was so popular that the original room was packed with people waiting outside, and we ended up moving to a fairly large auditorium. The presenter, from Grand Valley St. University, as well as a co-presenter from UT-Austin who recorded a video since she not able to attend the conference, had several interesting tips. She described a workshop that she held for her university's faculty and staff, teaching how to "Google like a librarian."
Admitting that Google and libraries are usually mutually exclusive, the presenter argued that we are better off taking advantage of Google, rather than trying to ignore its existence:
1. At the core, "Your students are using it. Your faculty are using it. You are using it. But how do we all use it?" The reality is that Googling has become a fundamental skill and many students/faculty are not using it to its potential or are using it incorrectly. Acc. to a recent study, 83% of college students start their search with a search engine. Better to help them use it smartly than to fruitlessly try to convince them not to use it at all.
2. Take advantage of this as an opportunity to use a widely-known, widely-available tool to teach the basics of IL. Show that it's possible to come up with credible information, so long as the results are evaluated effectively. Point out that Google's relevancy rankings are driven by advertising dollars and thus, must be evaluated for potential bias. Might also use Google to show how easily instructors can detect plagiarism.
3. Remind people that librarians are search experts. Turn the misconception that we hate Google on it's head. We can show them the best ways to use the tools, so that their research starts with tips that they learned from the library; also breaks down the barrier between librarians and students. Google is common ground for us all.
The workshop with faculty covered advanced Google searches; Google Scholar; Google Books; and Google Translate. Some of the tips:
- Google shows several key stats on the main search page (without having to link to other sites), if you follow a certain vocab. Ex:
- Population Savannah
- Sunrise Birmingham
- Time London
- To find Web sites similar to a given site, key in: related: www.cnn.com (or www.macy's.com for shopping sites; scad.edu for art colleges
- Google handles Conversions - ex: tablespoons in 2 cups; feet in 10 kilometers
- To make sure flight is on time, enter airline and flight # (e.g. delta 2113)
- unemployment rate [state]
- To find images similar to a given image: option to either paste url with image or upload image (kinda scary...)
- For Google Scholar, option to see which results are available in a local library (I don't think this works for our lib?)
- Google Books: can be used to quickly search public domain books for specific words. Greatly simplifies textual analysis.
(The demo for this point was very interesting; searched On the Origin of Species, which everyone associates with evolution, for the words evolution, evolving, or evolve. The results: the book only mentions "evolve" and only as the very final world. Weird.)
- Google Books also allows highlighting textual material and clipping and/or translating passages.
- Google Translate: use for passages or entire Web sites
The presenter made a very strong argument for teaching Google strategies, though I still feel uneasy about it, esp. when we try so hard to convince students and faculty to use our databases. Certainly, it is helpful to learn more about how Google works, adding to our bag of tricks for performing more effective Reference searches when our Virtual Library falls short, but not sure that, allo I'd spend time teaching faculty how to bypass our databases. Tricky line.
This session ended a little early, so I raced over to a room with a block of 3 30-minute sessions, and the last one (on Jing!) was just starting. The title:
Libtube Team: Creating Tutorials Together, On a Dime, and In No Time
Jing, as we discovered last Wednesday, is an open source program from Technsmith (also the creators of Camtasia) used to create screen capture videos. The N. Georgia College library uses Jing videos to answer common library questions, allowing students access to them 24/7. They subscribe to Jing Pro ($14.99/year) because the free version has some limitations (more about this later - the free version could be ok for us).
To start the process of creating Jings ,they write scripts so that the narrative behind each video is more or less consistent. They keep the dialogue fairly informal, aiming for a student's perspective, but spelling out the dialogue, along with pause points and reminders to click in the screen (offset in < >brackets), keeps the recording end smooth. Their "actors" are student workers and recent grades (we might consider some of our frequent student visitors and/or select mentors). As a rule of thumb, 1 page of script generally equals 1 minute of recording.
While Jing does not allow inserted pictures or pre-recorded video, you can switch between screens. So, you can put the images in a Powerpoint presentation and then pause the Jing recording and switch from a web browser page to the PP. We probably won't worry about this trick for our first attempt, but nice to know a way around it.
NGCSU posts their videos directly to YouTube, but they can also be saved or posted to Screencast (supplies a link - more about this later).
Using the free version, videos are limited to a max length of 2 minutes. While presenters in this session and others all used the Pro paid subscription that allows 5 minutes, they said 2 minutes is really an ideal length for this type of video, to keep students' attention. The Pro version also allows saving the video as an mp4 file (possibly other file types) that can be stored on an FTP server, rather than the Screencast streaming site that requires viewers to have Shockwave.
The presenter, a very nice guy, offered to help out with any technical issues, and I have his email addy.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Friday, Sept. 23 - 8:30am
Steal this idea: how we redesigned our instruction program by adapting others' ideas [Panel]
Started off the day with this session sharing tips from conferences that the presenters, all from the Univ. of West Georgia, attended within the past year. Conferences included Educause Learning Initiatives, LOEX, and the Library Assessment conference, among others.
Some of the ideas that we might consider:
1. Start instruction sessions with an icebreaker related to the topic at hand, encouraging them to work together to find answers. (The grab-bag addition to our EDU1010 orientation is right on track with this.)
2. Parking Lot Test - a theory proposed by Tom Angelo (Educause) that students will forget material covered in class as soon as they set foot into the parking lot because they are not being "shut down" properly. One way to ease this issue is to solidify the most important points in the last 60-90 seconds of class. Ask students two questions at the end of class:
- One thing you learned?
- How will you use something you learned today in another class?
Then, have them either turn to their neighbor to share, or to the whole class, and each person must have a different response. The presenters added the second q because they found while students seemingly understood the material presented (answered the first q easily) but asked for help with the same topic applied to another assignment.
We tested out this practice at the end of the conference session, forming groups to discuss one thing we would take away from the presentation and apply to our library, and then present it to the rest of the attendees. And, it really did work - I remember several ideas that were covered much better than without this interactive, personalizing component.
3. Problem-based/challenge-based learning: a concept that is increasingly gaining ground lately in the IL literature, defined as helping students build on what they already know. The goal is to focus students on an area relevant to them. See http://www.challengebasedlearning.org for more.
I found this point to be very relevant to us in discussing the research process with students (and the step that I discussed with my group in #2 above). We can have them start with a big idea (e.g. climate change or homelessness) and the narrow it down to a challenge question, something that really interests them. Even if they are not allowed to choose their topic, they can hone it into something that they really care about - some question that really needs to be asked or some problem that they see. In effect, they are more invested in the issue and want to research to fill in the missing pieces.
4. In the area of assessment, the presenters recently put together a 1-page "visual identity" with key stats from their longer annual report (e.g. how many students they serve weekly or monthly, number of instruction sessions per year). They've found it esp. useful to have on hand when their dean asks to documentation to show the administration how the library contributes to campus learning outcomes and justify funding/new positions.
The idea of a 1-page visually-appealing summary struck a chord with me as a way to show off our stats beyond our lovely 1 1/2" binders. I don't have an exact purpose in mind (would the deans be interested in it?) but Chef Osborne asked for a similar one-page "what the library does for the culinard program) recently and would be nice to present as "updates" to the library committee. I'd imagine that if we had something like this on hand, opportunities where we could put it to use would present themselves and perhaps save us from turning away from other projects to come up with a sudden request. I wish that the presenters had shown their "visual identity" to help us generate ideas for our own.
5. One of the attendees proposed an interesting idea to drive home the idea of plagiarism: have students write down their greatest accomplishment on an index card; then collect the index cards, redistribute them randomly, and have the students present the accomplishment as their own. Definitely gets the point across, but maybe too heavy-handed. Think this would work for us?
Started off the day with this session sharing tips from conferences that the presenters, all from the Univ. of West Georgia, attended within the past year. Conferences included Educause Learning Initiatives, LOEX, and the Library Assessment conference, among others.
Some of the ideas that we might consider:
1. Start instruction sessions with an icebreaker related to the topic at hand, encouraging them to work together to find answers. (The grab-bag addition to our EDU1010 orientation is right on track with this.)
2. Parking Lot Test - a theory proposed by Tom Angelo (Educause) that students will forget material covered in class as soon as they set foot into the parking lot because they are not being "shut down" properly. One way to ease this issue is to solidify the most important points in the last 60-90 seconds of class. Ask students two questions at the end of class:
- One thing you learned?
- How will you use something you learned today in another class?
Then, have them either turn to their neighbor to share, or to the whole class, and each person must have a different response. The presenters added the second q because they found while students seemingly understood the material presented (answered the first q easily) but asked for help with the same topic applied to another assignment.
We tested out this practice at the end of the conference session, forming groups to discuss one thing we would take away from the presentation and apply to our library, and then present it to the rest of the attendees. And, it really did work - I remember several ideas that were covered much better than without this interactive, personalizing component.
3. Problem-based/challenge-based learning: a concept that is increasingly gaining ground lately in the IL literature, defined as helping students build on what they already know. The goal is to focus students on an area relevant to them. See http://www.challengebasedlearning.org for more.
I found this point to be very relevant to us in discussing the research process with students (and the step that I discussed with my group in #2 above). We can have them start with a big idea (e.g. climate change or homelessness) and the narrow it down to a challenge question, something that really interests them. Even if they are not allowed to choose their topic, they can hone it into something that they really care about - some question that really needs to be asked or some problem that they see. In effect, they are more invested in the issue and want to research to fill in the missing pieces.
4. In the area of assessment, the presenters recently put together a 1-page "visual identity" with key stats from their longer annual report (e.g. how many students they serve weekly or monthly, number of instruction sessions per year). They've found it esp. useful to have on hand when their dean asks to documentation to show the administration how the library contributes to campus learning outcomes and justify funding/new positions.
The idea of a 1-page visually-appealing summary struck a chord with me as a way to show off our stats beyond our lovely 1 1/2" binders. I don't have an exact purpose in mind (would the deans be interested in it?) but Chef Osborne asked for a similar one-page "what the library does for the culinard program) recently and would be nice to present as "updates" to the library committee. I'd imagine that if we had something like this on hand, opportunities where we could put it to use would present themselves and perhaps save us from turning away from other projects to come up with a sudden request. I wish that the presenters had shown their "visual identity" to help us generate ideas for our own.
5. One of the attendees proposed an interesting idea to drive home the idea of plagiarism: have students write down their greatest accomplishment on an index card; then collect the index cards, redistribute them randomly, and have the students present the accomplishment as their own. Definitely gets the point across, but maybe too heavy-handed. Think this would work for us?
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Thursday, Sept. 22 - First Day
I'm officially in Savannah!My flights went smoothly, and even the shuttle service that I booked on a whim worked out perfectly. The driver warned me about protests across the city today, in response to the Troy Davis story (close to home for Savannah), but I haven't seen anything beyond charming historic homes, Spanish moss, and cobble-stone streets.
My hotel is located in the middle of downtown, a fair distance from the Coastal Georgia Center, where the conference is being held, but could not ask for a more scenic walk. Pulling into the driveway of the hotel, I spotted Paula Dean's restaurant less than a block away! =)
After settling into my room, the rain that began shortly after landing miraculously subsided. I changed into tennis shoes and went for quite a walk around the downtown area on route to registration at the Coastal Center. I crossed through Market Square - strange to recognize several shops and restaurants from my once-a-year All-State Orchestra weekends in Savannah - and walked through several squares (mini-parks).
I ended up looping around a bit (definitely took the scene route), but it helped to map out the layout of the city in my mind, rather than blindly following a GPS. Not that I would have turned down a GPS, but stumbling on a Froyo shop made the extra steps worthwhile... =) At the end of my walk, I crossed the campus of SCAD (Savannah Art of College & Design), and found the conference building at the far end of it. I was relieved to spot the registration table and fellow info specialists walking inside, though it was a treat to see SCAD.
I registered and talked with the volunteers, learned that they're experimenting with QR codes to allow attendees to view the program via smartphones and may not have printed programs at all next year. Then dropped in on the reception (free dinner!). It was more low-key and fewer people than I'd expected, but maybe the majority of attendees are planning to register in the morning. Was still nice to get a better sense of the city and find out exactly where I'm headed tomorrow morning. On my walk back, I stopped by Paula Dean's restaurant and gift shop - desperately in need of a disclaimer warning that the intoxicatingly buttery fried chicken and mac cheese may lead to a food coma.
Long, though very good day - looking forward to really getting into the conference tomorrow. Crossing my fingers that the rain holds out, at least in the morning and evening!
Saturday, September 17, 2011
Preconference intro
Less than a week to go!
I'm thrilled to be attending the GA International Information Literacy Conference in Savannah in just a few short days. In between sessions, I'll post here aboutideas gleaned from presenters and other attendees, thoughts about putting the new ideas into practice in our library, and tidbits about the overall experience in this gorgeous city. More coming soon!
I'm thrilled to be attending the GA International Information Literacy Conference in Savannah in just a few short days. In between sessions, I'll post here aboutideas gleaned from presenters and other attendees, thoughts about putting the new ideas into practice in our library, and tidbits about the overall experience in this gorgeous city. More coming soon!
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