New Directions in Information Fluency Conference

I'll be presenting on 4/5/14 at the New Directions in Information Fluency conference at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. If you'll be attending, please consider attending my talk on collaborating with your school's writing center to provide workshops on writing research papers. It's during Concurrent Session III, at 2pm, and part of Panel D on Productive Collaborations (Olin 302).



This co-teaching experiment was actually from when I was still at Stevens, and all the lesson plans, handouts, and exercises were developed in conjunction with (and sometimes solely by) Jennifer McBryan, who is all kinds of awesome. I ended up leaving before we had a chance to get past anecdotal evidence of the program's success, so we never did get to most of the assessment methods mentioned in the presentation.

The most popular workshop we gave revolved around helping students understand the correct way to "use" scholarly sources. As in, how to develop a topic, how to read and understand an academic journal article, and how to responsibly use the content in their own papers. (Those links go to the handouts we used to teach each concept, via Google Docs. Feel free to download, adapt, and use them as you like.)

For the paraphrasing exercise, I would find 3 articles related to the course topic, or a sample research paper topic as outlined by the syllabus, and I'd send the first 2 pages of each of those articles to Jenn, who would then create a paraphrased excerpt from each one. (Here are the sample articles referred to in the above-linked exercise.) She would build some errors into each excerpt, either in the in-text citation, or in the way the writer is using the paraphrase or quote. (We were trying to get them to understand that you can't just pull words from an article, and use them out-of-context. You can't imply that the original author is saying something other than what they were actually trying to say, even if you can make the quote sound like it supports your thesis.)

I have to give all the credit to Jenn for being great at creating these problematic paraphrase excerpts. She was fabulous at making them challenging, but realistic, and I was pleasantly surprised by how adept the students were at catching even subtle misuse of information.

Finally, I've put together a brief reading list of articles discussing Library-Writing Center collaboration:

• Artman, Margaret, Erica Frisicaro-Pawlowski, and Robert Monge. "Not Just One Shot: Extending the Dialogue about Information Literacy in Composition Classes." Composition Studies 38.2 (2010).
• Bronshteyn, Karen, and Rita Baladad. "Perspectives on… Librarians as Writing Instructors: Using Paraphrasing Exercises to Teach Beginning Information Literacy Students." The Journal of Academic Librarianship 32.5 (2006): 533-536.
• Clark, Irene. "Information literacy and the writing center." Computers and Composition 12.2 (1995): 203-209.
• Ferer, Elise. "Working together: library and writing center collaboration." Reference Services Review 40.4 (2012): 543-557.
• Palomino, Norma Estela, and Paula Ferreira Gouveia. "Righting the academic paper: a collaboration between library services and the writing centre in a Canadian academic setting." New Library World 112.3/4 (2011): 131-140.

Is tenure academic?

I really wanted to make the switch to an academic library where the librarians had faculty status, because I'm on a career path that includes publishing and presenting, and I wanted some credit for that. I'm noticing a scary trend though. Because it was not required in my old job, my scholarly projects were organic. If I did something I felt was interesting enough to share, I wrote about it or presented on it. Now that I'm at a school where librarians are faculty members, I see some of them (and this seems to be encouraged) coming up with half-cocked projects that are not of any real use to the library or the school, just so they can write them up and get articles on their CV.

This is just taking librarians away from their regular (and, in my opinion, more important) job of being useful to their local communities. And, if not that much thought is going into their written content, they're not adding much to their professional community either.

When all that debate was happening over whether or not librarians should have faculty status, I was firmly on the side of YES, because I don't want all my scholarly work to be done on my own time, and for nothing. But if we're just going to adopt all the problems of a crumbling tenure system, I'm less sure of where I stand.

Just one more thing...

One thing I forgot to mention in yesterday's post on Harvard's library site... They have a really sleek user feedback system. When you click on the "Tell Us" button at the top of the page, you get the following javascript pop up:

I love that it not only gives you a place to provide feedback, but also tracks and reports on known issues. This saves time for both the user, and the helpdesk, since the helpdesk is used to receiving untold numbers of reports on the same printer being broken, or the wireless being down. This system allows users to see what issues are currently being dealt with before submitting their comment. Users can also comment on or "vote up" issues without having to submit a new ticket.

I did a little snooping around in the code, and it would seem that they are using (and correct me if I'm wrong here) an online helpdesk system called UserVoice. I like not only the functionality of the software, but also the sleek way it integrates into your website, and provides a social aspect to the online helpdesk. Nicely done, all around!

The sociology of Sociology 101 (or "Psych 101" 101)

I just had a really great chat with a professor here, and it got me thinking. I've been pondering the idea of doing my PhD  at some point (I will be finishing my third masters this December, and I'm declaring a moratorium on masters degrees after that.) Having taken many of my classes for this past degree online, I'm fascinated by educational technology, but that doesn't quite cover what I want to research. What I'm *really* interested in is the sociology/psychology of learning behavior in college students.

In the last five years or so, I have gotten really passionate about learning. I want to learn. I need to learn. I take classes, and get degrees, not for a line on my CV, but to learn. This is a sharp about face from my undergraduate years, when skipping classes and bullshitting my way through classes was the norm. I'm not proud of it, and I'm sure my feminist card will be revoked for this, but I even cried my way into a passing grade once. OH THE SHAME!

::ahem:: Aaaaanyway. There came a time in my educational career, when the joy of learning hit me hard, and now, I finally *get* it. But that's not to say that I never have classes where it's just too easy to fall back into old habits. Multiple-choice quizzes, required forum posts with extremely restricted topics that are of no interest to me, slides that the professor has copy-pasted from another source, and formulaic group projects (especially when I can't pick the topic *or* my group members) send me reeling back into "just-get-it-the-fuck-over-with-with-a-passing-grade" mode.

So that's what lead to my discussion with the professor this afternoon. We talked about what factors could seemingly change a bright class into a dull one (time of day, class troublemakers, strict lesson plans created by a third party, unclear performance expectations, banning of technology, etc.)

Educational technology is powerful, but it's not a cure-all. You have to be very pragmatic about what tools you use to teach certain curricula, and you have to understand that it's all a work in progress, always. How your students use technology, and what kinds of technology they use are ever-changing things, and the most important aspect of any class is engaging them. Getting them interested, getting them involved in the learning process, getting past remembering and into *understanding*; that is the ultimate goal, and sometimes you have to sacrifice quantity for quality (that's just a fact of life, right?)

Does anyone know of anyone doing research in this area, or any pertinent books or articles on the topic of psychology in post-secondary education?