Monthly Archives: June 2008

Relaxing

By IRIS Posted on by


I’m well and truly on vacation and have been all week. And, for the first time ever, I’m taking two weeks of vacation in a row. That’s right. I was on vacation this week, and I’ll also be on vacation next week. Hard to fathom, I know, but it’s true.

It’s not a vacation where I’m doing anything special. I’m mostly sitting on the couch, reading (I have a supply of fiction and a whole stack of New Yorker magazines to read), petting the kitty, watching episodes of Rosemary & Thyme on DVD, and generally being a slug. Today I even took a nap (not one of my talents, and not something I’d planned on doing, but something that ended up being really nice). And you know what? After a full work week spent not working, I’m starting to feel a little bit more like myself again! Maybe this means that next week I’ll have my brains back enough to start my Japanese lessons back up.

Oh! And I’m really excited to learn that we’ll be getting clickers for our library classroom! I’ll have to read up on Knowledge Surveys and see if I can combine what I’ve learned about clicker pedagogy with that kind of assessment. The ideas are bubbling!

Which reminds me, I still need to write about Knowledge Surveys, which I heard discussed very compellingly at the NITLE Moodle meeting I went to earlier this month. Hmmm…. and that reminds me that I still haven’t written much about Moodle and the crossroads I think it’s reached, and there are one or two other topics I haven’t covered yet from last month’s conferences. Maybe next week will be a week of blogging as well as Japanese lessons. Maybe. If I’m not too busy being a slug.

(Image credit: “Hammock” by Listen Missy shared under Creative Commons)

Another Reason Our Legacy Systems Must Evolve or Die

By IRIS Posted on by

In a not-so-recent New Yorker that I hadn’t yet read, I ran across this sentence about Google’s emerging advertising markets:

Two vital markets are television, which is ‘easily attainable,’ and mobile phones, which are ‘more personable’ and more ‘targetable’ than most advertising. (Auletta 36)

This resonated with something that John Riedl (keynote speaker extraodinaire) said at the Midwest Library Technology Conference about mobile computing. He said that because screen real estate is so precious in the mobile computing environment, the challenge is to make sure that the content that shows up on those tiny screens is exactly what you care about, exactly what you wanted to see. There’s just no room for false hits.

Up until very recently, I haven’t been too worried about mobile computing in the library world. It’s been a little bleeding edge for me, a little too easily turned into a superficial discussion of Those Millennials and Their Gadgets. But in the last couple year and a half or two, mobile computing has entered the mainstream in my little world. My friends of all ages have cool little devices that keep them online all the time no matter where they are. Our college IT department is pushing the iPhone as the next Palm Pilot. In the near future, even I, in my iPhone-less state, may have a little handheld wireless device.

Meanwhile, the library catalog will fail miserably at any request for targeted responses to one or two-word queries (nobody wants to type long search strings into a mobile device, not even the most dedicated advanced searcher). So here’s the rub: I want it all ways. I want a robust system that’ll let me, my comps students, and my faculty advanced-search the heck out of it. But I want a smart enough and light enough version that’ll work well for mobile searching. Unfortunately, right now I have a system that does neither of these things well, but doesn’t do the second thing at all.

Auletta, Ken. “The Search Party: Google Squares Off with Capitol Hill Critics.” New Yorker. (January 14th, 2008): 30-37. (online version here)

Seeing Patterns in Student Work

By IRIS Posted on by

One of the aspects of expertise that fascinates me the most is the experts’ ability to look at a whole range of information and see useful patterns.* While reading the sophomore writing portfolios this week, I was constantly impressed by the way expert readers could, with incredible speed, read a student’s portfolio and say, “Well, this student has trouble framing quotations.” It was true, but it was a pattern that a novice reader might miss amidst all the details. The student had in various places also misused commas, or strung together paragraphs that didn’t seem entirely related, or had weak introductory sentences, or split infinitives, or had difficulty with tense or number agreement within sentences, or been uncomfortable choosing between primary pronouns (I/you/he/one… so many options!). And yet, an expert reader could take a broader view and say that over the course of all the papers submitted, this student had trouble framing quotations.

Musing on the facility with which these expert readers culled through details to find patterns, I realized that over the course of three years, I’ve begun to develop a similar capacity when faced with the student research experience. I could read a set of research papers and see that the student didn’t understand the concept of authoritative sources, or the conventions of scholarly disagreement, or how to deal with more than one or two secondary sources. And I know my colleagues and I often observe trends in the questions we get from students in specific classes. In fact, we often use these observations when we plan repeat support for a class or when we’re strategizing with the professors about how best to help the next batch of students.

Now I wish even more than I did before that I had time to comb back through all the notes I keep on all the appointments I have with students. I bet my instruction would improve dramatically if I had a better sense of the patterns of student confusion I see. And I bet the faculty I work with would appreciate it if I could communicate these trends to them in a less haphazard way than I am currently.

* For more on how experts differ from novices, see the chapter called “How Experts Differ from Novices” in How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School. Eds. John D. Bransford, Ann L. Brown and Rodney R. Cocking. Washington D.C.: National Academy Press, 1999. 31-50.

Most Likely Poisoned

By IRIS Posted on by

As some of you know, I’m allergic to eggs. I’m even allergic to the smell of cooking eggs. I’m allergic to stuff you cook in a pan that you’ve previously cooked eggs in. This is why I never accept breakfast invitations at conferences.

Well, this morning there were eggs EVERYWHERE at the portfolio reading. They had scrambled eggs available all morning. They served egg salad for lunch. They also served chicken salad for lunch, which is loaded with egg-y mayonnaise. So yeah, I’m pretty much doomed. Here come four days of dyslexia, headaches, and mood swings. Yippee.

Anniversary

By IRIS Posted on by

I forgot about this yesterday, but that was my 3-year anniversary here at Carleton. By no coincidence whatsoever, it was also the 3-year anniversary of the day I started considering myself a librarian.

When I originally took this job, I secretly promised myself I could have another job after I’d stayed here for four years. I was terrified and lonely and felt under-qualified, but I knew I could stick almost anything out for four years. After all, college had been scary, but I’d made it through. Grad school had been scary, but four years later I’d finished a couple degrees. My secret plans have been foiled, though, because the people here are so great and the stuff I get to do here is so amazing that I’ve decided four years isn’t nearly enough. So if they’ll have me, I’d like to stay for a few more, please.