Category Archives: Carleton

Low-Key Cooperative Continual Professional Development

Posted on by
1

A few years ago, my library decided to start a cooperative blog where we’d alert each other to developments in the wider world of librarianship, highlight interesting things we’d learned, and generally help each other keep up. There was enthusiasm, there was drive, there was an interesting blog… and then it died.

As far as I can tell, it died for three reasons: some people weren’t comfortable writing posts for it, people who rely on RSS to read blogs couldn’t deal with a blog that was locked down and therefore had no RSS option (one of those people was me me… no matter how useful, the site was dead to me without RSS), and everyone found they couldn’t get in the habit of clicking that bookmark and logging in to see if anything new had been posted recently.

Meanwhile, each of us continued to keep up with our own corners of the profession, some through email lists, some through professional journals, some through online social networks and blogs, and most through some combination of the three. But we all missed out on the richness that can come from hearing about things that affect our own worlds but originate in another person’s, and we all went back to been less and less aware of what interests and inspires our colleagues.

So this year we’re learning from the mistakes of our past effort and trying again, this time with more flexibility. I’ve set up a portal (still very much in progress) for those of us that really want a “home base” to check. There’s also a bookmarklet that will let people send annotated screenshots of web pages directly to my email account (using ToRead) for people who like that method of marking what they find, a Delicious tag for people who already use Delicious, and a general invitation to email me or pop in and tell me about interesting things that have come up.

So hopefully the collection piece will give people enough options that they don’t have to either conform or not participate. Hopefully there’s at least one option that will fit into each person’s existing habits, and people who are interested in experimenting with new-to-them options can do so without feeling locked into those options for all time.

Meanwhile, I’ll take whatever comes up and write a periodic blog post that glosses the things we’ve found (and behind the scenes, I’m going to see about getting password protected web-pub space on the college network so that I can link from the wide open blog to locked down documents that we aren’t comfortable sharing beyond ourselves). People can either subscribe to this newsletter via RSS or email, depending on their newsletter-reading preferences and workflow. It’ll also get fed into the portal for the “home base” folks. Just to round out our options, we’ll have low-key, face-to-face, brown bag lunch sessions once or twice a term for people who really prefer to discuss rather than read.

So hopefully the dissemination piece will also have enough options that people can work this seamlessly into their existing information-gathering processes.

The biggest challenge, then, will be striking the right balance between having a broad range of topics in each post/newsletter without overwhelming people with too many things that aren’t applicable to them. The idea is to have this be fun and interesting, not irrelevant and overwhelming. Wish me luck!

New Research Guides Went Live!

Posted on by
Reply

This is probably only really exciting for me, but I’m SO EXCITED, so I thought I’d share. Those libguides we were working on over the last few months? Well, they went live today with the start of classes. I give you … [insert drum roll here] … Gould Guides!

Now, as with any transition, some things still need some work (by which I mean nearly all of our “general” guides, which will get updated as time allows, and certainly before Winter term), but the meat of it is done. And making the transition gave us all a wonderful oportunity to think carefully about the purpose of our guides, redesign most of them, spark renewed interest with our faculty, and talk amongst ourselves about each of our tips and tricks for making research guides as useful as possible.

As soon as our MetaLib upgrade happens, we’ll also start peppering these guides with highly customized search boxes… but doing that before the upgrade will just be an exercise in frustration, so we’re holding off. That’s another whole story and set of headaches…

But for now, the message is: Yay! GouldGuides!!! So excited!!!!!

New Trading Cards!

Posted on by
3

We decided to change things up again. For years there were baseball trading cards, then for a couple of years there were anime trading cards, the last two years were classic comic book covers, and now… LP album covers!

Here’s mine:

And here are the rest of the gang’s.

And So They Burned It

Posted on by
4

As I drove in to work this evening the familiar voice of a piano professor here spilled out of the car speakers that generally only bring me voices of people like Steve Inskeep, Michele Norris, Scott Simon and the other body-less NPR friends that follow me through my days. She was explaining that Annea Lockwood composed an avant-garde piece in which a piano is burned. It’s called “Piano Burning” (which strikes me as a not very avant-garde name for such a piece), and tonight they’re performing it on campus.

Arriving on campus, there was the dilapidated piano standing alone in the middle of the Bald Spot, waiting to be burned.


Pianos I’ve known have always lived in warm, homey spaces, or stood in state on a stage. They’ve always felt like they calmly conceal the potential to thrill you tomorrow or next year or when your grandchildren come to visit. They’ve always promised great things for the people who can touch them with care and skill, and for the people those artists know.

This piano, though, is just sitting in the middle of its rectangle of cleared earth in the middle of a wide, blank field, hunched under the gathering clouds, and waiting to be burned. I’ve never seen such a starkly alone piano.

And then they burned it.

Reading Sophomore Portfolios

Posted on by
2

This morning was the first of three that I’ll spend sitting in a room with 35 or so faculty members reading portfolio after portfolio.* Or rather, the faculty read through portfolio after portfolio while I gave up on ever reading that quickly and just got through as many as I could. And now my legs are sore from being tense all morning…. nerves and all. It’s rather intimidating to join a group of faculty and participate as a novice in an activity they do all the time, and to know that every portfolio you read will be read again by one of them, and to wonder how you can possibly say something constructive to a student in a couple of sentences especially when you’re struggling to come up with a cohesive sense of why you think they should pass or not, and to sit there wishing you’d brought a dictionary because spelling just isn’t your thing and there’s no spell-check built into these pens and sheets of paper and you’re critiquing writing, for goodness sake, so the students are likely to be really ticked off if the person evaluating their writing can’t even spell…

And so, my legs are sore.

So why did I volunteer for this? I mean, I’d done it once before. I knew I’d sit there with pen poised over the blue evaluation form and dread having to write to the student who’s academic career will be shaped in some small part by what I write. I knew I’d read at half the speed of my fellow portfolio readers. I knew all these things, but I also knew that if I chickened out, I’d kick myself. This is, after all, one of the only times I get to see the results of the work I do with students. Even more than that, it’s one of the only ways I’d ever get to read enough of my students’ work to get a sense of the patterns of successes and failures in underclassmen’s writing, use of outside sources, and argument structure. It’s also a rare opportunity to learn about faculty standards as they’re applying those standards. And you know, it’s a beautiful thing to watch experts glance over a random sample of writing and pull out patterns of writing indicative of the student’s writing ability over all.

So, as we all sat there norming our reading by evaluating some sample portfolios as a group, I also began the process of recalibrating my expectations for student work at the Sophomore level and listening for clues about what might be expected at the Junior level. For example, I learned again what a difficult project it is for college students to learn what a conclusion really is in a paper, and how to manage it effectively. I saw students learning to negotiate tone and voice and just how, exactly, to manage other people’s words in with your own.

And so I’ll be going back tomorrow and the next day as we plow through another 400 or so portfolios together. I’m not looking forward to the aching legs by the end of the week, but I am looking forward to coming through the experience with a better sense of what students can do by their second year in college. As I said to one of my co-workers, I hate reading the portfolios, but once I’m finished I love having done it.

* More info on the portfolio.