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Month: January 2008

Class: Citation as a Lens for Interdesciplinarity

Published by Iris on Tuesday, January 8th, 2008

By popular request from my twitterish friends, here is the basic gist of the class I taught today.

Context:
One of the amazing professors here (I have to say that, she’s reading this :P ) teaches a class which, being interdisciplinary and being a lower level course, often ends up introducing students to the world of interdisciplinarity. So this professor and I have decided to prime the students’ brains early in the term for two concepts: there are different disciplines out there and they each have their own conventions for good reason, and you’ll have to follow one of these conventions soon, so here are the basics.

Class (PPT):

  • Citation has many goals, and avoiding plagiarism is only one of these goals (and frankly, the least interesting of the bunch, in my opinion… see my opinion). These goals have to do with the fact that writing is enherently communicative, and communication happens primarily within a community of inquiry. As you read throughout this term, see if you can determine a little bit about each authors’ relationship to research and to his/her community of inquiry simply based on the citations included in each piece of writing. Citation…
    • Shows respect for your community
    • Communicates clearly within a community (like jargon)
    • Reveals what kinds of evidence are most important to a community
    • Builds context for your argument
    • Gives credit where credit is due
  • There are three interlinked rules that all citation styles strive for:
    • Rule of Least Confusion (get your readers to exactly what you want them to see)
    • Rule of Brevity (Accomplish the first rule as succinctly as possible)
    • Rule of Readability (I know… doesn’t seem like any style accomplishes this one)
  • EXERCISE: Working in groups, look at these three journal articles and build your own citation style that fulfills the three rules of citation and that reflects the values of the “community of inquiry” that is your class. Report back what you decided to include, exclude, and why.
  • Comparing MLA, APA, and Chicago (show citation to the same work, three different ways)
    • MLA is designed specifically for the “softer” humanities, such as languages, literature, and the like. This style foregrounds authors and their works and chooses to mention but not highlight dates, since most of these disciplines don’t do as much time-sensitive research (works of literature rarely become “obsolete”). The important evidence in this field is often the words that particular authors wrote, so the author and title are the two most salient pieces of information.
    • APA highlights authors and dates. It serves many of the harder sciences, and information in these disciplines can quickly become obsolete. What would you think if a person gave you computer instructions based on a manual from 1992? Most of the information in that book would be out of date and therefore not useable.
    • Chicago Manual of Style is somewhere in between MLA and APA. It is especially useful for interdisciplinary work, which is as likely to use time-sensitive material as it is to use material that is not time-sensitive. It foregrounds the author and the work, but it acknowledges that the date and the publication itself may also be important to the author’s argument. Footnotes bring this information to the reader’s attention at the point when the author quotes or makes reference to another author. The bibliography provides a summary of all the works cited in the document, allowing the reader to go out and easily find all the author’s sources.
  • Basic Elements of Chicago, and examples of citations for the primary kinds of works (this is the nitty-gritty details bit)

So there you have it. That’s what I was up to today. Since I wasn’t actually teaching the mechanics of Chicago style and was concentrating on how to read its citations and what the citations could tell you about how useful the works themselves would be, I didn’t spend long on the nitty gritty bits. In all, this was a 40-minute session.

Since we’re talking citation, I should mention that I out-n-out stole many of my views on citation as a function of disciplinary priorities from one of my esteemed co-workers. But I was really excited to see how that kind of thinking could help me move this class toward a richer understanding of interdisciplinarity.

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Strategically Planning for Library Technology

Published by Iris on Friday, January 4th, 2008

Here’s a not-so-hypothetical question for you: What key technologies or kinds of technological trends should go into a three-year strategic plan for library technology?

Just brainstorming here, some of these are in the works and some of them may not be appropriate… but hey, I’m brainstorming.

  • Get a new catalog (boy, do I ever wish!)
  • Better platform for research guides (more interactive, less massive-block-of-text-ish, etc)
  • Clickers for classrooms?
  • Better space for assistive technology in the library
  • Evaluate space in terms of increased laptop usage and make printing from laptops possible
  • What about making the library mobile-computing friendlier?
  • Do we know what technology will be needed as we plan and implement a data service?
  • Implement federated search
  • Continue with the on-going project of evaluating/tweaking the library site
  • Continue to explore ways of integrating library services into Moodle
  • Continue to collaborate with the IT department as much as possible
  • Create better space for the manipulation/creation of multi-media projects
  • Here’s a vague one: keep thinking about how to make stuff easier to get to online.
  • I don’t remember where we are on our digitization initiatives, but I’m sure that’ll be part of this.
  • Continue to look for ways to put help at point of need…. that’s another vague one.

I don’t know what other departments will want or need, but luckily, I’m not the only one thinking of stuff to add to this plan.

I enjoy taking time to think about this kind of thing, but at the same time it feels weird. I already feel like if I want to try something, I can, and if our department needs to use or implement new technology, we get the support we need. So I guess I need to stop thinking of it as a “here’s what we wish we could do” document and more of a “here’s what we’re likely to want to try” document.

But I know I haven’t thought of everything. In fact, I feel a little less kept-up on emerging trends right now than I have before because I had to put other priorities ahead of that one last term. So what am I missing?

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Wishing to Track Students Better

Published by Iris on Friday, January 4th, 2008

I really wish there were an easy way to keep track of which students I’d taught in classroom situations, and what I’d taught them. With a population of just under 2000, it’s entirely possible that I’ll start seeing some of them over and over now that I’m getting invited to meet with more classes.

Now, I very rarely teach the same library session twice simply because each session is (hopefully) tailored to the needs of a specific assignment or set of assignments, and even if the same assignment comes up in future years there’s usually a new resource or something that keeps me on my toes. But there are a couple of components of these sessions that I find myself teaching over and over again in different contexts: the MLA International Bibliography, for example, or getting your hands on the actual text of an article, or the disciplinary importance and conventions of citation. Wouldn’t it be nice if I had some way of knowing if most of the students in an upcoming class had already practiced with one or more of these components and would want me to approach them in new and interesting ways? Even if I still had to cover the MLA IB because they needed something new or because a few of the students hadn’t worked with it before, wouldn’t it be nice if I knew to change things up enough that it would keep the interest of the veterans while still feeding the newbies what they needed?

I keep notes about this kind of thing for my individual appointments, and it really helps when this year’s seniors come to me for help with their senior theses and I can look back over the sessions I’ve had with them in past years to figure out what they might be expected to know already, and where I can push them to grow a little more in their research prowess.

Alas, I just can’t think of a good way to keep on top of this for the classroom situations, though. I mean, I could create a database that allowed me to describe the components of a class and link that class to all it’s enrolled students. Filtering by class could help me see what I’d included for that course number over the years. Filtering by student would show me if I’d seen individuals more than once, and what they’d supposedly learned from me. But honestly, I don’t think I’d be able to keep up with it.

Has anyone else done anything like this? How?

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It Happened… At Long Last

Published by Iris on Thursday, January 3rd, 2008

I’ve tried Google Reader several times in the last year. I kept hearing other librarians falling head over heals in love with it and wondering what I’d missed. But each time there was something that fundamentally disrupted my feed reading flow. I couldn’t have labels I wanted (it didn’t like having multiple labels having the same beginning word for a while there), I couldn’t rearrange the order of the feeds and simply could not function with that draconian an adherence to alphabetical order… lots of little things.

But over the past few days, Bloglines hung up on me one too many times and I thought I’d test out Google Reader again. After all, with the world of perpetual beta you never know if the problems that irked you 2 months ago will have been solved. And lo and behold! They had been. I imported my feed collection with no problems, rearranged my feeds to my heart’s content, and began reading away.

The only thing I don’t like is that it forces me to see what other friends in my gmail address book are reading. It’s not that I don’t like these people or their feeds. It’s that I don’t have the time, and I don’t have the will power NOT to click on a link that’s bold with new items. That new-item bold is hardwired into me as something that needs to be cleaned up NOW.

But I think I’ll stick it out this time. Hopefully in the next few months they’ll add a preference that kills this particular version of water torture.

Update: I cannot for the life of me figure out the “All Items” link in Google Reader. It routinely has more items listed than the sum of all my new items below it. In fact, I just clicked on that link and read all the items in it… the screen is now blank of new items, and it STILL says I have 13 new items. I don’t! If I do, I can’t see them. Grumble.

Update 2: After a few days of watching the phantom “new items” number climb and climb for no known reason, they suddenly disappeared this morning in the middle of my blog reading. Yay! Now it works as I want it to work (except for the annoying Friends Shared Items thing… but I’ll deal).

Last Update, I promise: So it appears that I get to cycle through weirdness and normalcy. The phantom “new items” number grows and grows each day until one day it realizes that it’s lying and clears itself. It stays clear for a day or two, and then grows again. I’ve decided to find this amusing.

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