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Category: Libraries and Librarians

An ebook plan by Steve Lawson and Iris Jastram

Published by Iris on Wednesday, March 9th, 2011

Steve Lawson and I were trying to come to grips with what an actual workable plan for ebooks in libraries might look like (something that doesn’t involve arbitrary and ridiculously low check-out limits, a la HarperCollins). And we hatched a cunning plan, which we’ve published over at Steve’s blog: An ebook plan by Iris Jastram and Steve Lawson

Here’s my favorite line, and the one that I think captures the entire plan in a nutshell (and which Steve wrote):

We believe that the publisher should publish, and the library should own, lend, and preserve.

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Teaching poorly

Published by Iris on Thursday, March 3rd, 2011

My last two classes of this term were… challenging, and I did a pretty poor job of rising to the challenges. One of them was just a case of me not having my head on very straight, talking more than I intended, and forgetting to mention things I’d meant to emphasize. What’s more, it’s the first time I’ve had a group of students just flatly refused to participate, no matter how much prodding they got from me and their professor, in a group activity that I’ve had several classes do before with good success. But in the end the students all left class with at least one scholarly article and at least one newspaper article for their papers, and most of them hadn’t done the kinds of things we were doing in class before, so it wasn’t useless, but it certainly wasn’t great.

The other class was very different. The professor couldn’t be there and had left me a long list of potentially useful things her students would need to know, but when I got there and asked them where they were with their paper topics, the conversation turned into a long brainstorming session where they helped each other come up with the required material culture artifacts that they’d need to incorporate into their papers. Only one of them needed the kinds of primary sources we have in the library, as it turns out. We did talk a bit about other primary and secondary sources that might be useful to them, and we did talk about how the strategies for finding out about and laying hands on primary sources is often fundamentally different from the strategies for secondary sources, but for the most part it was just the 13 of us thinking about how to illustrate their arguments with things like ear buds, album covers, magazines, and cigarette packs. And then I got up and showed them 10 minutes worth of “And here’s OAIster and the American Periodicals Series and ProQuest Historical Newspapers… just in case you ever need them.” I think they absolutely needed that time to think through their sources, but I also think that there’s very little that I could contribute to that experience.

In the first class, the overarching message was “there’s lots of stuff available,” which is ok, but maybe not the single most helpful message for first year students. In the second class the overarching message was “the library doesn’t have the sources you need” which felt odder. Both are often true, but neither are my favorite messages to convey.

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Teaching for my own amusement

Published by Iris on Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011

Last week I had a lot of fun joining Jason, Anna, and Rachel on Adventures in Library Instruction. I’d had a bit of a rough day, but talking with three people as enthusiastic and interesting as these three really turned things around. They’re awesome!

Since then, I’ve been thinking about part of that conversation where I realized I really only gave half of an answer to a really good question. I was talking about using both Google Scholar and disciplinary databases together (expanding on my post about why undergraduates need those clunky databases anyway) and Rachel asked how I justify teaching some of this stuff when the assignment is really VERY basic: find 3 articles. I think there could be a lot of reasons, some better than others, but I think the main one for me is that I teach for my own amusement.

I don’t mean that I teach things that aren’t useful (well, I probably do, but not on purpose) but that I really think it’s ok to geek out a little in the classroom. That was one of the key things I learned at ACRL Immersion: being authentic is more important than being perfect, and students engage more with people who are engaged. If I’m actually interested in what I’m teaching, the classroom experience has got to be better than if I’m bored. And I am NOT interested in database interfaces. I’m just not. But boy can I ever geek out over citation and the way that it reveals how disciplines construct knowledge, and boy can I get excited about the ways people build up enough knowledge about a topic to do intelligent searches for new information on that topic.

I can’t possibly expect my students to care about something I don’t care about. But I can hope that if I care a lot they’ll at least be interested enough to wonder why I care. And if they’re nodding and smiling and laughing with (ok, maybe at) me, they’re more engaged than if they’re asleep, and maybe at that point I have a hope of pulling them along on the coat-tails of my own enthusiasm into the nitty-gritty of research.

Barring that, at least I won’t have been bored.

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Adventures in Library Instruction – Episode 23 (MP3)

Posts referenced in the podcast:

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Breaking up with best practices; Hooking up with learning goals

Published by Iris on Friday, February 18th, 2011

Last weekend* I heard two sentences that sparked one of those great “ah hah!” moments. A writing center director said, “We’ve moved away from best practices and toward learning goals. This helps us prioritize and it helps us evaluate whether we’re accomplishing what we wanted to accomplish.”

I’ve talked before about how learning goals keep me focused and keep me from burning out on instruction, but it occurred to me in what felt like new says how the framework of learning goals could solve a lot of problems for me in ways that their less actionable cousins (like “best practices” or “standards” or even phrases like “user centered”) couldn’t.

Here’s what I mean in three examples:

  • In my own teaching, there are usually 15 or 20 Very Important things that I wish I could teach my students in any given session. Using learning goals helps me prioritize from among the very important things, feel less guilty about letting some very important things fall by the wayside, remember to think about what they’re learning rather than what I’m teaching, and feel connected to the broader, more interesting issues of information literacy.
  • In selecting a discovery tool, there are long, long lists of features and functions that user-centered design relies on. No interface has each specific feature, so how do we choose? How do we prioritize the list of very important features? What if we developed learning goals for our discovery system? What if these goals were something like being able to learn the differences between kinds of sources, be able to pick out important terms for the topic and field, and see where to go from here (different searches, different databases, different people). Maybe one system doesn’t have faceting but does have something else that reveals terms and directions. Maybe our usability tests could be more a long the lines of assessment of what the students learned by interacting with the system. Maybe this would all help us prioritize from the long list of important things to choose a system that functions in service of the mission of our library.
  • In first year seminars (the context in which the original phrase came up), focusing on programmatic learning goals could help prioritize from the long list of things it’d be nice if all first year students knew. Maybe it would help guard against creating impossibly long check lists of things students should be exposed to, and therefore guard against treating first year seminars as massive inoculations that transform high school students into college students. Maybe it would also grant the teaching faculty the freedom to explore interesting topics in interesting ways while having similar learning outcomes.

Or maybe I’m just creating my own buzz phrase. Or maybe everyone else already knew this.

But for me, at my institution, expanding this framework beyond my direct teaching or my department’s strategic planning is helping me make those hard decisions that crop up all over the place and to make them with more confidence.

* Last weekend I attended a workshop called Teaching and Maintaining Mulitdisciplinary First-Year Seminar Programs hosted at the gorgeous Pomona College campus. This is the second blog post drawing on my experiences there.

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