Story time

Recently read David J Brier and Vicky Kaye Lebbin (2004) 'Teaching information literacy using the short story', Reference Services Review, 32/4 pp 383-387.

I like the idea of stories helping us to retain information. I know that in this instance the article is referring to the imagined story or tale, but the point still fits well with one of my many theories of teaching - that a true 'story' or - yes if you want a more technical term - a case study - is better at making the point, and importantly allowing that point to have been retained to become effectively learnt, than I ever could with bullet points on a powerpoint (or just my voice droning on).

Personally I like a visual clue as well as the story. So well-illustrated children's story books were made for me.

Cue the start to an article that might make it beyond my computer:

Communities in the past were built on narrative, or stories. Children were taught about life, about skills, about who they were and how to behave through stories. Narrative engaged the mind, and fuelled the imagination. A story that one person tells one audience, and a different person to the same audience, might be presented differently but can still have the same impact and the same truths contained. Community Learning is all about using different people to tell the same story, to teach the same principles but from different viewpoints...........

More on space

Prompted by the discussion lunch today at MML (and a need to get a presentation on the go...) I went back to my survey results from a number of academics who have recently used our new IT training suite in the Library.


Key comment:

It seems important that the room, and what goes on in it, is part of the well-established learning environment that is the faculty library. By placing electronic resources alongside material texts, the former gain a kind of visibility and status. The proximity between electronic and print resources is not only very convenient for students and class leaders - it reflects a fact of 21c. research.

If I have academics promoting our space like this - then I'm happy.

Transformative? or merely informative?

An excellent topic for the journal discussion lunch tomorrow - Is the physical library redundant in the 21st Century?

From a related blog posting I enjoyed the following

"It is not the quantity of information available nor the ease at which it can be got that libraries should focus on, but rather the quality of the educational experience offered"

On a day when I debated the pitfalls of having too much to do and think about (and just how debilitating that was!) with a colleague in the queue at Marks and Spencers at lunchtime I wonder whether 'quality' is what we as librarians all too often fail at. We talk about, plan for, and in general aim to improve our stats - whether they are circulation or footfall or website/VLE/facebook/ebook hits. The SCONUL HE annual return encourages exactly this. But are we TRANSFORMING lives? Perhaps this sounds a bit over the top? Martin Lewis is keen to point out that numbers using the Sheffield Information Commons are increasing. I've been heard to say - oh great, footfall, book borrowing etc is up. But - I don't think that this is quite the point! The point is that the service we offer should be transformative, it should be all about impact. If the physical space of the library IS important then we should be seeing comments from students that say exactly that; we should be able to correlate degree results with use of the services - and so on. Perhaps....

I am in complete agreement with Mary Beard - on the need for time to slow down, to allow the thought processes to operate in another space with the resulting serendipitous spark of illumination on a particular matter. I shan't advocate that libraries work for me in the way they do for Mary, but I can vouch for the bike ride, the walk into town and back at lunchtime, the downtime effect of shelving a trolley load of books. Anything really that removes me from my desk and my normal place of work and gets me out into fresh air or just doing something that allows my brain to quietly jog along in the background. These are frequently my own eureka moments - and the only problem that I have is the inability to recall what they were when I get back to the desk! I'm still working on a solution......

Looking forward to the discussion.

Teaching Librarian

Having completed 4 hours of teaching to groups of varying sizes on Friday, of which only two of the sessions were repeat sessions, I thought a little reflection would not go amiss. This last week I have personally taught 3 grad sessions, given a lecture, and taught a guesstimate of 4 or 5 fresher sessions. Three other members of staff have, between them, done another 10-15 hours of teaching time, let alone the 30 odd induction tours of the Faculty Library in the previous week. This next week I am contemplating a mere 3 hours of teaching with 5 in the following week.

This year we have had fresher students going to their DoSs 'clamouring' for practical sessions. It could be that they were intrigued by the new IT Training suite with the computers that emerge out of the woodwork (so to speak) and then quietly disappear at the end of a session. It could be that our Induction Tours were so good that they were desperate to come back for more! We've had Part II's asking at the desk for more 'Quickstart for dissertation' sessions. I've had somewhere in the region of 40 grads signing up for Endnote courses. We've also had three academics booking our IT training suite for training their MPhil courses - no teaching for us but good ol' library promotion going on! It's fun. It's tiring. It's fascinating.

I'm looking forward to the evaluation results to see what we can change and tweak and do better next time. I'm looking forward to the Teaching for Librarians session in January run by Chris Powis so that we can think of different ways of communicating information to our users. I'm looking forward to our patrons becoming used to the fact that we are always offering options for helping them make better use of the resources and services that we have on offer.

If we can create a climate where students in Cambridge actively ask for and want to attend training from library staff.................then I will be a happy person.

oops - nearly forgot the wordle

.....................and we're done

The good, the bad or the ugly?

Thing 23

Conclu'sion n. 1. termination; final result; decision; in ~, lastly, to conclude. 2. judgement reached by reasoning.........




Whilst concluding, or reaching final thoughts means the end of 23 Things, I fully expect that this is not the end of interest in Web 2.0. for myself or for others around the University. Two summers ago, following a June Library staff development day when Phil Bradley gave a presentation to library staff, a number of us met together a few weeks later (at the English Faculty because that is where a lot of good things happen!) for an afternoon of playing with Web 2.0 tools to see what might work in our libraries and what might not. You could say that was the beginning........, 23 Things another stage......, and I am sure that in a year or two's time there will be other collaborative ventures in Cambridge exploring these tools and others. We should collectively pat ourselves on the back - I think that overall we are more collaboratively minded, we are successful at grass-roots initiatives, and we are generally a pro-active bunch of librarians! Combine that with our wonderful 'boutique' , user-focused libraries and, even better, students who are filmed saying they love the libraries, and I think that should sell the Cambridge model nicely.

Taking part in 23 Things has been something of a roller coaster ride. A sense of being over-whelmed with work and 'other things' at certain points nearly scuppered the whole programme as far as I was concerned. It all took more hours than envisaged and I spent a lot of 'home time' as opposed to 'work time' for doing the Things. Some people might not liked to have done this; but although this is a slight red herring, I wonder whether we can now afford not to think about some element of professional development taking place outside the workplace in this day and age? In any case, I'm delighted that I persevered to the end, and feel pleased that I'm at this final point of evaluation. I liked the style of learning - bite-sized for the most part - and mostly easy to work through with options for doing more. There are some things that I would definitely like a 'proper' training session on especially when I think that they might be useful, but haven't got the time to figure out how to apply them. (Group libraries and Zotero spring to mind!)

So.....addressing the questions:

Which Things did you find most useful, or thought-provoking, or good? What do I say 'yes!' to?

1. By definition anything that I currently use regularly is good (kinda figures!) - Facebook, Google Calendar, Doodle, Zotero, Flickr, Slideshare, RSS feeds, youtube
   
2. I like Google docs, especially the registration form tool. SO easy to use and it amazed my Computer Officer with its simplicity.
3. Am still keen to make use of LibraryThing for new accessions like CSL are doing but I just haven't the time to spend on it now.
   
4. I am a convert to blogs - I started out with my blog called Head above the Parapet because it felt exactly like that. I'm not sure that I will continue blogging personally although I would like to think I would, partly because I am thinking of doing Chartership revalidation and this tool seems to be good for reflection. Along the way however, a blog - which we use for Library News - seemed the way forward for some parts of our website. I was especially inspired by the History Faculty Library in Oxford. So, the 'Learning Hub' has been born.
5. Reflection - in general. It's good for the soul.....
   

Which didn't you find useful at all and is downright ugly? What do I say 'no' to?

1. Podcasting. - see my blog on that to explain this one.
   

Which might I look at again, not bad enough to relinquish altogether? What do I say 'maybe' to?

1. LinkedIn,
   
2. Delicious
3. Dare I say Twitter? I fell into and out of Twitter in the course of 23 Things and have actually stopped checking it now - though I suspect I will be back there in time if only because I am essentially a pretty nosy person and I want to see what is going on. But I really do wonder how people have time to distract themselves all day with Twitter. Maybe they don't get the number of emails that I do, which are distracting enough - or maybe their jobs are more monotonous than mine! I rarely do anything like the same type of job every day and suspect that I would find it difficult to process any more information than I currently do. Having said all that I do use facebook for distraction!!
   

Which have you persisted with?

I persisted with Google docs - to the extent that I used them as part of the Committee preparation but not again until I was able to apply the registration form for the film launch - and then all of a sudden I have found myself using more of the docs. Especially useful when working between home and the library and remote access to the work server is rather painful.

I played a lot with ppts in slideshare until I discovered that I couldn't get animations and transitions to work in ppts loaded to slideshare. I've discovered iSpring though and it's very simple and effective.

What about Web 2.0 and social media?

There are clear distinctions about how Web 2.0 tools get used. There are those that have been put to use in developing services to libraries and for the benefits of users, and there are those that are for the benefit of our personal skills improvement or for workflow improvement in our libraries. I am drawing some of them to our users' attention this October and as usual I will run Zotero/Endnote sessions to introduce students to this information management tool.

How do you think they are shaping library services?

Library services should be shaped by the users of that service and not by the tools. If the tools dictate what we do, then shame on us.

Thing 22 nearly there - it must be wikis

I haven't got anything against wikis in general. I find Wikipedia is great - all sorts of wonderful information - and of course we know that it might not be true as we are librarians and we know that sort of stuff. We tend to think that the 'yoof' don't. But, I'm not so sure. I think they know they are not 'supposed' to use it/reference it and still use it knowing full well that they need to verify their information. Child no. 2 has just finished her degree and confesses to countless times where she started her work with Wikipedia. I'm fine with that. After all I use Google a lot.

In the bumff about wikis it says that 'Librarians are currently using wikis for a variety of purposes: to produce staff manuals and subject guides, to manage projects, and as Intranets'. I thought that I honestly did not think that a wiki would add anything really extraordinarily good to our work flows for this type of activy. The only thing that struck me was that I could have used it for brainstorming for the current IT Training room project where those involved were rarely able to physically get together - myself, Computer Officer, EMBS electrical, EMBS maintenance, AV people, Furniture people, IT people. Most of the rest of the time we have a shared drive for documents, manuals, subject guides etc etc.

I have an account with PBwiki and have added information on to the TeachMeet wiki. Apart from that 'I'm good' - as they say over the pond.