Tag Archives for education
“To be of any value an education should prepare for life’s work.”
“Don’t trust your memory. Make notes. Write down your observations.”
The last year has been a formative one as I approach the end of library school, and though I am by no means a fan of introspective self-indulgent blogging (see the death throes of LiveJournal), I think it is necessary to reflect on just two things that happened to my year that will inform the shape of this blog over the next few months.
The first is the completion of my directed research project, in which I crafted a large paper on social media use in the academic library. Prior to the completion of that paper that was the realm in which I was most focused. Academic libraries, I thought, were the realm of my interest, and that I could continue my investigation past finishing that report. But what I found instead was that my interests focused further, and I felt freed from trying to wrangle such a broad and complex environment. I now find myself moving past the broader academic culture (or even, perhaps, “libraries” in their most general conception) and its adoption of social media, into a realm of web culture that I view as more pressing, less well-defined, and that requires more reflective practice than it currently receives.
This brings me to my involvement with health librarianship. If you have paid close attention to the things I have been putting on Twitter lately, more and more of them have been health related. A budding interest of mine since my first days of library school and the CIHC (and some not so subtle prodding by librarian mentors) have drawn me toward the field at an alarming rate. I had the pleasure of presenting at the Canadian Health Libraries Association conference last June; I started a second job at the UBC Library in Vancouver General hospital in September; I published a paper for health librarians with Dean Giustini and Allan Cho; and by sheer luck I was able to hear one of my favorite tweeps, Dr. Kent Bottles, speak in Minneapolis (my home town) at a health care and social media event during my practicum. I help to maintain some of the fantastic resources at Dean Giustini’s HLWIKI Canada. One day soon, an interview with me on interprofessional health practice and my work at CIHC Library should be put up on our blog.
Rule one of blogging is to define an audience and speak to them. I feel a little like I am shifting or disrupting that audience as I write this, having defined mine as a larger community of librarians interested in web technology generally. But I am one of the only students at my library school who maintains (if irregularly) a professionally-oriented blog (correct me if I’m wrong here, SLAISers), and certainly one of few who have taken an active interest in health libraries. More Osler: “It is always better to do a thing wrong the first time.” If you’re bored you can just quit me, but my hope is that you won’t. I don’t feel I’ve done wrong here, but feel I have to change slightly in order to engage critically with my more focused interests. My hope is that it leads to greater frequency of posting and, ultimately, adds value to the field in some way.
I just completed my term-long directed study project on establishing social media in academic libraries, and am quite pleased with the final result. For the study I compiled as many references I could find to social media, higher education, academic libraries, strategic planning and policy and mashed them all up into a narrative review. The result is a grounded argument for moving from program experimentation to accepted and strategic social media initiatives. If you’re game enough to read it, I decided to toss it up on my Slideshare for download.
Not to spoil the ending, but it’s the best part:
The challenge of adopting social media in the academic library is not new, but only now are librarians and scholars beginning to tackle the advanced management of social medial programming head on. Further research on new learners and information literacy will bolster the evidence needed for librarians to begin shifting institutional culture. Additionally, the sharing of professional practice is always recommended, no matter the channel. However, the onus is now on the librarians, managers and institutions to prepare the way forward for social media in the academic library. Our users are changing along with their information practices, and the time has come to bridge the information gap between library experimentation and established service. We can either meet our users out there to collaborate, or wait endlessly for their return.
I’ve spent the last two weeks researching, thinking, brainstorming, being smart, feeling dumb, all of the normal processes that go along with trying to outline some ideas for an upcoming project. Essentially it has to do with the last two posts that I have written about here, that mainly concern themselves with establishing some points of contact between social media tools and eLearning.
I came very close to coming up with an article outline and talking to a supervisor at my library school to help me along the process of completing such a project when I found that some substantially similar work has been completed by Dr. Leslie Farmer who will be presenting her paper, Library E-Learning Spaces, at this year’s IFLA Conference in Milan. (Jealous? I am.) I highly recommend you read it.
The part of Dr. Farmer’s paper that interests me the most, and I think has the most forward-looking approach is her outlining of “underlying theories and principles.” Check it:
Current literature about learning spaces refer to built education: “architectural embodiments of educational philosophies” (Monahan, 2002); “layout, location and arrangement of space” as it impacts behavior (Strange & Banning, 2002, p. 15); how spaces impact teaching and learning; may apply to the intentional design and use of space as a teaching/learning environment. They also contrast the terms “formal learning” (curriculum-based, which is often classroom-based intentional opportunities for learning) and “informal learning” (serendipitous human interaction that involves learning).
Cannon’s 1988 extensive synthesis of research on the impact of the environment on learning provides a starting point for learning space discussion. Basically, contemporary design of learning spaces builds upon an educational philosophy of active and social learning. This approach starts with the student learner, examines desired outcomes, and plans the physical conditions for an optimum learning environment. Keeping in mind instruction and learning style variances, learning spaces are designed to provide differentiated areas and grouping arrangements. In addition, items within these environments should support modification and customization to reflect users’ interests and needs.
It is my contention that social media and web/library 2.0 tools do much in the way of providing a customizable and intentional learning space when specific tools are chosen for a specific task, and not just cobbled together from a misguided desire to include technology in learning because is new, or educators feel that they “should.” (Along those lines, Josie Fraser‘s project in the UK, Digizen, just posted a nice checklist of sorts for evaluating social networking services which is worth a look.)
There also seems to be a discussion on Twitter and now a blog post going on at the OpenEd conference here in Vancouver about education, content and community, all of which have ties to the concept of intentional learning spaces. As I understand from this conversation, social media tools are already being used in a positive, constructive manner to create digital learning spaces and even to become, in some cases, educational communities that coalesce around a topic and can ideally continue outside of the bounds of any particular course or assigned requirement.
Keeping that in mind, now I believe the challenge lies in exploring what current options exist for creating a functional and customizable social media learning space, and in identifying the salient elements of those learning spaces that are supported by contemporary learning theories identified in work akin to Dr. Farmer’s. Too bad I can’t make it to Milan.
References cited in Dr. Farmer's paper: Cannon, R. (1988). Learning environment. In D. Unwin & R. McAlees (Eds.), Encyclopedia of educational media communications and technology (pp. 342-358). New York: Greenwood Press. Monahan, T. (2002). Flexible space and built pedagogy: Emerging IT embodiments. Inventio, 4(1). Accessed Aug. 13, 2009, from http://www.doit.gmu.edu/inventio/issues/Spring_2002/Monahan_1.html Strange, C., & Banning, H. (2002). Educating by design: Creating campus learning environments that work. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Continuing my line of thought from earlier this week, I got caught up in thinking about social media as an online “learning space.” As such, I looked into the creation of learning spaces and how they affect us as learners. To me, an online classroom is as much of a “space” as a physical one, and that includes WebCT, a wiki, or even a conversation held via replies over Twitter. All of these things create an environment for potential learning, that has its own mores and accepted behavioral structure, and also potential effects for how and what we will be able to learn there.
A few months ago, the Educause Review (man, I love Educause) was on the creation of learning spaces, and Malcolm Brown wrote a wonderful piece that codified the ideas from each article into one review he titled “Inversions.” In it, he describes the “new curriculum” that states that new learning spaces, both virtual and physical, are inverting the traditional classroom and education structure, and allowing students to become their own knowledge creators and “active planners of their own learning.”
This is how I view my own activity on social media like Twitter, Delicious and even Facebook occasionally. By allowing me a learning space that enables not only an active and social learning experience, but also one that blends our own learning with the learning of others as inextricable from the system in which we are involved. That is, because social media mores and accepted behaviors as they pertain to learning are almost always under development (given the shifting nature of the specific tools and young age of social media as a “learning space”), we are also engaging in something that could be considered enactivist, or (hope you’re at a university somewhere) co-emergent.
Social media tools as learning spaces allow not only the inversion of the classroom structure by almost requiring their participants to take responsibility for their learning, but in doing so, they include themselves in a variety of theoretical frameworks of contemporary learning theory. In my opinion, in order to continue to properly justify the utility of social media as education tools and “learning spaces,” especially as they grow in popularity as well as infamy, the framework for understanding our learning within them needs to begin to be developed.
There’s a lot here, I know. Too much. But I’ll leave you with this quote from Brown’s Inversions. He uses the architect’s concept of a “desire path” to illuminate the challenges of effectively creating and sustaining a new learning space. He says, “People create desire paths not just through the built environment; they also create desire paths in their “practices” environment. Faculty and students will do the same in learning spaces: make a beeline back to the old, familiar practices unless they are assisted in undertaking and sustaining the transition from the old practices to the new ones.” It is on us to support the transition.
I came across an article this weekend by Ruth Raynard titled Beyond Social Networking: Building Toward Learning Communities the gist of which is that social media and social networks provide a unique ability to change and enhance online learning for students that targets their famililarity and skills in the online arena. Raynard says:
My discussion here… introduces the idea that social networking is only the beginning of a longer and more complex process of socially constructed learning and ultimately collaboration and knowledge building. That is, if educators only integrate the ability of students to connect and socialize, deeper points of learning will be missed. (emphasis mine)
I have been interested in this line of thinking for a while: how can we utilize and exploit the advantages of online collaboration to improve learning spaces? My own experience has shown that mimicking the traditional classroom structure online (think WebCT: modules as lectures; discussion forums with limited options for sharing resources; an email listserv, perhaps?) ignores and perhaps even actively denies many of the salient benefits of learning in an online space. Raynard recognizes and supports this resources sharing between students as well:
While in more traditional learning environments much of this must be orchestrated and planned by the instructor and organized through the grouping and pairing of students, when using a social networking tool this level of connection can happen immediately.
Using social media to enhance the collaboration and learning in the space can be tricky, however, and it does indeed, as Raynard goes on to caution, take a hands-on effort by an instructor to guide the learning and knowledge creation that takes place. I am sure that all too quickly can course facebook and wiki pages become clotted with webjunk, even (or perhaps especially?) among post-secondary students. Another challenge is increasing student comfort level with sharing their ideas publicly with the class. Raynard suggests that this is not a new instructional challenge, but rather that creating and fostering “learner autonomy” is simply present in all learning spaces and must also be tackled online.
In one conception of social media and online presence that I liked, The 4Cs Social Media Framework, breaks down the levels of collaboration and community building that are noticeable in many social media tools. The third C is community, or “the idea that social media facilitates sustained collaboration around a shared idea, over time and often across space.” That happens to double as a nice definition of a successful online classroom, doesn’t it?
What is lacking in my own knowledge and perhaps the collective writing about this topic now is a recontextualization of learning theory and education psychology that either supports or denies the types of collaboration and content creation that can take place via social media as actively beneficial to the students (or as preferable to more traditional online “classrooms”). I am working on collecting resources that explore or outline these concepts for an upcoming project, and any comments or resources would come greatly appreciated.
A few days ago I came across a wonderful article on Mashable entitled “10 Ways Journalism Schools are teaching social media.” The thought struck me about 30 seconds in: all these concepts should apply to library school, but why aren’t they being pushed and taught in the same way?
I thought since I wasn’t being explicitly instructed on how social media can increase the quality and relevance of the library school curriculum, that I would break them down for us and attempt to explain the urgency with which librarians (and our schools’ faculty) need to be catching up in this area.
1. Promoting Content
Social media tools bring traffic, and they connect with users who aren’t physically able or necessarily willing to come into the library. We already do a lot of passive web advertising on library home pages, and of course some form of virtual reference services is available almost everywhere. We also talk a lot in library school about reaching users, but so often social media doesn’t even make the discussion–being considered by so many as trivial or merely concerned with the banal updates of someone eating a sandwich. But I leave it to you to discern the difference:
Not helpful, I grant you. But:
If you can cut the noise and spend the time constructing a useful and relevant network of users with whom to share your library’s content (and, as is the case here, reviews of your library’s work), the benefit to your users is palpable. It’s time to start discussing how to effectively using social media, instead of assuming everyone on Twitter has nothing more to offer than THE_REAL_SHAQ.
2. Interviewing
The concept of the journalist’s interview perhaps translates most directly to librarianship into the reference transaction. We are already here as I mentioned briefly above. Services like AskAway, here in BC, exist all over North America and being knowledgeable about the social media tools that make a service like that possible is absolutely necessary. Meebo is common and easy enough to figure out on one’s own, perhaps, but what about the many other channels through which reference could take place? Skype, for instance? If one of the challenges of the virtual reference interview is missing out on non-verbal cues from patrons, then what is stopping the library from implementing webcam reference? A unique, personal touch is always good for business.
3. News Gathering and Research
Hello. This seems like a no-brainer, but the challenge I always hear is how can a social media tool like Twitter or Delicious possibly be good for real research? The key to leveraging social media for quality information retrieval is identifying a network of positive and valuable information sharers, not one filled with the noise and minutiae of everyday life. For me, Twitter can be just as powerful an information gathering tool as the most robust RSS feed, but it requires maintenance and diligence to find the right people to listen to. The point is this: diligent and educated use of social media, just as in proprietary database research, can yield fruitful and valuable results.
4. Crowdsourcing
Gaining your users’ perspectives on your initiative can often make or break the success of that program in your library. Social media tools provide unprecedented ways to interact with a large user base with very little effort. Once you have established an online community, be it on Facebook or Twitter or Ning or wherever else your users are, it is not only useful to you, but fun and engaging for them, to be included in the programming process.
5. Publishing with Social Tools
Publishing in the library community is perhaps most often encountered in the academic library community, but this is an applicable point to the field in general as well. As open access publishing gains steam, and the free availability of quality, peer-reviewed articles grows, it will become increasingly important to share these sources via social media, if only to offset that signal-to-noise ratio that we so often lament in our Twitter community. Pushing your openly accessible research out through social media only provides further benefit to those who are following your web presence.
6. Blog and Website Integration
So often I come across library websites that have blogs and even Twitter feeds, but don’t integrate the content into the page thereby forcing users to add another click to see the content. Couple that with yet another two or three to subscribe to the RSS, and we are looking at several unnecessary steps between your patrons and your live content. Learning to integrate social or syndicated content into websites is extremely valuable and there are a number of free tools out there, like feed2js, that will help you to do exactly that. Often times, social media services themselves will even offer pre-made widgets (Facebook and Twitter both do this, for example) that you can place on your home page.
7. Building Community and Rich Content
For me, this point goes beyond the simple signal-to-noise ratio. Community has long been an essential part of the library’s function, and it only follows that your library should be doing everything it can to encourage the growth of its user base, both physical and virtual. And rich content? By providing social media tools and the opportunity for your users to provide commentary and feedback on library programming and services–especially if those comments are acknowledged or even acted upon–is an easy and unbelievably effective way to increase appreciation and support for your organization.
8. Personal Brand
“Students can’t stay in school forever.” Good point, and speaking from a personal perspective, having a portfolio, blog and Twitter feed has done a world of good for me both as a student (it has allowed me to prove my usefulness to the student organizations with which I am involved) and professionally (I have been given many opportunities thus far to provide expertise in web tools to my employers and my research projects). And moving further than that, the ability to create an online identity for anything, be it for yourself or your library, provides a way for your users to easily identify and connect with you. Personalization of your web presence is a great thing, and the increased inclusivity it brings is a great boon to prospective employee or library.
9. Ethics: Remember, You're Still a Journalist Librarian
Lavrusik cautions the journalists to whom he is writing against being perceived as involved with certain organizations (like political parties), and this is a particularly salient point especially considering the “personalization” that I encourage above. There comes a point at which we all have to decide whether we are broadcasting our personal brand, or our professional one, and it is of the utmost importance to encourage all users to access library services, not just those who perceive that they have similar facebook interests.
Encouraging social media use in the library can often feel like pulling teeth because of the intensity of privacy concerns that are at the forefront of many librarian’s thoughts. I represent myself and can be proud of the things that I support on facebook (like Alec Baldwin’s genius on 30 Rock), but I am also aware of what message this sends, and how it might need to change if this were a professional or organizational profile. This is yet another reason why educating library students (or any students!) on responsible and effective social media use is so important. Without an understanding of how to separate personal and professional or public and private identities online, it is far too easy to end up excluding or alienating users that normally could have found a home in your library’s online community. Social media is too exposed, and too exposing, to ignore in our education any longer.
10. Experiment, Experiment, Experiment
This final point is something that I feel is grossly underlooked in our education as librarians today. There are a number of people that I know in library school who are experimenting with social media, but not necessarily due to much encouragement from faculty or practicing librarians. Personal interest can indeed take you far in the world of free social media tools, but having the go-ahead from the people who are making you work and who are the de facto providers of your education is much more appreciated, and, potentially, much more powerful.
So: the tools are out there and so are our future users, but it is time to talk about them, together, meaningfully–and in the mainstream courses that we take, not just relegated to specific electives or as an aside in a reference service lecture–to increase our working knowledge and be able finally to start understanding the benefits of social media in the library.
A big thanks to Vadim Lavrusik and Mashable for the inspiration (and, frankly, the structure) of this post.
I just completed a course entitled Social Software Literacy, which was offered online through Rutgers’s School for Communication, Information and Library Studies. The course was inspired by the normal course of action when educating librarians (or anyone, really) on Web 2.0 tools: “here’s a list of tools that are out there, how to use them, and this is why they may be good or bad in the library.” It was a fun class to take, and ultimately rewarding especially due the blog writing that I did as a large part of the course requirements. The posts below, all categorized as Rutgers SCILS598, is the result of that blog. For more information on the course, you can peruse the wiki that served as our home base throughout the term.
Armed with that base of knowledge, I now want to delve a little deeper into the working of social media in a library context, and am being given that opportunity here on this new blog, as well as through other research-related work with colleagues at UBC, Dean Giustini and Allan Cho. So stay tuned.
Do educational videos stand a chance vs. entertainment videos? Why/Why not?
It is difficult to say what exactly the separation between those two categories is, and therefore it is further complicated to answer this question. Take for instance, TED, a global lecture series that produces high-quality videos of most of their talks available for free online. Perhaps I am a huge nerd, but these videos are both entertaining, and in most cases, astoundingly educational. There is a special skill held by great educators that combines those two facets into all of their learning experiences.
YouTube is an incredibly popular search engine, not only for the funny things you can find, but also apparently for much more educational information. Though the two are often separate, there is no inherent reason that entertaining videos must win out over educational ones. If the educational videos are boring, well, then that seems to me to be a separate issue.
One example of a funny and educational video is the You Suck at Photoshop series. This is a very popular series of tutorials on how to use basic to advanced Photoshop features, but that are presented in such a way as to make them engaging and even have a narrative flow across the different “lessons.”
Given the ease with which anyone can record and upload their own entertainment or educational video, the potential for the two to merge becomes stronger and more realistic every day.
Falling into coming to school in Vancouver for me was primarily motivated first by place, then by price, then by sheer luck I think. I came from the University of Wisconsin, where, as you may know, there is a library school and one that is looked fairly well upon (or so I hear). I had a job, I had friends there, so in many ways it would have been ideal, but I guess I was just ready to leave. Madison is a wonderful community and I secretly hope to make it back one day, but at the time of the decision, I’m sure now that it was the right thing to leave.
You can see the pictures that I uploaded to describe my “ed experience” here. The whole class project group is here. I first entertained the notion of coming to Vancouver for graduate school because I had heard such good things about living in the Pacific Northwest. Then I saw the tuition rates. A calendar year at SLAIS runs me $7,200 CAD. All UBC graduate students are required to maintain a year-round relationship with the school, so that price is for 2 normal semesters, and both summer terms regardless of whether I enroll in classes.
To compare, fall and spring semesters at UW-Madison are $5,600 USD, plus $4,100 for summer (if I chose to enroll). That is a total of $15,300 for the year. More than double! I couldn’t believe it, and started working immediately on my application.
I always have to temper my enthusiasm with the fact that the cost of living in Vancouver is much higher than in the States (though perhaps not New York City, as those of you living there may attest) so that evens things out a bit. But either way, that turned my Pacific living dream into a reality.
So what else can I say about my education experience here? It is a time of political struggle at SLAIS, but that makes it a good time to be around in many ways. We are currently conducting a series of interviews for the school director positions (the candidates are currently confidential) as well as for two open faculty positions. It has been very interesting to be in on the process of selecting a new figurehead for the school… for example, I am personally very interested in technology so it was hard for me to like (though I did end up liking) one candidate whose research interests were of a more humanist bent. I have a background in the Humanities, but I’m not sure that’s where the field of LIS needs to be heading.
Along those lines, I have been talking with several of my peers about desiring more technology oriented classes in the SLAIS curriculum. There are some, though none along the lines of web development and design, which I am personally interested in as it applies to our field. They are offering a social media course next fall which I am happy about, but I’ll have already been in this one. I know there are options outside of SLAIS for courses such as these, but that is difficult and there has been little outreach between departments so far in my experience.
This is not to say I am unhappy here. Overall, my experience in the classes I have taken have all been very positive, and though there is some want for a larger, stable faculty, the base faculty here now is solid and they have all been very warm and welcoming of new students, and, now that I am one, of continuing students as well.
Well. I think I’ve said enough. There is more of course, but I will spare you. If you’re interested in talking more just let me know. I could go on, I am sure.
