Interesting article on assessment

Our Assistant Vice President (library director) forwarded me this article recently: What Are They Learning? Pre- and Post-Assessment Surveys for Libr 1100, Introduction to Library Research" by Jon Robert Hufford. It's from College and Research Libraries preprint articles page, which incidentally has a feed.

It's an article about the experience of a group of Texas Tech librarians who administered a pre- and post-test to their library research course. Although our situation is a bit different in several significant ways, I found it very helpful, and very much wish I might have had a chance to read it before we got started in our assessment efforts.

• Elapsed time--from what I understand, they tested their students at the beginning and at the end of a semester. In our assessment, we pre- and post-test one shot classes at the beginning and the end of class. Although ours is different, its very illuminating to compare results of a semester-long class as opposed to a 50 minute session.


• There is a useful literature review in the beginning, though elsewhere the author laments the fact that there are not many articles written in the literature on this particular subject, and near the end of the article encourages other people to contribute with their experiences.
  

They included an analysis of their questions and the responses, which was also highly useful.

An idea for Google notebook, and catching up

I was noodling around and rediscovered Google Notebook again. I had noticed it last year (judging from the date of the little snippet I had saved) and most probably forgot about it. It seems to have been around for a while, and probably people are already using it. It just occured to me as I looked at it again that maybe it might be a good tool to use for an assignment for evaluating websites. Students could be assigned several websites, and they could evaluate each assigned site and make notes in their notebook, and then share them with the class. The only hitch is that the students would need a Google account. I did a quick search to see if anybody else is doing something like this--I found this blog post written by Laura Pressley of Wake Forest University referencing a presentation by Jennie Hunt. I am curious how that class/assignment worked out. I am sure to find more if I look deeper, but in the meantime I am thinking it might be an interesting activity to develop, possibly.

I am considering to test it as an activity with an ESL undergraduate class, that is normally a two part class, and only about 10 students.

Interim/Summer is always a very busy time, because although there are less students, we are preparing projects for upcoming semesters and finishing up old projects. Our team has gone through two semesters of assessing freshman year English composition classes, and so currently we are revising the survey and looking to investigate using either our class management software TRACS or Synchroneyes as possible alternatives to using Survey Monkey. I know there have been gallons of ink spilled on assessment already, and really all I venture to add to this vast knowledge is the observation that reading about how other people do assessment is helpful but there is no better learning experience than putting a project into practice. I think i will save a detailed description for a separate post.

We are also setting up several workshops/trainings for staff which should be interesting. One will be on using our our SMARTBoard, Synchroneyes (classroom control software), and Senteo (clickers). Another will be a Web 2.0 presentation for staff. So, looking up to be a busy May.

Interesting new tool--Glogster

I was churning through the web looking for something new, and I stumbled on something I had never seen before--Glogster. It's a social poster site. Poster, as in graphics, and multimedia. I just signed up, and haven't made anything yet, but I can totally see using these as part of my teaching repetoire. Apparently it is supposed to be very easy to make them, even if one does not know HTML.

Now, I am probably the last person in the universe to have seen this website, but nevertheless I was so interested I just had to blog it.

I can immediately think of a few ways to use this in IL instruction:

• an assignment for students in IL classes (have students make one)
  
• a quick and cool way to make posters to illustrate concepts for each class I teach.
  

I also think it would be great as well for those who are very visual in their learning styles.

I was particularly intrigued by Cybrarian's Glogs. I think i feel inspired to go make one for next week's classes.

Interesting ACRL poster session

I got a couple of notices on several list-servs on a really cool looking virtual poster session. It's called Eye to I: Visual Literacy Meets Information Literacy and it's got lots of fabulous information on a subject which seems to be very much of the moment. Since so much of our culture's communication is conducted in visual media, it's surprising to me that this aspect of IL integration isn't mentioned more. There's alot to look at on this site--I am still plowing through the site's online posters.

SL buzz meeting

So, I went to my first SL meeting in-world last week. Apart from the disorienting feeling of coming into a meeting cold and having to catch up, there were some unique hazards that don't normally come up during a meeting--like having your avatar slump as if asleep (I've never fallen asleep in a meeting) and also interesting animal avatars lurking nearby and other avatars flying around. I was merely "listening" and so read the conversation intently, although about half of it was somewhat incomprehensible for me.

It's a pretty mindblowing experience though. Information literacy got mentioned fleetingly, though from what I remember it was in the context of finding information on Second Life, in world. (that is how I understood it at least--I don't have the transcript in front of me.) Which, to this mind at least, is a huge jump.

More interesting reading

Just saw an interesting new book mentioned on Sheila Webber's InfoLit blog called A New Literacies Sampler which is (oooh!) readable online. I haven't had a chance yet to plow through but a few chapters looked very interesting and probably pretty apropos to what we are doing......
wireless classrooms, gaming, ..............academic blogging.