Target Marketing Library Instruction

This is a flyer that I made for the Art & Design department here at Texas State. I am the Art & Design subject librarian and wanted a way to let the students know that I am available for personal art & design research help. I also wanted to use a format and images that would catch their eye. After finding the type of images/emotions I wanted in my art books and then finding them on ARTstor to download, I put them in the comic template. I made it using a program called Comic Life which you can try with a free trial and then if you like it you can buy it pretty cheap, like twenty bucks. I will be hanging the flyers around the art building and a few here in the library. We will see how it goes. Next semester I may tweek it a bit depending on the kind of feedback I get from this one. And I think we will try this approach for different subject areas to make students and faculty more aware of our services.

Information Literacy Across the Curriculum Workshop part 2

I attended the second part of the "Information Literacy Across the Curriculum", workshop which is given jointly by the TLT group and ACRL this last Tuesday. Michelle Millet was the presenter for this installment of the series. I had attended a previous presentation she did in person, which was very informative. This presentation was also very helpful because it had a slightly different focus and I picked up several good ideas.

Michelle's institution has chosen Information Literacy as their "Quality Enhancement Plan" which is required for their reaccreditation. Her perspective is very interesting because this level of support and widespread integration is not always so easy to achieve and I personally think it is a wonderful example of how to do things, and I find her recommendations to be very enlightening and practical as well.

Some of the major ideas/points/interesting bits that I came away with:

• Her description of the marketing and publicity. She mentioned t-shirts and also a Youtube video
• She continued to stress assessment as a very important step
• It interested me very much to hear that they had an annotated bibliography assignment as part the First Year Experience program. It sounded like they had the students prepare it over the summer.
• She mentioned Graduate students which interested me as well, I believe she also mentioned workshops for those students.
• It sounded like they had quite alot of ways of reaching faculty--such as annual workshops, course stipends, travel grants, and a standing Information Literacy committee.

And of course her final recommendations, which were again to stress assessment, to find and learn from other programs, to host discussion, and to be persistent.

A Sad Day

If you are reading this, wherever you are in libraryland, I would ask you to pause for a moment in remembrance of Devin Zimmerman. If you have been a regular reader of this blog, you might have remembered that Devin was the Information Literacy Coordinator here at Alkek from January to August 2007. Tragically he was shot and killed while on duty yesterday at his workplace in San Antonio. Although I only worked with him for a relatively short time, he made a lasting impression on me and the people here at Alkek.

I think Devin was one of those special people who bring a light with them in the darkness and illuminate everyone around them, a catalyst that causes those around to grow and change. I have seen the tributes on his facebook page, and I know that he made a difference to many people. For me myself he was a mentor, and in a friendly competitive way spurred me onto new things. As I sit here in the office that he once occupied I remember and am grateful for his encouragement and advice even after he left to work at Alamo Community College.

By way of a memorial I'd like to link to his youtube videos and his very first blog post. He had also posted some podcasts but sadly the files did not survive. It may seem an odd memorial but I think although it may only reveal some of Devin's unforgettable character in a small way, at least they are his own words.

Interesting Online workshop

I just attended the first part of a really interesting online workshop called "Information Literacy Across the Curriculum", which was given jointly by the TLT group and ACRL. There will be two other meetings, on the 14th and the 21st of this month. There will be three other presenters, each to present a case study of their experiences in their institutions. Today's session was given by Lisa Hinchliffe, who is the Coordinator for Information Literacy Services and Instruction at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

One of the first things I noticed as she was speaking was the size and diversity of their program, or rather as she described it as " multiple IL programs." I may have heard this incorrectly but I thought she said that they had from 20-50 staff teaching classes.* If it got that right, it sounds quite vast.

* Note: Special thanks to Lisa H. who graciously sent me the correct numbers via her comment below:
70-100 librarians
20-30 graduate assistants (library school students)
35-45 library units in 27 different campus buildings. (Wow. That *is* vast.)

It was very interesting though to me because although our university is not as large as UIUC, we still are pretty decently sized (29,125 students according to our website) and I could see how some of the things she spoke about could be adapted in our situation.
My ears perked up at several outreach/marketing activities that she mentioned; the idea of having a person dressed as a book and roaming around campus so students could take pictures with him is very endearing. And apparently they have iconic frisbees they give away as well. That is one area that I would like to learn more about--ways to advertise and get the world out in very creative approaches.

I found the interrelated relationship between their IL program and Reference to be also very intriguing, mostly because what she described corresponded to some observations that I had made about our own situation. She described consultations (I thought she meant individual type research consultations) , workshops (in particular for graduate students), tours in several different languages (Chinese, French, etc), and also very heavy IM use. For us IM usage has been steadily increasing although it isn't exactly "heavy." I have noticed though that our individual consultations are increasing and I wonder if this is something that other folks are seeing.

Some other things that stuck out in my mind (and notes):

• A graduate level IL credit course--I'd always heard of IL credit courses for undergraduates.
• She mentioned getting assessment plans for programs on campus--sounds interesting

I may be adding more as time permits, but for the most part felt that this was a very useful presentation.

An Interesting Find (Unity, a game development tool)

One of my colleagues who is the main architect/builder of our Second life campus passed me this link to Unity, a game development tool. Of course I am probably the last person in the world to learn about this program. I haven't had a chance to really look into it, but it seems really cool. It's web-based, and the website says you can make MMOs and Virtual Worlds with it. It appears that you have to download their player first to actually use it. I had fun playing with their little demo.

I like the fact that they have lots of tutorials and documentation. I am mostly a user of Second Life, but one of the things that is so hard at first for people new to Second life, and a potential headache, is the fact that you must create an account and download the software, etc. If this game maker is easy to use, well, oh the fun we could have!

I am deeply curious if anybody else has tried this game maker for their Information Literacy games. This is something that has interested me for a very long time, but I have only recently had time to really begin to research. The 2008 ALA TechSource Gaming, Learning, and Librarians Symposium is coming up in November, and I'd dearly like to go.

Back from Hiatus

And I am terribly sorry for the delay. It's been a bit of an interesting summer. I went to Hungary and the Czech Republic for vacation most of July, and then it was pretty much straight to Denver at the beginning of August for the Reference Renaissance conference. (I think i will save some of the presentations and our presentation for a later post).

Assessment

But there are lots of interesting and cool things to catch up on. Over the summer, we continued to work on our Assessment efforts for our second-semester Freshman English course. Since we only had two classes it gave us a chance to test the Synchroneyes quiz/test tool a little more comfortably. In the contest of Synchroneyes vs. Survey Monkey, my admittedly non-scientific preference at this time is for Survey Monkey, only because when I used Synchroneyes I had to print out every single survey.

I wasn't able to make it to the LOEX of the West conference, but my colleagues did, and they told me about a great presentation from University of Texas Libraries(which is about 30 minutes away up I-35) called "Assessing out Assessment: Failures and Successes at UT-Austin." I think it is proving to be helpful for understanding and planning our assessment effort, and I wanted to give a shout-out to AJ Johnson, who let me ask questions about their presentation/project and generally let me pick his brain.

And, along other lines, we are going to experiment with using "clickers" to do assessment. We have used them in some of our classes as part of our active learning activities. With that in mind I have been reading this article: Clicking your way to library instruction assessment.

Embedding Librarians in TRACS (SAKAI)

I know this is already something that has been happening in other places, but this semester we are going to make an effort to "embed" ourselves in the course software. We have done some things in the past, with a few classes, mostly building wiki pages using the course management software wiki function (as distinct from our wiki) But we'd like to try more classes and do more, like embed a meebo widget in the class site. So stay tuned for that.

I think I will stop for now. :)

Back to LOEX of the West 2008....

The next session I went to was called a Pecha Kucha. It was three different presenters with about10 minutes each on the same topic and was called A MUVing Experience: Three Perspectives on the Curricular Integration of Second Life. The presenters were Colleen Carmean - Director, Information Technology Services, Arizona State University, Sandra Ley - Instruction Librarian, Arizona State University, and Lisa Kammerlocher - Librarian, Arizona State University. All of the presenters discussed their experience as instructors using Second Life to teach their courses. Most of the students responses to the experience were positive.

The next day I went to a great session given by Jerremie Clyde- Liaison Librarian, University of Calgary and Chris Thomas - Liaison Librarian,University of Calgary entitled Benevolent Blue: Playing with Information Literacy. This was the best session I went to because it actually included a virtual game that the presenters are creating that we the audience actively played on the computers. The game addressed information literacy in a very political theme with violence and adventure.

The interactivity and then short survey of our experience really made this session worthwhile and interesting because, remember, I was looking for ways to make my classes engaging. Here I found it but it still wasn't an easy answer. It wasn't just the game they had made, it was the combination of their case study type presentation, along with the hands on experience and the short survey questions they gave us that made the whole session more energetic. We were all participating and exchanging information, audience and presenters. Now that is a class. Their project is still in beta and they did ask us to email them if we wished to be included in the future in the testing before the game goes public.

I really went the opposite way with the next session I chose because it was a discussion of information literacy competencies. I went from hands-on with game to discussion of the information literacy theory. I felt like I was playing the game where someone hides something and they tell you when you are hot or cool as you get closer to what you are looking for. I was cool to almost cold.

Cold was a good way to be in the hot dessert city of Las Vegas. I took a tour of the beautiful LIED Library to see what a ultra-modern library has to offer. It didn't disappoint me with its automated retrieval (space saving) system and comfort in the interior of wood and steel. I loved this library and actually took a lot of pictures to help me with our library's space assessment team that I am a member of.

I never found the perfect game to use in my instruction sessions so I will just have to make up my own game. But I guess now I know what parts of a session make it engaging for me and that games do make you think, which is better than watching someone blather on sans active participation. Yeah for games, LOEX of the West and for Vegas!