using zotero to manage citations

I am probably the last person in the world to find out about zotero, but I have downloaded it and find it extremely cool. It's an extension for firefox, and you can use it to keep citation information and other extremely useful things.......like adding notes, taking a picture of the page, even adding tags to citations. This is a list of databases/sites that work with zotero, and they don't have all possible citation styles yet. Here's also a nice youtube tutorial from zoteron which explains it pretty well.

Summer update

ah, the summer. We've been actually fairly busy with classes, and also a new instruction librarian has joined our team as well, Charles Allan. The ALA annual conference is coming soon--several librarians will be attending. Hopefully that will generate even more interesting new ideas to post about. :)

I am curious how many people use adobe premiere/premiere elements either alone or in combination with screencasting software like camtasia or captivate for tutorials or other projects. There's been a flurry of seminars and other writing on screencasting, but most of the time people seem to be focusing on the screen capture aspect of it all. We have been producing and showing a short library video for our first year student orientation for nearly 4 years, in various different incarnations---first in Premiere 5, then Captivate, then Camtasia, and now it appears possibly a combination of both. If anybody knows of a good program that can handle both screen captures and edit video well (I know Camtasia can handle video, but it doesn't really seem to be as easy to edit video in Camtasia than in Premiere Elements) I would be definitely interested to know.

Another interesting development would be to offer a workshop in basic Second Life skills in addition to our other workshops. I would venture that especially if and when students begin to attend classes in SL, that this would probably become necessary.

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.

Library Tutorials

We're creating tutorials to help people use our resources and have recently added them to our website:

http://www.library.txstate.edu/ref/bi/libtutorials.htm

For now, we're also linking them out to YouTube, where we're getting quite a few hits (thanks to those of you who have viewed or linked to our tutorials there). We've learned quite a bit from what other libraries are doing and will continue to experiment, revise, and hopefully teach a few people how to do research along the way.

Devin

Second Life Best Practices in Education 2007

Last Friday I attended a session of the Second Life Best Practices in Education conference in world. I had just sat my avatar down 5 minutes before the start time when the dreaded mandatory log-off in 5 minutes message came through. Once that little hiccup was resolved, and my avatar was re-seated, the presentation started. It was very interesting in that the speaker's voice was piped through as well, adding to the unearthly experience. It was also my first time seeing a whiteboard in action, and I was taking notes. One little quirk was the fact that it took a couple of seconds to for each new screen to rez. It wasn't terribly bad, just a bit odd--I wonder how a real student would react to that.

The gist of the session was profiling a professor's experiences with her three class sections using SL assignments and also meeting them in world with online office hours. Her classes are more like systems engineering and such, but I can see where it could go with information literacy classes. I had wanted to "go" to the action learning session, but the timing was weird.

I also had a chance to check out the poster sessions and also the exhibitors, which was pretty cool. Still haven't gone through my virtual swag though.

So far I can see a few ways of adding IL into a virtual class.

• have a librarian embedded in with a class taking place in SL (and the librarian would embed library resources as much as possible)
• have a "game" like that one sim (I can't remember the name just now) that is set up like myst (scattered clues and very self directed discovery type game)
  
• have real life IL sessions in a second life classroom.
  

I've read in other places that people are discussing what IL means in second life--it strikes me that this ties in with maybe expanding IL instruction in libraries to include teaching students how to use Second Life (and other software).

More Multicultural Transformation........and Second life

This last Wednesday our head of Reference Dr. Clara Ogbaa did another session for the Multicultural Curriculum Transformation faculty members, and yours truly did a short segment on wiki editing. Dr. Ogbaa presented on advanced searching--who knew that you could do so much with google? (see the wiki pages here). Something very interesting came up--some of the faculty were interested in the wiki features in TRACS, which is our institution's course management system. Which leads us to wonder if perhaps migrating part of our wiki pages into a TRACS site wiki might be a good vector for integrating information literacy into courses. (one of the glories of TRACS is that it has a wiki feature built into course sites)

Today there's a Second Life conference in Best Practices in Education in world. I will probably attend a few sessions. I am curious how this will work out, as this is my first SL conference. I've been to various meetings before in large groups, which is an interesting time keeping up with what's getting said.......at least there's a transcript to go over later.

2007 Multicultural Curriculum Transformation Institute

Yesterday our Reference department head Dr. Clara Ogbaa presented "Multicultural Resources: Research Strategies" to faculty attending the Multicultural Curriculum Transformation Institute. It may sound like a run-of-the-mill presentation, but if you examine the presentation slides, it is not the usual library presentation at all.

The other interesting aspect is the fact that we've created wiki pages (see wiki pages) for each faculty member's class, and participating faculty are allowed to post and edit in our wiki.