Heather Braum

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Posts by Heather Braum

Twitter Daily Digest for 2010-07-31

Jul 31st

Posted by Heather Braum in Twitter

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Overall summary of unCOILed experience

Jul 30th

Posted by Heather Braum in Conferences

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Overall, I was quite thankful I came down for unCOILed. Always good to meet librarians from other areas and states. As continuing education moves more and more toward a distance or online environment, workshops like this one, focusing on distance education for academic librarians,  are really needed for those in continuing education or who do a lot of training.

I’m beginning to learn and see that there are methods that work and methods that don’t work. People have different learning styles, and I think because many times you’re on your own learning, you have make much more effort to address each learning style in your online/virtual instructions. At least in F2F environments, people have the opportunities to do, watch, see, and hear. But online, if one learning style is left out of the approach that person is much more so alienated.

Thanks again to the organizers who put this together. I took notes for the four sessions I attended, and picked up the notes for a fifth. I’ll look through those later and write a separate post at that time (it was on LibGuides). Here’s all my notes to these sessions:

  1. Keynote Panel
  2. A New Look at COIL: Customizing Online Information Literacy
  3. If You Widget It, They Might Use It
  4. Teaching with Chat
  5. LibGuides (coming soon)
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Teaching with Chat

Jul 30th

Posted by Heather Braum in Conferences

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Using the IM reference exchange to teach information literacy skills

Kathryn Plunkett, SOSU

“give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime” -chinese proverb

I took some notes on this session, but I honestly was tired by the time this one rolled around, and had a hard time staying focused by this point. Presenter was great; I just was overloaded by this point. As a result, I’m not posting all my notes here. They really won’t make sense (they barely make sense to me!).

Session Summary

Chat reference can be more than just a way to quickly answer ready reference questions. Especially for distance students. If the process is thought out, information literacy skills can be taught. When answering the questions, keep the ACRL Information Literacy standards in mind.

Some best practices to keep in mind:

For Students

  • Determine what the student already knows.
  • Build search strategies together;
  • aim for student independence;
  • describe each process step by step;
  • ask questions during each step;
  • ask the student to describe what s/he found;
  • define library terms.

For Library Staff

  • Know the importance of regular training.
  • Set policies and procedures.
  • Practice, Practice, Practice.
  • Show you are approachable interested and listening.
  • Use scripts when appropriate.

Market the service was briefly mentioned. Some extra discussion on just needing to go where the students were. More and more, people are not coming into the library; accessing information online. But that doesn’t mean they’re accessing “good” information, as ReadWriteWeb posted today, citing a new study out by Northwestern University.

This session definitely makes me want to think further about how NEKLS has implemented its new online chat service on our newly designed website. A few people have used it and have been well-served, but how do we get more librarians to use it? I know not everyone is comfortable with this interface and email or call us instead. But, for those who this might be helpful at the point they have questions, how do we reach them?

Sidenote: good discussion happened between the three Kansas librarians present at this workshop at the end. Brad Fenwick from Hutchison Community College and Carol Matulka from Pratt Community College and I talked at the end about reaching students who need access to the library’s services after their kids go to bed (after 9pm) or early in the morning (4am-8am). Almost every library is closed at this point, but chat service isn’t available to them at all. What might fill this gap? We talked about maybe about tapping into a worldwide network of librarians who at least could answer basic reference questions and get people started in the right direction. Is anyone aware of a service like this? I’ve heard of it for a text service for librarians, but not for online chat reference.

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If You Widget It: They Might Use It

Jul 30th

Posted by Heather Braum in Conferences

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Building Library Widgets for your Online Learning Platforms

Amanda Lemon, OCCC & Toni Hoberecht, OU-Tulsa

Presentation webpage

From the presenters’ setup, it looked like it would be fun, even though we’d be talking about HTML some. :)

Presenters are at two different institutions; two different learning platforms.

Widgets are small boxes of code that can be embedded in websites.

Explanation of a widget using a bottle of wine, using a Prezi presentation & live props.

  • Bottle of wine–>decanter–>wine glass.
  • Bottle of wine–>winery aerator place in glass–>instantly funnels the wine into the glass. (This is a widget).

Widget::Wine analogy

  • Bottle of wine (rich): this is the resources, the OPAC, the databases
  • Decanter: URL/hyperlinks
  • Glass of Wine: Your End User

The aerator acts as the widget. They get the information direct where they want it in the glass. No separate container needed.

Discussion of More Than Two Hours of Daily TV, Video Game Time Can Cause Attention Problems and Hooked on Gadgets and Paying a Mental Price.

  • The end users aren’t going to just go to a different site.

The default Resources page in the OCCC Angel interface has built-in boxes for Wikipedia and Google. Where’s the library??? It wasn’t there.

They got a presence there first by having a widget built for the library catalog. Ongoing issues getting a database widget placed there.

The widget simplifies the search for the end user.

Creating the Widget

The widget parts:

  • title
  • description of what it does
  • a graphic
  • the search box
  • button;
  • link to the site

Don’t use Word to write the code. It adds “helpful” code. Use notepad, naming the file, “name.html” — using .html allows you to open the file in a web browser.

We’re making a little segmented area to put our widget onto an already existing information.

Div tag = container

At this point the presenters walked the audience through building a widget. Their presentation discussion thread works through some of this process. A couple of notes

  1. Finding the unique searching URL can be complex.
  2. LibraryWebchic.net/mashups can help out.
  3. Presenters suggested to look at others pages & source code to start get possible ideas.

The steps in summary:

  1. Make Widget in Notepad.
  2. Save as HTML file.
  3. Email file to LMS admin.
  4. Admin does the rest.

I really enjoyed this session. Even though I’ve been doing HTML coding for years, off and on, part of being self-taught means you do miss out on certain things. It was good to fill in some of the gaps in my knowledge. Also, watching someone else teach this was quite helpful for seeing other methods to teach the same times of hardcore techie skills to people who aren’t hardcore techies. I definitely learned some strategies. Analogies (like the wine bottle) are the key. The biggest thing that techies need to remember is to watch the terminology and if you’re told that people don’t understand, step back and think of an analogy of the techie skill you’re teaching that your audience can relate to. For non-techies, the biggest thing to remember is to ask for clarification if you’re confused.

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A New Look at COIL: Customizing Online Information Literacy

Jul 30th

Posted by Heather Braum in Conferences

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Went to this session; honestly, I don’t like being critical of session, but I’d hoped it had been a lot more than it turned out to be. Presenter focused on using a hardcoded tutorial and talked a lot about code. More fruitful discussion was when she started talking about direct contact with students. Point mentioned that younger faculty thinks students can use everything online (Not true) and don’t send students to the library as much. She hands out her business card so students can contact her directly more and more.

Notes from this session are below.

Presenter: Elizabeth (Beth) Jones (OCU)

Modules:

Modules use quizzes to show what students are learning and retaining the information. Grade doesn’t matter. Stickiness is the point. The quiz is designed to hold the answers if students need to click on the information areas of the tutorials to review the answers.

Uses:

  • research instruction sessions
  • graded assignments
  • distance learning

Design considerations

  • first set should be generic or for lower level English courses
  • What types of info will be standard across the disciplines?
  • What areas will be different?
  • Keep it short.

Tools

  • Using Desktop software: Adobe Dreamweaver; FTP Commander; HTML; Javascript; Visual Basic
  • Another suggested tool to use it working with a CMS?
  • Access Database reading — Visual Basic.

Customization

  • What is different about this area/discipline?
  • Change all examples or excerpts to discipline specific ones.
  • Change all citations to the approved style for the discipline.

Coding

  • Uses spry method within Dreamweaver

Questions

Pre-test/post-test used to compare progress? Hasn’t been implemented yet?

Right now correct/incorrect displays; eventually go back and put in more information for why choice was wrong.

Jquery mentioned as an alternative to straight Javascript.

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