Below is the text of our survey invitation for CAVAL. I wanted to share it here as well. If you are in Australia and would like to take the survey, please see this URL:
I’m excited to see the project moving along. I also can’t believe how soon we’ll be leaving for five weeks Down Under – just three short months. I’m also excited that we’ve already gotten confirmation that we’ll be presenting preliminary results at the 2010 Public Library Association meeting in Portland!
Dear Australian library colleagues,
You may have seen the announcement earlier this year where I was appointed as the 2009 CAVAL Visiting Scholar. My research, “Measuring the Value and Effect of Learning 2.0 Programs in Libraries” will evaluate the impact of Learning 2.0 programs in Australia and the perceived levels of openness, transparency and trust by staff in organizations that have completed the course.
Now it’s time for me to ask for your help!
If you have completed a 23 Things / Learning 2.0 program, I’d like to invite you to participate in an online survey.
If you have any questions or concerns about the survey, please contact me (email is on front of survey).
If have been the person responsible for developing and/or implementing a 23 Things / Learning 2.0 program for your library (single library service or a consortia program), please email your contact details to Warren Cheetham at CityLibraries Townsville (warren.cheetham@townsville.qld.gov.au). I have a special survey which Warren will send to you, just for people who have lead a learning 2.0 program.
Thank you for your participation in my research. I am looking forward to my trip to Australia in October!
Best wishes,
Michael Stephens ~
Assistant Professor, Dominican University GSLIS Tame the Web: Libraries & Technology: http://www.tametheweb.com
This group, inspired by Born Digital and Tribes, created a teen review blog. They highlight various ways to involve teens and encourage them. Ideas: display teen reviews in physical space to generate interest, market via social tools and usual channels, and use FREE tools!
This group created a community for midwest librarians with Ning. They used the Ning Network help pages and community pointers to build the site. They also outlined what worked, what didn’t and what they learned. They want to encourage use of the Ning beyond class and will continue to work on it.
This group explored ways to take the library out of the building via outreach to teens. The About section of the blog links to the slides which take viewers through a sample presentation for teens about a local library’s outreach.
I’m working with two students this semester on individual independent studies. They’ve chosen to chronicle their work via a blog, This is one of the ways we check in and I can see their progress. We also meet for lunch every other week to discuss readings and have some genral chit chat.
Purpose
This project is being completed as part of an independent study by Kyle Jones and Katharine Johnson, graduate students in Dominican University’s Graduate School of Library and Information Science.
Kyle wants to investigate more into the field of Information Architecture and develop a background on its influence (or lack thereof) on library website and application design.
Katharine wants to gear her research toward the architecture of library website content. After a rigorous investigation of IA on a whole, she hopes to offer libraries a blueprint for their site design based upon what has (and has not) worked in the past and creating a sustainable site for the future.
Are you from a library or cultural institution located in Illinois? Do you have a digital collection?
Please participate in this Illinois digital library survey!
The survey consists of 25 questions, takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete, and is available between March 16 and April 6, 2009 on SurveyMonkey.com. The results will be posted on WebJunction Illinois (http://il.webjunction.org/) at the end of April.
We are a group of Graduate School of Library and Information Science students from Dominican University working on a research project to collect data for a statewide descriptive survey on digital collections (defined as a collection of images, text, video or audio made available on the Internet or Intranet in any type of library or cultural institution).
Thanks for your participation!
Please feel free to forward this link to anyone you think may be interested in responding.
Miriam Lytle
Marie M. Martino
Justine Wagner-Mackow
Three students at Dominican’s graduate School of Library and Information Science invite you to participate in an online survey asking professional librarians to discuss the importance and aspects of personalization of the Library. As future librarians we are continuously learning and looking for ways to strengthen and improve the programs and services that we will provides to members, libraries and the public. We want to gather the many diverse efforts librarians currently use to create user directed libraries and capture as many new exciting ideas still waiting to be actualized.
For this survey we understand ‘personalization’ to mean that patrons of the library can do one of more of the following: configure and select the content of a library’s web presence appearing on their own computers, create their own space on the library’s web pages (teens and adult can initiate their own book and film clubs), contribute content for the library’s web pages such as book reviews and reading lists and tags, and comment about the library and its collections.
You are invited to take a short online survey that will ask you to evaluate what personalization is and how libraries use this valuable tool. Your answers will help guide the development of future plans, and help us better meet the needs of all members. Please go to http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=2qrTDWpjQ7yGKpYEgEj2VQ_3d_3d to complete the survey. It will be available from March 4, 2009 through March 23, 2009.
All responses to the survey will remain anonymous and absolutely confidential and will be used only in aggregate with all other responses received. We are hoping for many responses from a broad spectrum of librarians and libraries.
Thank you in advance for being part of our classes’ exploration of Library 2.0 and participatory service. We look forward to sharing the results with online when the survey is complete.
Thank you,
Emily, Jessica, and Bill
If you have questions contact Bill elliwill (at) dom.edu
Each semester in LIS768 we take an hour and talk about Second Life and log in to see what it’s like. This is the first semester that we have actually chatted with a Reference Librarian and I was very happy the class got to participate. The librarian spoke with the class and told us she does a voluntary 2 hour shift weekly in world and gets a good number of reference questions from outside of LIS folk.
Some synchronicity: add to this an email I received from a librarian that follows me on Twitter who is teaching at Catholic University this semester.
You’ll note one focus of the class is working in SL. My LIS701 students were also very interested in the section in our new book about SL. I know SJSU has a presence, but what are other LIS schools doing with SL?
this semester, twitter is the main mode of communication used by my students and me. twitter has replaced at least three classroom technologies, and has streamlined our outside-the-classroom conversations and collaborations.
twitter has replaced the class listserv. for years, i’ve used a listserv (alternatively called a mailing list or discussion list) to extend our discussions beyond the classroom. these days, when we want to continue conversations, the 12 students in DMP, the 17 students in ESF, and i use twitter.
twitter has replaced email announcements. in the past, if something’s come up, or i want to add a reading, or we have a location change, i would send all the students in class an email. these days, when i have something to announce, or when my students have something to announce, we use twitter.
twitter has replaced the cardboard box i used to bring to class on due dates. in the past, my students would print out their papers and bring them to class; i’d collect them in a box and take them back to the office to grade. these days, my students write blogs, design flickr sets, upload vidoe, and post works-in-progress. when finished, they tweet about it so that i – and, more importantly, their peers – can check it out.
So, if you’re an administrator, what are you doing to foster collaboration among your staff, and especially your teachers? And I’m talking more than just PLC’s, although that’s not a bad start. What are you really doing to fundamentally change the structure of your school(s) from one of isolation (close the door and teach), to one of sharing and collaboration (knock down the walls)? Is it unacceptable to share in your institution?
If you’re a teacher, what are you doing to foster collaboration among your students? And I’m talking more than putting them into groups of four and having the students create a PowerPoint presentation together. What are you really doing to fundamentally change the structure of your classroom from one of isolation (do your own work), to one of collaboration (work with others)? What are you doing to build their skills to succeed in a corporate environment that requires them to collaborate on a global scale?
Intended for K-12, this post speaks to me not only as a professor but as someone who thinks about libraries. I’d like to see more sharing in my classes and between classes in our program – this is something I need to build into syllabi. I’m also eager to see more opportunities for collaboration between librarians and users – sharing virtually and in our spaces. This certainly impacts BI, the reference interview and user programming.
We have a decision to make. There is a new version of the blog software that runs our site. My provider has suggested we upgrade and I agree – BUT – it means some change in the look and use of the back end interface of your blogs. This means you might have to relearn a few steps to posting to your blogs. It also means we will get improved functionality and some spiffy new features.
Here’s what your blog posting interface looks like now:
And here’s what the new interface looks like:
I will only do this if the majority of LIS768 and LIS753 students agree it’s a good idea to have this experience of an interface change during the semester. I am interested because it will give you some real world experience when applications and interfaces change. It proves that change is constant and we can meet it head on as explorers. It taps into to everything I want you to get out of technology classes with me. Please comment on this post with your thoughts. I will gladly bow to the hive mind for this one.
This book was a very easy read about a subject that is not intuitive to me being a digital immigrant. I appreciate that the book has chosen a broad audience to address that includes parents, educators, and librarians— to create a conversation between all those who have high stakes in dealing with the changing needs of the digital native population. The idea of creating a dialogue between parents and their children, educators and their students, librarians and their users, was a strong point throughout the book and reiterated in the synthesis, “…this book is an invitation to conversation. It’s an invitation sent out especially to parents and teachers of DigitalNatives and would-be Digital Natives” (274).
I think libraries would make an excellent place to “…make space for students, parents, and teachers to educate one another about what’s going on in cyberspace and to explore together ways to mitigate the risks that online life brings with it” (102). The book highlights many of the same topics as this course, which compliments my feeling this week that “the virtual world complements and extends the offline social sphere” (25).
The world is becoming more interconnected, and more interrelated. Library space is changing since cyberspace can, and often is, accessed there. This means there needs to be information on topics that include cyberbullying, privacy, online safety, intellectual property rights, accessing quality information versus the quantity of information that can be found on the Internet and how to battle information overload. “Digital literacy is increasingly a critical skill for Digital Natives to learn. We are not yet doing what we can, or even what we need to do, to teach Digital Natives to be media literate in this new, more complex information environment” (181).
The way Digital Natives are interacting with information is changing rapidly. Librarians need to stay educated—be aware of the technology so the conversations/education seminars are relevant to Digital Natives. “This participatory digital environment requires all of us to become more media literate” (128). “We ignore the social norms of DigitalNatives at our peril” (148). “Those who come to understand the dynamics of information production in the digital era will be better prepared than anyone else to thrive in the integrated digital world. And the best way to learn these dynamics is to participate in information production directly” (159).
Use older Digital Natives to stay informed and current on how to engage Digital Natives—to create a community-based solution to the complex and continually evolving issues created by new information and technologies. “Tap into—and celebrate—the creativity of the DigitalNatives to help solve the problem” (105). “And it is Digital Natives who are best poised to engage in this process” (125).
Digital Natives are creative—the library must also be creative in ways to educate and engage them. “What stands out to us is…the extent to which this creativity represent an opportunity for learning, personal expression, individual autonomy, and political change” (113). AllowDigital Natives to “control the shaping of culture, the making of ‘meaning’” for the way they use the library (125). “Digital Natives presuppose their role as shapers of culture…information diversity, with greater participation by young people, is a positive development that we believe will be good for the long-term health of our society” (126). Allow them to navigate and interface with the library using their mental maps—and new ways of how libraries can be relevant to them could be developed—and ultimately they could create new terrain within society through this exploration and application of their critical thinking skills. “The way that many young people are using information technologies is changing the way the world works. We don’t yet know the full impact of these changes, but we know that they are profound and will alter all manner of dynamics over the coming decades, if not centuries and beyond” (287).
Located within the university’s Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS), the center is in the process of building an historical collection of the best children’s and young adult literature from around the world, as well new books submitted by publishers, and additional titles selected as resources for teachers and librarians.
The center, which seeks to serve educators, scholars, researchers, librarians, teachers, and parents–also plans to host a Website of literature-based resources for librarians, teachers, and parents, providing access to theInternational Children’s Digital Library, and serving as a permanent home for the Children’s Reading Round Table of Chicago.
GSLIS was established in 1930 and is one of the largest master’s degree programs in the country. The American Library Association-accredited school boasts four full-time faculty with expertise in children’s and young adults’ literature.
The center is funded in part through the Butler Family Foundation and is a partnership between the GSLIS, the School of Education, and the Rebecca Crown Library.
In Michael’s Library 2.0 class, I had the opportunity to read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, and I wrote up the lessons I thought libraries could take from it as they seek to better themselves in a Library 2.0 world. Here’s the condensed, bloggy version of what I took away.
Lesson one: The Aeron chair. This chair was break aesthetically from how office chairs had always looked, but despite some initial outside skepticism, the design team persevered because they knew they had created a great project; the chair came to be the company’s biggest seller. Similarly for libraries, it is important not to reject ideas for fear of disruption or anything being different. Maybe people will grumble about a new website design at first because the way they’ve always gotten to things isn’t there now. But if it adds more features, allows for more interactivity, gets captured better by search engines, etc., dealing with some short-term uncertainty is ok. You set yourself up for more long term success.
Lesson two: New Coke. The disaster that was New Coke came about in large part because Coca-Cola designed it to do well in taste tests where it was sipped. But people don’t drink Coke by the sip, they drink it by the can, and the impression after one sip is much different from the drinking a whole can. Libraries should also be careful about how they get feedback from patrons. Do your survey questions capture how patrons experience the library? If testing your site, maybe they can find the Help section on your website when you ask them to, but will they think about finding it when you don’t explicity tell them to?
Lesson three: The sculpture’s fingernails. They didn’t quite know how they knew, but several art historians could tell that a sculpture purchased by the J. Paul Getty Museum was a fake; one of them said something about the sculpture’s fingernails just didn’t feel right. They were right. Just like something can feel fake, it can also feel real, spot-on, exactly right. This post from Sarah Houghton-Jan is exactly what I mean. She says about the Vancouver Public Library front page, with pictures of library users and quotes about how they use the library: “Something about it resonates with me, and all I know is that I like it.” That’s just the sort of reaction we should be going for, with designs like that which immediately hit people and say, this is the essence of the library, this is what we do.
Chris Oien is a library science student at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul, Minnesota.
The Networked Student was inspired by CCK08, a Connectivism course offered by George Siemens and Stephen Downes during fall 2008. It depicts an actual project completed by Wendy Drexler’s high school students. The Networked Student concept map was inspired by Alec Couros’ Networked Teacher. I hope that teachers will use it to help their colleagues, parents, and students understand networked learning in the 21st century.
Anyone is free to use this video for educational purposes. You may download, translate, or use as part of another presentation. Please share.
I’ll be sharing this with my classes and the Dominican faculty. This so speaks to how educators should be moving forward as well as the fact that librarians should offer access to these “emerging synchronous tools” to help guide the way.
I like this model. Maybe this is what LIS768 should become. I’ve already seen these things play out in the classroom: responses from authors, blog comments from big names in Social Media and a sense of empowerment in the students themselves.
This is our last weekend for LIS768. Most of the time is devoted to group projects.
One group explored Twitter and its uses. The used a blog to gather the lit review, examples, and more. I learned about companies and organizations using Twitter in some very cool ways.
One group explored transparency, opening a discussion with the class and presenting a prototypical case study. Six themes for Transparecy to work:
I’m taught my last weekend of LIS768 in St. Paul at the College of St. Catherine last week. The final Saturday of class is always group project day. Take a look:
I am grading their final papers today – papers on academic law libraries and social technologies, the Cluetrain and reputation online, to name a few. Good stuff! If you want to check in on their class blogging, all of the LIS768 CSC bloggers are listed here.
His words are so well-chosen and ideas so spot on IMHO:
To move towards a move innovative organization requires experimentation, trial and error, doing new things, and breaking rules. Libraries looking to become more innovative are confronted with reality: it takes 100 crazy ideas to find 10 worth funding experimentally in order to identify 1 project worth pursuing. As it has been said, that it takes a lot of acorns to grow an oak tree.
The challenge is that most library organizations are structured and managed to continue current practices rather for than for innovation. Both strategy and resource alignment are focused on supporting short term missions and goals. This holds library organizations captive to a culture that is antagonistic toward innovation. Such a culture kills most attempts at innovation and can eventually drive innovative individuals away. It is not that the individuals within a library do not want to innovate, they talk about it all the time. Simply put, the structure of library organizations and their approach to management may make them unwittingly systematically hostile to innovation.
Schnell highlights a book by Gary Hamel:
Gary Hamel notes that that the bottleneck within an organization that ultimately throttles innovation is almost always located at the top. Organizations are trained to look to the top for clues about where it’s going.
What happens if the folks at the top are mired in outdated ways of thinking? Some directors may stifle innovation because in their career they’ve never been encouraged to foster such a culture. Others may just not care to as they finish their careers. Others may have played the role of gatekeeper for so long, there’s no alternative.
Others go out of their way to empower staff. One dean of libraries once told me: “I don’t understand all the new stuff, but that’s what I rely on my staff to do: figure it out and tell me what we should do.” I’d take that style any day!
Michael Casey and I just wrote about library marketing for our next column and from what we’ve heard from our calls on Twitter, some libraries are throttled by tight control on the message. Guess what? The world has moved on and the message belongs to everyone. (The column will be out October 16th)
More from Schnell:
In his book The Future of Management, Hamel discusses new management principles which can help transform a library into a more innovative culture, including:
variety, diversity, experimentation, depoliticizing / depolarization of decision making
resource allocation flexibility
enabling activism through democracy (devolution of accountability, distributed leadership, unalienable )
engagement and mobilization through a common cause
increasing the odds and successful contribution of serendipity
These are wonderful points and they speak to where I think business, organizations, and, yes, libraries. I use a category here at TTW called Library Innovators, and I suspect that many of the libraries and librarians I tag with that category as I gather stuff here would fall in line with some of the principles above.
Of course, my mind turns to LIS curriculum. I don’t teach management but I would be very interested in seeing how these new models are being incorporated into courses. Shouldn’t we be instilling a sense of experimentation, flexibility and a sense of curiosity in our graduates?
I thank Eric for the most cool post. Much to ponder.
“Talking, looking, flying, searching: information seeking behavior in Second Life” by Margaret Ostrander, MLIS, has been accepted for publication by the peer-reviewed, academic journal Library Hi Tech. The article is based on original research Margaret completed to investigate how users seek information in virtual worlds. Margaret’s work will appear as the lead article in the “Best Young Professionals” themed issue in December 2008 (vol:26 iss:4). Margaret completed this research as part of a self-designed independent study under the direction of Dr. Michael Stephens at Dominican University while a student on the College of St. Catherine campus.
In Michael’s Library 2.0 class, I had the opportunity to read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, and I wrote up the lessons I thought libraries could take from it as they seek to better themselves in a Library 2.0 world. Here’s the condensed, bloggy version of what I took away.
