Our college’s design team has been doing a series of videos to highlight their awesome work on our library’s upcoming Graphic Novel Symposium. (I posted on this back in May here.) Our library is fortunate to have such talented individuals who make us look good. Behind the Scenes: Graphic Novel Symposium Graphic and Web Design
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This past semester I had the opportunity to take part in Michael Stephens’s Hyperlinked Library course. The course, especially the readings and discussions on reflective practice, teaching, and learning brought together for me the professional and the personal. A little bit about my background: my previous career was in German Studies, but a couple years ago my contract as an Assistant Professor wasn’t renewed. My wonderful, supportive colleagues said again and again that it was due to budget pressures, but deep down and for quite a while I felt I had failed. What the experience offered me, though, was a […]
I have written several times on this blog about ACRL’s draft Information Literacy Framework that is set to replace the Information Literacy Standards for Higher Education. The new Framework has generally been well-received, and the Task Force is working diligently to address questions and concerns expressed by members’ responses to previous drafts. (As I have noted in the past, I am a member of this Task Force but I do not speak on behalf of the Task Force here.) The new Framework is built upon a set of threshold concepts that define a continuum between novice and experienced researchers. Threshold […]
A big AHA! moment about 21st century participatory librarianship came from an unlikely source: a book about ancient pueblos of the American southwest. The author observed that each pueblo was comprised of a collection of living spaces surrounding a large common area – first, the Great Kiva, and later, the plaza. Every living space faced into this common area, which was the hub of pueblo life and ceremony, because, as the author noted, every community needs a center (Scully, 1988). That’s it! I thought.That’s the 21st century library. The 21st century library is some combination of physical and virtual space […]
Context Book Assignment: Net Smart: How to Thrive Online Critics of modern social media and our emerging hyperlinked culture are abundant. So are cheerleaders and utopians, who praise the potential of new media and our always-on, always-connected, society. Critics warn us that Google might be “making us stupid,” as Nicholas Carr put it. They wonder, as Sherry Turkle has, “Why do we expect more from technology and less from each other?” They worry that we are becoming overloaded with information, unable to focus on sustained chains of reasoning, and “driven to distraction.” They express concern at the tendency for Facebook […]
On April 25th, we held our 13th annual Information Literacy Summit in Illinois. This event is a partnership between Moraine Valley Community College Library and DePaul University Libraries. We are excited to share the keynote address on metaliteracy, information literacy, MOOCs, and threshold concepts featuring Trudi Jacobson and Tom Mackey. Changing Models, Changing Emphases: The Evolution of Information Literacy featuring Trudi Jacobson & Tom Mackey ————————– Troy A. Swanson is Department Chair and Teaching & Learning Librarian at Moraine Valley Community College. He is the author of the book,Managing Social Media in Libraries. You can follow him on Twitter at @t_swanson.
[I have posted on the new (draft) Information Literacy Framework from ACRL here, and you can also read the thoughts of others here.] As we approach the upcoming ALA Annual Conference in Las Vegas (in June) where our task force will unveil a more complete draft, I wanted to offer some thoughts on how this Framework connects to undergrads with a special nod toward my community college colleagues. (I do not speak for the Task Force in this post.) As the Task Force has acknowledged, we are basing our work on the groundbreaking work of Lori Townsend, Korey Burnetti, and Amy R. […]
We are very excited about our upcoming Graphic Novel Symposium, which will be in September of 2014. Check out our website, http://www.morainevalley.edu/comicculture. We are aiming to create an academic event that can be utilized by our faculty members in the arts and humanities (and maybe other areas of the curriculum). We’ll be featuring faculty lectures, local comic shops, a gaming event, and a cosplay event. We’ve been working on the marketing for this , and we recruited one one of our awesome catalogers, Brenda Lozano, as our model for our images. Yes, it’s true. When Brenda is not cataloging our […]
Last week, I had the pleasure of attending the Texas Library Association Conference in San Antonio. While there, I had the opportunity to talk with Justin Hoenke (among many folks) who is also a contributor to this blog. We discussed his work at the Chattanooga Public Library and, specifically about the use of their 3D printer. Listening to him talk, it really struck me that at the basic level Justin does not really care about the 3D printer. The 3D printer is all well and good, but the thing that he is really after is the learning, the creativity, that […]
I have a decent understanding of copyright and the process of determining fair use, but I didn’t have a good understanding of how YouTube enforces and adjudicates copyright disputes. I’ll own up to my naiveté, but even after acknowledging this, I am still troubled by YouTube’s approach to copyright enforcement. I thought about titling this post, “I Fought the Law and the Law Won,” but the problem is that this whole thing isn’t really about the law at all. In YouTube Land, it doesn’t really matter if your use of copyrighted material falls under fair use or not. What matters […]