EDUCAUSE 2008

I’m back from attending my first EDUCAUSE conference in sunny Orlando. It was a great experience and an interesting conference, although I’m not sure someone like me fits neatly into the 4 tracks (Leadership, IT, Libraries, Teaching and Learning). I don’t think I had a big “aha!” moment either, but did come away with a bunch of ideas, some renewed connections and some stuff to find out more about, which is what you hope to get out of any conference, right? Some session recordings, including an amazing lecture by V.S. Ramachandran about the human brain, are available here.

Ideas and cool stuff

I saw a neat demo by MIT on their mobile applications for PDAs; apparently, all the code is available for sharing.

Some other noteworthy sessions I attended were:

Engaging the YouTube Generation

This session featured presenters from different institutions who provided some interesting ideas about video projects and contests. UPenn has a yearly “mashup” contest for videos of different lengths (e.g. 1 minute, 3 minutes) which began 2 years ago. They have a digital media lab available and support in the learning commons, which they feel is key to the success and growth of the project, and have also created resources to help faculty assess video projects. Dartmouth’s Jones Media Center also has resources to help faculty think about why they might want to create video assignments, how they might assess them and examples of past project assignments.

Learning Space Design

Univ. of Minnesota used design thinking to create some cool learning spaces. Neat features were plasma screens and table microphones students can use when presenting their group work to each other in the classroom. The prof. can then “push” what the students have displayed to everyone’s screens. Research questions that have been investigated using this model classroom include faculty and student attitudes and expectations. See http://www.classroom.umn.edu

Crit Stuart from Georgia Tech talked about using an ARL Tool Kit on designing learning spaces. The toolkit contains were a bunch of great strategies for gathering feedback and generating ideas wen designing learning spaces.

Course designed like a video game
The take away from this session was that we need to be intentional about introducing gaming elements into our course design. Suggestions include:

• bonus points, points not percentage
• letting students work steadily or in bursts (think of this as “digital time”)
• allowing students to select several different paths to get through the course
• using a variety of assessments, some of them like games (e.g. a “scorecard”: give students a scorecard to rate different web sites)
• using multimedia: makes use of public video and other multimedia; tries to use existing material as possible so that she can focus on other aspects of the course; TED Conference as a source for video?
• timely feedback
• peer “pressure”/peer feedback and assessment; student work accessible to all in open repositories; also puts in place collaborative/peer learning; students can take on the role of novice, expert and coach (I’m not how this would work work if students are not at the same place in the curriculum and if learning is scaffolded

Stuff to find out more about

• The ALA Techsource Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium, happening right now if Chicago (wish I’d heard about that one a little sooner, but it’s definitely something to watch for next year)
• EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative has a ton of resources I need to spend some time looking at; sounds like their conference would be a good idea, too. They are currently compiling a list of Top T&L Challenges for 2009, and 21st century literacies/fluencies is on it
• IBM data visualization tool: Many Eyes (freely avail. from their site?)
• digital storytelling

Putting SoTL into Practice

I attended a presentation the other day by David DiBattista, a professor a Brock University and 3M Teaching Fellow. David was invited to McMaster as part of a campus-wide reading group on pedagogy (who needs ‘one campus, one book’ when you can read about this stuff? ) sponsored by Dr. Joe Kim. David’s presentation was actually about a different kind of multiple choice test, called the Immediate Feedback Assessment Technique, which I will write more about later, but he also talked briefly about Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL).

According to David, putting the SoTL into practice means:

• attending T&L workshops
• reading the T&L literature
• reflecting on and evaluating your teaching practice
• sharing your knowledge with others

This statement made me feel pretty good because I realized that all of these are things in which I have been trying to engage our librarians. Members of the campus T&L support unit have helped me put together T&L workshops for the librarians, and I have tried to encourage participation in T&L events on and off campus. I am working on creating RSS feeds to discipline-specific T&L journals so that I can ‘push’ articles of interest with the librarians, or so they can consult these on their own (I’m hung up on trying to get the feeds to populate a page, instead of having people login to a reader to see them). Our Teaching Squares (TS) project encourages reflective practice, and this year, everyone is expected to participate either in TS or in a peer feedback initiative. Finally, I have been trying to share knowledge through this blog, and through the “Teaching and Learning @ Mac Libraries” blog we are using to communicate internally (feel free to take a look; thanks to my colleague Nora, it’s a lot more developed than this one!). We are also working to build community though the workshops and the Teaching Squares project, but in addition, this year, we will be experimenting with cross-disciplinary “team teaching” in some of our large classes. The idea is that, under the lead of the appropriate liaison librarian, we will get together as team to review the objectives for a class, brainstorm about how it could be taught in the hopes of sharing knowledge and getting some innovative ideas and then we will either team teach it or members will be responsible for teaching some sections or building the online support. No more, “here’s the slides, let me know how it goes”; this is all about building the class from the bottom up and “blowing it up” (as my colleague Jeannie An says)!

That’s not to say that it’s all going swimmingly or that there’s no room for improvement, but at least it’s reassuring to hear that we’re heading in the right direction.

New Directions for Teaching and Learning features information literacy

There are a bunch of interesting articles here, well worth a look.

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/86011233/home

STLHE 28th Annual Conference

I just got back from the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (STHLE) 28th Annual Conference in Windsor. The conference is primarily for educational/faculty developers, but there was a host of faculty and educational technologists in attendance as well, and a few librarians. (I think I met four in total, although there may have been more.) This was a great conference: faculty developers are an awesome crowd to begin with, so it’s hard to go wrong when you’re spending time with them, but on top of that, the sessions were generally of high quality and it was well organized. I also met some faculty and ed. tech. people from McMaster that I had not had the opportunity to meet on campus, and to catch up with some colleagues from my previous institution.

Here are some notes from sessions of interest that I attended: David Kaufman (UBC) lead a session on Games and Simulations in Higher Education and talked about the Educational Games Central game repository . There are a number “shells” that one can take a modify for educational purposes; you simply request an institutional log-in and away you go. The games are even bilingual. Kaufman’s is trying to address the same questions we raised in our WILU 2008 presentation, namely, what makes games successful as learning tools, and how can we apply these lessons to our own educational contexts?

I attended several very good sesssions on TA development. A few notes of interest: University of Windsor has come up with a list of “attributes” for graduates that include information literacy, numeracy, problem-solving, and critical thinking, among others. These are all found in 21st century fluencies models and in the essential learning outcomes identified by the AACU for college and university graduates. This is the first Canadian university that I know of that has done this, and is really interesting. If you know of others, add a comment below!

One session I really enjoyed was about dealing with disruptive students. It was structured as a combination of experiential learning and discussion, and lead us to an understanding that disruptive behaviour is often caused by a lack of transparency on the part of the instructor about goals and objectives for the class/course, and a lack of dialogue between the instructor and the students. How much control is necessary for learning to take place, and who should be in control? I would love to recreate parts of the session here.

There were also lots of sessions on active learning, and I will list some of the ideas I got from those in another post, but the best session I attended was the plenary, which featured the CRLT Theatre Program at the University of Michigan. We saw two plays from this program: one on the first day of class, and the other about conflict in the classroom. I have to say I was a bit skeptical and thought that the whole thing might be a little bit hokey, but the plays were very powerful because they were well scripted, acted, and staged.

All in all, a conference well worth attending, and it provides a great opportunity to let people know that librarians are interested in scholarly teaching and learning and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). (A group from McMaster actually lead a discussion on the difference between the two that was really interesting.)

Using lesson plans to design effective classes

This was our latest workshop for liaison librarians. Thanks to Donna, one of our liaisons, and Erika, from McMaster’s Centre for Leadership in Learning, for helping to put it together and facilitate it.

We looked at learning styles (based on Kolb’s Learning Styles Inventory) and how they impact teaching, determining “essential” content, active learning and lesson plans as a pedagogical and organizational tool. Overall, the workshop went well, although we misjudged our time more than a little (the teaching librarian’s Achilles’ heel!)

We are going to continue to investigate active learning (both the theory behind it and potential methods), and some participants suggested they would like to see different ways to address the different sections of the class such as “motivation” and “pre-assessment”, which I think would be a nice tie-in between workshops.

I am hoping we can archive and share our lesson plans, and then have some kind of discussion/activity to share best practices, successes, and lessons learned.

Core Competencies for Librarians

My colleague Jeannie An and I are working to develop a set of core competencies for librarians. Jeannie has been actively researching this topic for some time as part of her ARL Leadership and Development Program (and I envy her, because it’s really interesting!), but it is relatively new to me. There are a loads of articles and web sites on the topic, but two that I have found particularly useful are Core Competencies and the Learning Organization by Giesecke and McNeil and Purdue’s Libraries Performance Management System. Both do a good job of clarifying the relationship between core competencies and the organization’s strategic plan, mission and values. Since the McMaster University Library is in the midst of a “Transformation” process, the concept of the “learning organization” (Geisecke & McNeil) as an organization that has enhanced capacities to adapt to change will certainly prove valuable. The Purdue document will be useful because it shows how we librarians will be able to map our tasks and responsibilities to the Library’s strategic plan. And, of course, as Teaching and Learning Librarian, I want to use the ACRL’s Standards for Proficiencies for Instruction Librarians and Coordinators.
Why are we doing this? Of course, core competencies need to be tied to a process of performance appraisal and eventually, they will be at Mac. (But probably not by me!) Right now, we simply want to start a discussion among librarians about what skills and attributes we need to be successful in our careers, and how we might develop these.

Teaching Squares

McMaster University Library launched a library liaison program this Fall. Our Director of Library Liaison created guidelines for liaisons to help us achieve our key goals of

Building partnerships between liaison librarians and their assigned departments, schools or programs

Partnering to teach 21st century fluencies

Managing access to scholarly literature

Providing research consultations for faculty, graduate students and research assistants

In terms of teaching and learning, the guidelines encourage liaisons to engage in peer assessment of their teaching. I debated about implementing a peer coaching program, but in the end, we are going to experiment with Teaching Squares. I got the idea from Erika Kustra, one of our educational consultants at McMaster’s Centre for Leadership in Learning. Erika also put me in touch with two educational consultants from UVic and UBC Okanagan who have been extremely helpful in providing information about Teaching Squares and how to run the program. We have 8 librarians, including me, who will participate in the Squares. The purpose of this activity is for instructors to reflect on their own teaching and share these observations with their partners. I hope will also be an important teambuilding exercise that will help us to identify core competencies (more on this in another post) and common goals for librarians as teachers.

Problem-based learning

I attended a session on problem-based learning and information literacy as part of the Blended Librarians Online Community yesterday, and today we had a Teaching and Learning Roundtable on PBL given by one of our colleagues in the Health Sciences Library. Last week, I sat in on a session on authentic inquiry and information literacy last week offered by the Partnership’s Education Institute. It’s been an eventful week for innovative learning! PBL and inquiry-based learning are both examples of innovative learning at McMaster; it’s interesting to see how librarians are using them to approach information literacy.

Instructional Design

We held a workshop for liaison librarians today on instructional design. It was loosely based on a number of different workshops I have attended and presentations that I have given in the past, but with a few important changes, including the format and new activities related to developing instructional strategies. The workshop was organized by a team of librarians and a member of the campus Teaching and Learning Services unit and was designed to provide the librarians with a common framework to think about teaching and learning, and to use in working toward our goal of integrating information literacy into the curriculum. We looked at instructional design, talked about strategies for managing content, how to develop learning outcomes, and instructional strategies. (We *briefly* touched on assessment, but really only to say what it is and how it fits into the instructional design process.)

The workshop was a success (so far, all participants agree or strongly agree that the workshop was effective), although parts of it were a little rushed. I loved the active learning exercises we tried, including debates and collaborative learning. We all had a lot of fun and I think it was an important team-building exercise.

I think our next step will be to identify a number of skills students need and experiment with different strategies to teach these.

Peer professsional learning

As a follow up to my earlier post on roundtables, our professional development program is starting to take shape, although not necessarily in any structured way. Instead, topics have been chosen as need and opportunity arise. In terms of opportunities, we have discovered we have loads of “experts” among our peers and colleagues and I think we are doing a pretty good job of sharing in order to improve our common institutional knowledgebase. So far, we have roundtables scheduled on SAILS, problem-based learning, and creative commons licensing and its applications in T&L. We have also started using our (almost) weekly liaison meetings in part to learn about teaching and learning spaces and technologies of interest to liaisons, such as the newly designed Inquiry and Health Sciences Library classrooms, Articulate Presenter, SMART Boards, presentation and conferencing software such as Elluminate (we currently have a campus-wide site license as a trial) and PowerPoint. The last four sessions have been or will be given by our partners in campus A/V, the Learning Technologies Resource Centre (LTRC), and an assistant professor in the Faculty of Health Sciences who is responsible for faculty development (among other things). I met a lot of these people at a brown bag lunch series organized by LTRC for various groups on campus who are interested in teaching and learning technologies, so there is a whole lot of sharing going on! Another session of interest was a presentation to the liaisons and the Learning Commons Steering Group by Dr. Phil Wood, the Associate Vice-President, Student Affairs, and Dean of Students, who spoke to liaisons about NSSE and student engagement at McMaster.

All of these sessions have provided us with an opportunity to meet campus partners, and to demonstrate our interest in supporting, and participating in, teaching and learning at McMaster. Oh, and I should mention that the library will be presenting at the Centre for Leadership in Learning’s Learning Technology Symposium, coming up December 7th. Tom Haffie, the “clicker guy” from Western, will be presenting on classroom response systems. How timely!