Why I am a librarian
January 29th, 2008 § 6 Comments
Barbara Fister at Free Exchange on Campus tagged me to participate in the meme sparked by Dr. Crazy’s fantastic Why I Teach Literature post.
It’s a little funny – I haven’t felt the need to write fantastic prose for any of my other posts on this blog, but somehow being tagged and getting a topic like “Why I am a Librarian” makes one feel as if the resulting post should be carefully written. I’m going to try very hard not to succumb to that, and treat this instead as Dr. Crazy treated her original post – written quickly to express the feelings she had at the time, sparked in part by the discussions and ideas she’d been hearing immediately before.
Why am I a librarian? Because I think information matters on so many levels. And it is only becoming more important. I honestly don’t think one can be a functional, participating citizen anymore without kick-ass information skills. And I’m not talking about knowing what AND and OR do here. I’m talking about knowing where and how the information you need is produced and provided to you – the ability to apply all of those higher-order Bloom’s skills like analysis and evaluation to a situation, and to make sure you get enough information to make decisions that are in your interest and in the interest of the world. The person who’s dependent on others for the information they use to make decisions and solve problems is too dependent to effectively make decisions and solve problems. They’re at the mercy of others – and others who usually have some other agenda besides “making sure that people have the information that meets their needs.”
Except librarians. That is our agenda. That’s a huge reason why I am a librarian, and to take that a step further along the lines suggested by this meme – it’s also a primary reason why I teach information literacy. To help OSU students get to the point where they can do all of those things one needs information to do — solve problems, make decisions, have fun, explore, discover – without relying on me, or anyone else. And as an academic librarian, I get to do this together with faculty in the disciplines, but I get to focus on this part of it, all of the time, and with students across the disciplines.
And the thing is, I think this is more important now than ever. Maybe at one point it was enough to teach people how to get themselves to trusted, established information sources. Maybe there was a point in the history of publishing, or communication, where the name on the masthead was the last question you had to ask about a source. I doubt it, but maybe. I know it is not now, though.
I kind of like this story to illustrate this because it is so trivial –
I was watching the SAG awards on Sunday night because I love awards shows. I’m also very interested in the writers’ strike, with strong sympathies for the writers. So given that the SAG awards are a union show, I was interested how those things would intersect. So I was a little bit surprised when I watched the entire show from the red carpet on E! (shut up! I like red carpets) without hearing much of anything about the strike. “Wouldn’t you think that they’d be wearing something like the red ribbons to mark the strike?” I said.
Then the next morning, Shaun showed me the Statesman Journal’s story – which announced that the strike talk at the SAG’s was “kept to a minimum.” Now the Statesman didn’t send anyone to the SAG awards, this was just the AP story. Which means it is this story, or a lightly modified version of it, ran in almost all of the country’s newspapers. There’s a big factual error in the claim that only Julie Christie mentioned the strike among the winners (Tina Fey, unsurprisingly, did so as well), and the story gives the impression that the actors cared not at all about their fellow union members.
So I definitely took note of this headline from Variety when it appeared in my feeds — WGA strike a hot topic at SAG awards. HMM…. In this story you find out that the strike was all many people talked about backstage, and that the actors were wearing little black and silver pins for the writers.
So, if my problem or question is “whether I should support the writers’ strike” and the question of whether my favorite actors do or not is a big deal for me — well, yeah, that’s pretty trivial on multiple levels. But that’s not the point. The point is – that answering even a trivial question is not necessarily easy. And trusting the daily newspaper, or the 24-hour image industry television network is probably not enough.
So that’s one reason I’m a librarian.
On another level, though, I am a librarian because I love the scholarly tradition. Because I love the idea of information and knowledge created and shared, and I love the idea of being able to tap into that collective knowledge. Barbara’s post talks about this a bit, especially when she updates the conversation about libraries as knowledge “storehouses.”
But quibbles aside, libraries remain a significant and still-growing common ground for the academy. What a library provides is a place and space for students to not only find information and use it in their papers, but to see how knowledge itself is made – by people like them. In using a library, they learn how to participate in what Michael Oakeshott called “the conversation of mankind.”
Basically, I think that people need to know what it is that scholars and experts do. They need to know why it is important that scholars continue to do it. And more and more, I’m not sure they do. I don’t think that students fifty years ago came to college with deep knowledge about how to do scholarship, but I wonder if maybe they (at least within the narrower group of people who got to go to college 50 years ago) didn’t have a better idea of what scholarship was.
We talk a lot in libraries, and in higher education, about how technology has made our incoming students different, and I am very skeptical about a lot of those claims. I look at the students I meet today, and I don’t see the essential differences that some others see. I do see differences — I think their educational experiences before they get to college are pretty different than mine were. And I think technology means that they have more choices, and can choose not to learn some skills and sources I found valuable, without risking their grades. But I don’t think these differences are essential – I see them doing what I would have done had I had my expectations for learning built by No Child Left Behind, and if I had the same tools available to me that they had to them.
I worry when I read Wikipedia discussion pages and see people there dismissing information sources simply because they are the product of scholarly research, or because the researcher has a Ph.D after their name (and yeah, that definitely happens). The difference between what I’m saying and the criticism I associate with The Cult of the Amateur, is that I’m not sure that we’re trying hard enough in academia to make sure that people know what we do. That’s kind of a strong statement to make without any attribution or examples, but I’m going to make it anyway. Basically, I think we need to get beyond the idea that people need to trust experts “just because” — I mean, experts don’t trust each other just because — and really work to demonstrate why our scholarly work should be protected, and valued, and used.
I guess what I’m kind of saying is that I think we need to let go a little bit of the expert/ amateur dichotomy because we all need to act like experts, at least to one specific extent, even in areas outside of our own expertise. Even though we usually don’t have the subject knowledge to evaluate things instantly – we still can’t trust like amateurs. We have to have an expert’s impulse to question, to evaluate, and instinct to know when we’ve questioned enough.
And I think librarians get to think about that, pretty much all of the time. I’m happier focusing on this concept, no matter the discipline, than I was focusing on building knowledge within a discipline. This gets back to what Barbara says about helping students figure out that knowledge is created, and by people like themselves. And it brings me back to what I talked about in my earlier post on this subject, which means this is probably a good place to stop.
Don’t take the tag as anything stronger than “if you have time and the impulse to do so, I’d love to hear your answers to this” – tagging Karen Munro, Jeremy Frumkin and Paula McMillen.
social information networking literacy
January 28th, 2008 § 2 Comments
First off – the SAG awards are tonight, which might be our only awards show opportunity this season and Ryan Seacrest called in sick. It is like it is my birthday.
So this morning Barbara Fister pointed out a recent survey by the Annenberg School (the USC one) – a survey trying to examine “gaps in media usage between communicators and the general population within the United States.” They gathered data from three groups of people:
- influencers (“the 10%-15% of the population who exercise influence and control the levers of change in society as defined by Roper)
- communicators (communicators and marketing industry professionals who have responsibility for what their company communicates to external audiences… and at least 5 years of experience in that field)
- the general public (the general public).
So the researchers wanted to find out a couple of things: where people turned for they information they used to make decisions, and whether there were differences in the perceived value of different information sources among these three groups of people. Fister points out that it doesn’t look like “libraries” were even presented as an option to people given the survey, which is worrying. But she goes on to examine what the survey does show about information seeking, evaluation, and the effectiveness of marketing strategies — all topics of deep interest to librarians.
Two things jumped out at me in this study — first, the conclusion (on slide 17) that “the general population appear to be more skeptical of all factors than influencers and communicators.” This is something I’ve noticed on an anecdotal level for a while – that the students I teach increasingly distrust all sources, online sources, mass news, broadcast news, scholarly sources, alike. I think there’s something really significant in this for us in how we approach the question of evaluating sources with these students – I’ll probably revisit this topic soon.
(“factors” here means things like – do you consider factors like the type of media story, the media outlet, the journalist or reporter, etc.)
What I really want to talk about is the second thing – the significance of word of mouth marketing when it comes to connecting people with information sources. This one struck me today because it brought a couple of things together in my head.
The Chronicle reminded me about the Librarian in Black’s recent post about the University of Michigan study that suggested only 17% of teens think they might talk to librarians on social networking sites. LiB says, “it’s possible we were wrong to believe that a social networking tool would attract all of its users to our services.”
I liked that statement, yes, because it was validating for me — I’m someone who’s not great at going out and seeking contacts, even on social networking sites – and I’ve always been skeptical that they were a logical gateway to librarians for many students. But I really liked it because it left the door open for the idea that there might be lots of other reasons why librarians should use social networking sites. As a data geek, that’s the exciting thing about research for me – yeah, maybe one hypothesis gets blown, but that opens the way to new ones, right?
So anyway, that was in my head when I read ACRLog this morning, and it got me thinking abut marketing, word of mouth, social networking and information literacy. Here’s what I mean…
The Annenberg study finds that advice from family and friends is the number-one source of information for people when they make decisions. I don’t think many of us would find that statistic surprising. Thinking about this from a marketing perspective, though, this points to the significance of word of mouth. And as the Annenberg folks say “personal media is the ideal platform to trigger WOM.”
Now yeah, there’s definitely something hinky about the idea of phony word of mouth, or overly manipulative marketing campaigns – and that’s not where I’m going with this. I’m also not really pointing to the idea of Facebook or MySpace as a place for “OMG the stuff I get at the library is great” messages.
What I’m thinking is that there are lots of ways, on the web right now, that people can point their friends and family to the information sources they think are useful, authoritative, or otherwise worthwhile. Whether it’s sharing items using Google Reader, del.icio.us networks, or StumbleUpon, I think a lot of us have found really useful communities that have formed around this very thing – we use them to get advice and pointers to good information sources. Personally, I rely on my del.icio.us network beyond all reason.
Now, here’s the thing – I really don’t think many of my students are using these personal media tools — the ones that seem to most clearly fit in with the idea of using one’s friends and family to find good information sources. When I talk to students about the read/write web, which isn’t all that often, I don’t find that many of them have ever heard of tools like del.icio.us or StumbleUpon or Digg. Is this true? Have others found this? I tried to find statistics on this kind of usage among teens, or undergrads, and was unsuccessful. Does anyone have any research on this?
Don’t get me wrong, I know they know how to tag, because YouTube uses tagging. And I know they’ve forgotten more than I will ever know about connecting socially online. But do they use the tools that are about organizing, using and evaluating information — where the social aspect is specifically designed to help people navigate our crazy information landscape? I don’t think they do.
And the report Barbara links to really makes me think — shouldn’t they? Shouldn’t pointing our students to the tools and networks they can use, while they’re in school and after they leave, to find the good stuff on the web be an essential part of information literacy instruction? Not only to point our students to the tools they’ll need when they get out of school (which is important) but as a way to help them while they’re in college as well?
I spoke on a panel with Ann Lally from the University of Washington last spring – she was talking about the work the UW libraries have done to embed links to their special collections in Wikipedia. One of the things I remember the most from her presentation is the statistics she presented about how people were getting to the UW collections. StumbleUpon was on of the main things people were using to find the UW collections — I found that fascinating.
Basically, I think the resources our students can access because of our collections, our licenses, and our subscriptions are deeply useful – when I present article databases as a way to access “premium content” – I’m pretty convincing. I think our students would point each other towards these resources if they had a way to do so. And I think that pointing each other towards the “good stuff” will be an essential skill for them when they leave the university. So figuring out a way to get them at the tools that will help them do that – in college and after they leave – should be part of our information literacy instruction. Now I just need to figure out how to make that happen.
When Firefox extend-ers give you just what you always wanted
January 26th, 2008 § 4 Comments
it’s totally awesome.
Anyone who’s heard me speak in the last couple of years knows that I am addicted to del.icio.us as an off-site storage space for my bookmarks, and as a knowledge community. And I’m also recently become a regular Google Reader user (making the shift from Sage to a web-based feed reader) because of how it turns sharing and emailing links into a 1-click process for me. And lots of stuff goes straight from my reader into my del.icio.us.
But there’s all that limbo stuff — I might want to save it forever, but I’ll probably want to read it once and discard it. I’ve been handling that stuff using my browser’s bookmark feature, but that’s clunky because removing stuff from there is kind of clunky.
Enter the Read It Later extension. Install it, right click on any page (or use the browser buttons) and it gets saved to a reading list for later. If I like it, I can del.icio.us it from there. If I’m done, I just right click again and it’s gone. Awesome.
Reality TV without the TV part
January 26th, 2008 § 1 Comment
If you gave Make Me a Supermodel a Try just because my sister was on it (thanks John!) and you’ve noticed that she hasn’t so much been on it in the last two episodes – at least they gave her a blog on the Bravo website, so you can get some sense of what it is that a walking coach does.
open learning?
January 25th, 2008 § 1 Comment
So from transparency and participation in peer review to openness – openness in teaching and learning.
Most of you have probably seen some mention of the Cape Town Open Education Declaration. There’s a good description with some background on the initiative and its participants at Inside Higher Ed.
So what does openness mean in this context? Looking at the declaration, they mean a lot of things.
On the one hand, it means that the materials of teaching – the lectures, the courseware, the activities, the questions and more – should be freely accessible to as many people as possible. On the other hand, they also mean using technology to create open learning environments that “facilitate collaborative, flexible learning and the open sharing of teaching practices that empower educators to benefit from the best ideas of their colleagues.”
Like the Budapest Open Access Initiative the preceded it, the Cape Town declaration points to new technology as a catalyst, but relies on older shared values to direct that catalyst in meaningful ways.
This emerging open education movement combines the established tradition of sharing good ideas with fellow educators and the collaborative, interactive culture of the Internet.
Specifically, the Cape Town declaration calls for openness in three places – in educators and learners who “actively participate in the emerging open education movement,” in resources, and in policy.
Karen Munro points out where to sign.
Then just today, I saw a reference to a related openness project – focused on open access to required course materials. We all know that textbook costs are out of control. And increasingly, faculty are looking for things they can do about the problem. In a meeting today I heard that the number of books we got for course reserves has already exceeded the number of call numbers we’d set aside for the purpose. Most of us can’t just go out and buy all of the texts our students need each year, but I think most of us in libraries are sympathetic to students being asked to pay more than top dollar for less than top-dollar information when they buy their textbooks.
So here’s another petition you can sign – this one’s from the Campaign to Reduce College Textbook Costs.
As an academic librarian, I think there’s a lot more here than the chance to sign some online petitions. This couldn’t be more of an information literacy issue if it tried. We spend a lot of time working to make sure our students can find and use the information they need to succeed for classroom assignments like research papers; here we’re talking about our students’ ability to find and use the information they need to succeed in their day-to-day learning. I haven’t been treating this as an information literacy issue, but I think maybe I should have – maybe this is a good opportunity for partnering with faculty to help our students succeed.
scholarship and peer review and 2.0
January 22nd, 2008 § 2 Comments
Over the last few days, i’ve been seeing some similar projects popping up on the landscape — or, rather, fairly different projects tied together by a common thread. The thread is one of particular interest to me – how will things like peer review and traditional media publishing integrate with new ways of communicating and working with information made possible by emerging technologies? Or will they?
So for now, I’m just going to mention some of these things – and undoubtedly follow up with a bunch of tl; dr posts later on the topic.
First from if:book – they’ve adaptated CommentPress to serve as a peer-reviewing tool for a new book project from MIT press. The book is Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies, by Noah Wardrip-Fruin.
CommentPress has been around for a while – it lets a blog owner allow their readers to comment not only on blog posts, but on particular pieces of blog posts. The reader can pinpoint the argument or the example they want to address, allowing for a different kind of intellectual dialogue about a blog’s content. This is an all-or-nothing decision, you either make your whole blog comment-able in this way, or you don’t.
So you could use CommentPress for peer review before, fairly easily. You just need to set up a WordPress blog that holds the content of your book, article, or set of articles, and let the readers go with it. CommentPress allows them to comment on individual sections, or to make meta-comments on entire posts or pages. Your initial text isn’t revised by the process, making this more like peer review than like the collaborative authoring that would happen if you used a wiki for the same purpose.
One thing that makes the Expressive Processing example different is that the CommentPress level of commentary is only available on some of the posts in the blog. The book is being released, in parts, on an established blog – Grand Text Auto. GTA is a group blog focused on discussion of new media expressions — digital fictions, narratives, poetry, games, and more — with archives going back to 2003. Reviewers will be able to parse the posts where the book is made available down using CommentPress, while the normal discourse generated by the blog continues on the other posts.
I find this interesting because of the way it recognizes the importance of the existing community on this blog. If they’d gone the “special site for the book” route, I’ve no doubt that a community would have formed there (and would have included many members of this one). But the community would have been different, and the resulting discourse would have been different. This definitely bears thinking more about — I’ve been thinking for a while that these knowledge communities that grow up around certain blogs are a powerful thing and I think this project could potentially get at that.
More comments on this experiment at:
Planned Obsolescence and The Chronicle (free for now)
This morning’s experiment comes on the heels of this essay by Alex Reid in Digital Digs, one of my favorite sources for thoughtful commentary on new forms of scholarship. Reid is going to be co-editing the Praxis section of the online journal Kairos, and he muses here about one of the dilemmas inherent in any discussion of new scholarship — how can participating in open, social, collaborative scholarly projects give the kind of professional currency academics need to justify the time and effort their participation requires?
We all know this is an issue – Rachel and I have struggled with it for a few years now with the Library Instruction Wiki, and that’s a fairly simple and straightforward project. While it’s possible that someone might decide to edit or change an entry in our wiki so that the “authorship” of a particular instruction tool wouldn’t be as clear, it’s not very likely that that would happen.
Reid is specifically talking about another wiki Kairos’ PraxisWiki, which was also created as a way for people to share thoughts and commentary about the use of classroom technologies. Still, they’re struggling with how to make contributions “count” enough for academics to use it as a way to communicate ideas. I think he’s spot-on with his diagnosis of the problem — how can we ask academics, whose professional futures depend on their ability to demonstrate the impact of their work to spend their time and effort on us if we don’t give them a way to demonstrate the impact of that work?
Reid doesn’t have any great answers yet either, but I like his idea of thinking of this participation like conference participation. I’ve long wondered if participation in online communities, contributing to the Library Instruction Wiki and blogging isn’t more a type of professional service than scholarship — maybe that’s a useful line of inquiry.
Shaun talked about something similar the other day – on how we value “popular writing” in academia.
Finally, there’s this fascinating discussion thread at Scientific American — asking readers to weigh in on “Science 2.0.” Not surprisingly, reactions fall all over the place. I wasn’t expecting anyone to make the argument that openness in scientific communication would lead to physical injury, but they do. Anyway, lots of food for thought there.
Undoubtedly, much more to come…
Again about reading
January 22nd, 2008 § Leave a Comment
This isn’t really a continuation of the Caleb Crain post, more like something you might find on the shelf nearby.
Going through my feeds this morning I came across a couple of different things that got me thinking about reading, reading online, and reading in new ways –
First there’s this project, kind of like social reading — Book Glutton. They are operating on the premise that the time when you want to take notes about a book, or talk about a book, is while you are actually reading it. So it’s part online book reading thingy, part book-related social networking site.
You can read public domain books about Sherlock Holmes or Jeeves and Wooster, online — here’s what the reader looks like when you first launch it:
But there’s more to the reader than that. Picking up on the “you want to annotate while you’re reading” idea – if you click on that little blue strip to the right of the text, an annotation panel opens up:
You can read alone, or you can join a group reading a book together. What I find kind of interesting though, is that they’re taking “reading together” a lot more seriously than “join a group of people reading the same thing.” Which anyone already can do in a lot of places online.
Within the reader, if you click on the blue strip to the left, there’s also a chat panel:
And that’s what I actually find interesting about this site – that the basic premise is that people would rather read books together. I think this goes against a lot of our notions about curling up with a good book, in solitude and silence except for the rain drumming on the roof. Or the idea of “losing yourself” in a book – that doesn’t seem to have a lot of room for other people in it. But maybe that kind of reading only appeals to some, or only appeals in the abstract.
As the Stumbing Funsters, currently reading Alice in Wonderland, say — Rock on. We read, bub. We read. Mostly in the evenings, when we’re feeling social, btw.
So maybe there are a lot of people who would rather do their reading like this? On laptops, in coffeehouses, together? Or maybe this is a different kind of reading?
Then there’s this project, which is very different. Really, there’s nothing tying these together except in my head.
Where Book Glutton is largely replicating the physical act of book-reading, the “digital art publisher” tontonium goes somewhere else. The digital fiction, The Reprover was mentioned on the if:book blog today, and it looks like a fascinating re-visioning of one thing “reading online” might mean.
It’s something that you have to buy, and I haven’t yet. But I’m thinking that if I can convince myself that it will help me with my French, I might be able to justify the purchase.
Meanwhile, you can get a sense of what it is like on this page here, with one exception. if:book says that the fiction includes:
a witty text in French and elaborate English which expands and contracts – the same sentence blooming different additional clauses each time you pass a mouse across it. This is a deeply disconcerting effect at first, but once you’ve got used to it, a whole new kind of three dimensional reading emerges. It’s a fascinating idea which could only work on the web.
I think I’m going to have to justify buying it, just to see that.
Why I don’t like Ebsco’s visual search interface, part 2 of 2
January 21st, 2008 § 2 Comments
Because it isn’t any fun.
The old interface, with the circles and the squares, let you zip around and zoom in on an idea and then when that didn’t work, zoom out on the idea and try something new. I know that for some people, it didn’t work. For some people it was slow, and jerked around. And I get that. But for us, in our classrooms and on the computers in the Commons, it was fast, and kind of fun.
Here’s the column view of the new interface.
There’s a little bit of zipping around to be done there, but really, it’s just not as cool. It’s too hierarchical – it gives the sense that there is just one direction to explore – from the narrow to the broad and back again.
I was teaching a class a while ago and before we got started I was listening in on the small talk in the room and this one guy said to another one, “dude, I spent a couple of hours last night on Wikipedia so I didn’t get my math done.” That kind of blew me away. I mean, Wikipedia. It’s almost all text, with limited graphics. It’s written in boring, neutral encyclopedia style (at least it’s supposed to be), at least I think it’s safe to say that it’s not the prose sucking people in. And on top of it all it’s only mostly right (a description lifted almost verbatim from one of Jessamyn West’s talks).
But for all that, we all know it can be a bit of a time-suck. I think it’s the hyperlinks and the flattened browse that it facilitates that does it.
Here’s a visualization of the linked structure.
You go in, you click some links, and pretty soon you’re looking at a list of everything that happened on October 18. You’re not necessarily drilling down in a traditional sense, though you can do that, but you’re bouncing around a lateral plane of topics — and checking out connections you might not have even considered yourself. If it wasn’t fun, you wouldn’t do it. If it wasn’t easy, you wouldn’t do it. But it’s both.
Now, the old visual search was hierarchical too, and most librarians I know didn’t really like to use it themselves in part because they didn’t like the categories that the database generated for subtopics. But it didn’t feel hierarchical in the same way. To use it, you didn’t have to go back up and down the hierarchy – you could jump from one subtopic to the other and explore it non-hierarchically within a topic, even if you couldn’t jump from topic to topic easily.
Here’s the other view of the new interface – the blocks.
This one seems more active and fun to watch, but you don’t feel like you’re controlling the movement. It’s not intuitive (at least not to me). I’m moving around between topics, which are still hierarchically arranged, and I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m not controlling my browsing, not controlling the display, in the same way.
So why do I care if it’s fun or not? Well, because I want to encourage students to take the time to explore topics broadly before they make up their minds. I want them to put themselves in a position to find some new things out about their topic before they start to write. I mostly work with first- and second- year students doing cross-disciplinary gen ed type work. They do a lot of current events or similar type topics for their papers. They frequently have some idea of what they’re going to write about and what they’re going to argue, and it’s very tempting in a 10 week term to just jump in and gather together the kinds of articles that will support their preconceived idea of a thesis. I totally get that. I mean, seriously, I’ve done it.
But we know that deep learning is supported by authentic discovery. And because of Carol Kuhlthau, we know that taking the time to explore supports focus formation – the most important part of a research process that supports learning. And we know that when we ask students to explore before making up their minds about what they’re going to write we’re asking them to open themselves up to anxiety and uncertainty. We’re asking them to explore broadly, to consider sources and ideas they might not use when they are facing deadlines and anxious that they won’t figure out what they want to write about in time. And beyond this, we’re asking them to open themselves up to the possibility that they’re going to encounter some new idea that will force them to rethink some of their beliefs. This is scary stuff.
So – I say, let’s build them tools that make exploration fun. Wikipedia does this, and we encourage all of our beginning composition students to use it in this way. Ebsco’s visual search used to do it too.
Let me say one thing at the top – I am decidedly not saying “these kids today with their video games and their cell phones, everything has to be fun or they can’t learn.” I don’t believe that’s true, and my chapter in this book uses a lot of words to say why I don’t think that’s true. I’m not saying that the graphics alone made the Ebsco visual search fun.
No, I’m talking about the ways that learning, just plain old learning, not tricked out or dressed up as anything else, is fun. Remember what it was like when you were a little kid? When you’d check out books on bugs or the pioneers or maps from the library just because you were interested in bugs or the pioneers or maps?
When you’re a little kid you’re adding facts, and you’re learning about things for the first time, and that’s fun. And it’s more complex cognitively than we thought, and even little kids have to be willing to let go their preconceptions to learn, but learning then for a lot of us felt simple and easy. Then you get older and you start learning about harder stuff, and you start re-learning stuff. And for some of us, that leads to the little thrill you get when you read something or hear something or see some result in the lab that suggests everything you used to know about a topic was wrong and that what you’ve just learn will have a ripple effect – it’s going to make you think about things in an entirely new way.
I think this is one of the gaps that tends to crop up between those of us in academia on purpose as teachers and researchers and our students — our students don’t come to us with the idea that research and learning is supposed to make you rethink what you know, and that you’re supposed to engage in a process of constructing new knowledge. How College Affects Students reminds us that most people get to college just when they’re beginning to reach the developmental stage that lets them see knowledge itself as something constructed, not revealed.
I think this is crucial for us in libraries, and especially for those of us interested in information literacy to remember. What we do gives our students the tools and the understanding they need to find the information they need to build new knowledge and meaning for themselves. And when they come to us, most of them aren’t even thinking about knowledge in that way.
I think a lot of people who go on to get Ph.D’s can think back and point to formative experiences where they first realized how much fun research and learning and scholarship could be. Some of us have had that thrill for so long that we forget it’s entirely new to our students. And that it’s scary. And that it’s not that they want to be closed minded or that they’re refusing to learn – but that what we’re asking them to do is scary.
So that’s a really long way away from Ebsco’s visual search. Alone, did the little boxes and circles lead to seismic shifts in our students’ epistemological understanding? Of course not. But it was fun, and now it’s not. And the basis for authentic discovery is exploration. It’s looking at stuff that might be new to you, with an open enough mind that those new ideas might affect you. And anything we can do to encourage students to take that time, to explore, to learn, is well worth it. The visual search is less fun now, and I think it will be less useful for my students because of that.
Crowdsourcing history?
January 9th, 2008 § 2 Comments
I ran across a new social community/networking site today, and I’m not sure what I think about it. Well, I know I love the idea of it — but I’m not sure how to use it or what it means.
It’s called WereYouThere, and it’s a site intended to let people share their memories about people, places and events. Obviously, most of the images, stories and categories already on the site are about the big events of history — the things lots of people will have stories about. But there’s also room for people from a particular school or organization to share memories, families to share memories about a loved one, or individuals to reflect on their own lives. Comments are enabled on most posts, and there’s a discussion board for groups to form for more informal memory-sharing.
From the site:
WereYouThere is
designed to bring people together through shared experience, whether
reuniting old friends or connecting strangers whose paths once crossed.
But we’re much more than just another social network. Instead, each and
every member is a contributor to an ongoing digital history project,
weaving their memories into a searchable database of rich historical
material.
The About section lists the site’s founder as Jonathan Hull, "former Time magazine bureau chief and bestselling author" — which should give it a certain reliability in some people’s minds.
Stories can be uploaded in video, image or text (or a combination), and they are broadly sorted into several categories: events, places, people, eras, schools, military, organizations and reflections.
Anyway, as soon as I saw it I knew that this was potentially the kind of thing that could become the hugest timesuck in the history of timesucks for me. I mean, the chance to read first-hand accounts like "the first time I heard Bob Dylan" or the 1955 World Series, or reflections on television-watching in the 1960′s — from a lot of people in one place? Seriously, I could do that all day (or, more likely, all night).
And it’s a really exciting concept — on the Internet, where you could potentially reach people across geographical boundaries — reading or watching people’s memories about something like the moon landing from all over the world? It’s easy, at least for me, to get excited about a project using something so natural — individual people’s desire to tell their own stories — that could build a body of knowledge.
And build a body of knowledge out of sources that have traditionally been so difficult to capture. Oral history is relatively new, compared to other research methods, and so far only the tiniest of percentages of stories have been captured. Diaries, letters, and other private texts give a peek into this kind of personal memory, but they’re catch as catch can in terms of availability, and lots of people don’t decide to write about the same thing on a day to day basis. Which is another interesting thing about a project like this – the extent to which it lets you look at and compare memory against history – how events, people, etc. are changed in our minds by looking back on them.
But there are a lot of stories out there that can only really be told by collecting individual memories. I was looking for information on life on the homefront in the U.S. during World War II a few years ago, and while I found a little, I didn’t find a lot, historiographically speaking. Reconstructing a documentary record of something like that to use in writing histories is painstaking, labor-intensive and based at least in part on luck — and it shows.
(At least in the U.S. where we didn’t have people collecting data, on the streets, through the whole period as a collective anthropology project).
But can this kind of crowdsourcing approach work as history? Here’s the homefront page right now at WereYouThere? As you can see, it’s empty. And to be fair, this is the very early stages. But, of course, crowdsourcing anything can only work if there is a crowd.
And it’s hard to tell if this site is going to generate the kind of mass participation it would need to be viable. So far, most of the posts have been made
in the "events" category, which isn’t surprising. And it seems that
the "where were you when Kennedy was assassinated" is still the big
shared-memory question of our time, because that is the topic with the
most posts (18). 9/11 is a close second.
Interestingly, the topic I
saw with the most views was Princess Diana’s death, but there are no
posts there yet. Part of me wants to jump in and start writing down
what I remember — which is good for shorter things like the type of
"where were you" memories. If a lot of other people feel that too then
there could be a lot of content quickly, which is absolutely essential
for a project like this. But for the longer reflections, I think it might be more difficult to
get the kind of critical mass that would make this project really
exciting. We’ll have to wait and see.
And there’s also the question of how to treat information gathered and created in a project like this as a historian. I’m pretty good at seeing the potential of new forms of knowledge creation, and I’m a pretty good relativist to a point, but I have trouble thinking of how a wisdom of crowds approach like this can help the reader/watcher evaluate these stories. This project isn’t like Wikipedia – you can’t demand source citations on personal stories. By definition these stories are idiosyncratic and individual.
Even if I remember something wrong, that’s still my memory. That’s still interesting that I remember it that way. Unless I’m making it all up. On a project like PostSecret, the making it up part is still interesting — the fact that some of this stuff isn’t "true" doesn’t make it less compelling, at least to me. But with historical memory, it feels different. It does matter if I’m just reading someone’s historical fiction. And I know there are people out there who can make stuff up really well. And what does that mean for what we can do with these stories beyond the time-suck factor? I’m not sure.
But, I know I’ll be watching this site develop, so at this point that’s probably the most important thing. What it means for history can come later.
Faculty should mean more than that…
January 7th, 2008 § 3 Comments
Steven Bell has a post on ACRL Log today about tenure, librarians and faculty status. I reacted to it fairly strongly and I need to tease out why. Many of the individual things he said didn’t bother me, but taken in aggregate — well, there’s a lot here that’s not making sense to me. So I’m going to do what I do when I can’t make sense of something — try to write it out.
Those who know me know that I reserve the right to change my mind about stuff as I go along …
Bell’s basic point seems to be that librarians, even when they have faculty status, are not "real faculty" because they don’t work with students in the same way that "real faculty" do:
To my way of thinking, what separates the real faculty from librarian faculty is the relationship with students.
While this may seem simple, and even obvious, I’m having real problems with it.
I’m going to leave aside his use of the term "real faculty" because it seems clear that he’s being intentionally provocative with that and focus on the other assumption in the sentence – that real faculty is someone determined by one single thing and one single thing alone and that that is the nature and quality of contact with students in the disciplines. (I know this quotation above doesn’t mention the disciplines – I’ll deal with that below). Basically, I think he’s just being way too narrow. With this incredibly limited view of what it is that makes ‘real faculty’ Bell’s throwing out more than faculty librarians. Not only do I think that’s a naive and problematic view of the academy, but I think if we were to accept it, it would make what we do as librarians a whole lot harder.
Off the top I should definitely say that contact with students, supporting them through the learning process, is what got me into higher education to start — first as a student in the disciplines (history) and then as a librarian. That’s what I want to do – that’s the part of faculty culture that appeals to me. And I don’t disagree even a little bit that my contact and work with students as a librarian is profoundly different than it was as a teaching assistant or teaching associate in the disciplines. My problem isn’t with the idea that contact with students should be one of our core values in higher ed, or that teaching faculty do it differently – it’s with the flying leap to the conclusion that this student work, then, is the sum of what being faculty means.
As I said, I started out in the disciplines with every intention of becoming a professor. And the reason that I didn’t end up becoming a history professor was largely because I believed then, as I still do now, that the kind of teaching I wanted to do — I could do better as a librarian. When I was a historian, my main focus was helping students develop the skills they needed to become lifelong learners and informed citizens. I simply did not have the focus on the disciplinary content to be a great history professor – if they got the dates 500 years off, but still "got" the significance of the connections between the events I was happy. If they made smart connections between the oral history transcript we’d just read and the secondary monograph we read last week, but got the subject’s name wrong – I didn’t have enough of a problem with that. If they took me off on a tangent unrelated to the topic the professor wanted them to write about, but they had learned something important about how to do history – I hated marking them down. When I started working in the public library and teaching at the reference desk, I realized that this — THIS was the kind of teaching that I wanted to do.
Directly helping students develop those lifelong learning, critical thinking skills that will help them engage in public life for the rest of their lives.
And the hardest transition I’ve had to make as a librarian has been losing that week-to-week or even day-to-day contact with students that you get in the disciplines. I frequently use the analogy:
emergency medicine is to family practice what library instruction sessions are to credit courses
I was a really good history teacher at the end there, and I’m still figuring out how to do this one-shot thing. As a graduate teaching assistant in history I can point to student after student upon whom I know I made a direct and lasting intellectual impact. But here’s the thing – that didn’t make me faculty then. And it’s not what does or doesn’t make me faculty now.
What bothers me about Bell’s post isn’t that I don’t value what he says he values in this post — it’s that according to his thinking — an awful lot of other people aren’t "real faculty" either.
And I suspect there are few tenure-track academic librarians who develop relationships with students in the discipline of the type and at the level that occur between students and the real faculty
First, in this post he seems to be valuing the teaching in the disciplines above all other kinds of faculty teaching. I can say from experience, that he’s leaving out a lot of insanely good teachers, who are also some of the most student-focused faculty members in the business by doing this. Here’s the thing — faculty, even teaching focused faculty, aren’t all motivated by the same thing.
When I was in graduate school, and in the years since, it has become really clear to me that there are two kinds of teaching-focused faculty (of course, this is a deep oversimplification – go with it). There are those of us whose passion is the brand-new scholars — our excitement and passion for teaching comes from helping students make that transition into academic thinking, scholarship, research, and expertise. We like to help the first- and second-year students take their first steps at creating new knowledge for themselves. My friend Mark and I had a long conversation about this when I was working at the University of Portland libraries. He was talking about why he loved teaching (Poli Sci) at an institution like UP so much – more than he thought he would at a school that focused on graduate study, or even at a highly selective school where he would be spending most of his time working with advanced undergraduate majors. That just wasn’t for him, and it wasn’t for me. Not like working with the first-years was.
Then there are the scholars and researchers who really want to work with advanced majors and help those students move from creating new knowledge for themselves, to creating new knowledge — full stop. They want to teach major seminars, capstone courses, advise theses, they love the relationships they build with their advisees… my husband is one of these teachers. We knew in graduate school that while on the surface we were both teaching- and student-focused academics, we had this difference in what really excited us about academic teaching.
And then there are those, and there are a lot of them, who get into the academic game for the research. To create new knowledge themselves. They might like working with graduate students, or the occasional talented undergrad, with whom they can engage with the big questions of their own tiny subset of the disciplines — or they might not even want that. They go into academia and they end up teaching because it is part of the price of admission for doing research for a living — or they end up as research scholars on the tenure track and they don’t teach at all. So are all of us — the foundational teachers, the teachers in the disciplines, the researchers — faculty? I think so.
The interesting thing to me here is that Bell is reflecting a very typical attitude about what should be valued in higher education – and that’s an attitude that inherently devalues what librarians, and writing faculty, and basic math instructors, and tutors, and gen-ed teachers with mostly undeclared students, and a lot of other people on our campuses do. The idea that the teaching in the disciplines is the "real teaching" is exactly what leads to the devaluing of the undergraduate core. It’s what leads to huge general education courses taught by harried adjuncts and graduate assistants. It’s what leads to students who lack the basic skills – and I do count information literacy as one of those basic skills – to really succeed in their academic life. And it’s what leads to students who never get the help they need to develop those skills because those skills don’t have a strong disciplinary home.
In other words, I think there are a lot of people that would agree that teaching in the disciplines is what "real faculty" do – but I think that they’re wrong and not only wrong but destructive when it comes to my goals of creating lifelong learners, critical thinkers and informed citizens.
Larry Hardesty is the place to start when it comes to librarians understanding faculty culture. And where Hardesty is most useful, in my deeply personal and idiosyncratic opinion, is in the how he clarifies this concept – the focus on the disciplines is, in a crucial way, one of the key barriers keeping foundational skills like information literacy (and writing, and basic numeracy) from being supported as institutional goals should be:
Faculty culture emphasizes research, content and specialization. It de-emphasizes teaching, process and undergraduates – even at the liberal arts colleges where I have spent most of my career." (Hardesty, 1999, p. 244) Faculty do not think in terms of setting goals and objectives to measure development of "the independent lifelong learner" (Hardesty, 1995, p. 356).
Basically, if developing relationships with students was every "real" faculty member’s main goal, then I think our job as librarians would be a lot easier. And think it would be a lot easier for us to think of ourselves as "real" faculty. A lot of our faculty don’t have that as a goal because it is not valued by those who have power over them professionally (most of them don’t get tenure because of their work with students) and a lot of our faculty members don’t have that as a goal, because that’s not why they got into the game in the first place. And while that’s not me, I don’t have a problem with that.
Our colleges and universities are in the business of knowledge creation — and some of our scholars don’t do that with students. They’re not good at it, or they don’t value it. That doesn’t make them less faculty members. Some of our campuses have teaching loads that leave their faculty working with 30 to 40 students a year, with TA’s to do the grading. Some of them have teaching loads that bring them together with several hundred. Some departments have teaching/research loads skewed at 80/20 — some the exact opposite. My campus has extension faculty who work entirely with the broader community. The point is, all of these people are faculty. By telling librarians that because they don’t do everything typical teaching faculty in the disciplines do they aren’t "real faculty" Bell is lumping librarians in with everyone else who doesn’t do what typical teaching faculty in the disciplines do — and I just don’t think we want to be making the case that none of these people are faculty. It’s a too-narrow view of what higher ed does, and a too-narrow view of librarians’ role within the academy.
And then I totally agree with Bell’s conclusion – that academic librarians should take the time to read faculty blogs. (But I think we should be reading research blogs as well as those that talk about teaching and work with students.)
The key difference between us is that where he seems to think we should read them so that we can understand how we are not real faculty, I think we should read them to see what we have in common, across the academy. What better way to find new partners, and new ways of talking to those partners, than to listen to their voices? The great thing about this was, I have been trying to figure out a way to fit this blog post in to one of my posts and now I can.
This is an academic blogger who wrote a post recently on why she, at a particular kind of school with particular kinds of students, thinks it is important to teach literature. This post really resonated with me as a librarian because I think she’s talking about those things I value – how what she does gives her students the foundational skills and understanding they need to engage in public life.
(Full disclosure – my husband decided to riff on this post in his own blog – I think it’s also well worth reading on this topic)
Like Stephen Bell, I don’t really care about the titles. I don’t call myself an assistant professor now except in cases, like my dossier, where I have to. When I started at OSU I was a "professional faculty" rank employee, and now I am a tenure track faculty member, but the way I approach my own work hasn’t changed at all. I’m fine with being "librarian faculty" because I think we’re all real faculty — all of us different kinds of faculty who are engaged in the business of teaching, learning and knowledge creation.
