Gray Lady not so gray, actually
October 28th, 2008 § 3 Comments
Somewhere, I thought that I had listed some of my favorite news visualizations from the New York Times. The NYT has really set itself apart among major newspapers with its creative and useful and glanceable visualizations. It’s the only newspaper I see regularly featured on my favorite infoviz blog – Information Aesthetics.
But I can’t find it. I still think it’s there, but I can’t remember what I was talking about when I wrote it. So this isn’t my favorite example – just the most recent one I remember:
New York Times Endorsements Throughout the Ages
So this morning I read (in Information Aesthetics, of course) that the NYT is partnering with Many Eyes to open the visualization lab up to the rest of us. There are only a few data sets there right now to play with but the topics range from baseball to religion to Sarah Palin. You have to work with them as-is, it’s true. So like many other projects the ultimate value of this will be determined largely by the quality of the datasets the NYT makes available.
From the About page:
With Visualization Lab, NYTimes.com users will be able to visualize and comment on information and data sets presented by Times editors, share those visualizations with others and create topic hubs where people can discuss specific subjects.
The visualizations that have been done will look familiar if you’ve looked at Many Eyes before – charts, maps, network graphs and more. There are also tag clouds, and Wordles, though I’m not sure what Wordle’s connection to the project actually is.
The awesomeness of the NYT visualization project isn’t an accident, it’s intentional. At last year’s InfoVis conference, Matthew Ericson’s keynote on bringing visualizations to the masses underscores this face (this account at the Visuale blog is thorough and interesting, though more focused on maps and mapping than the keynote was. It also includes a link to the slides).
Bertini, linked above, says at the end of his account that the one thing that remained obscure after Ericson’s keynote was the tools the NYT was using to make these visualizations. Certainly, the tools from Many Eyes and Wordle have been available to all of us for a while – this doesn’t answer that question. But it does highlight how powerful some of the tools available to us on the emerging web are.
the amazing, spectacular side of information literacy collaborations
October 17th, 2008 § 5 Comments
We all read and talk about the difficulties of faculty collaborations.
I was talking to someone just the other day about how heartbreaking I find it to hear brand-new librarians, just out of library school talk in their job talks about all of the tricks and tools they’ll use to urge recalcitrant faculty to consider the possibility that information literacy might be important. I mean, it’s one thing to listen to someone talking from years of experience working with faculty that forging collaboration is hard. Those people have earned their cynicism, and are probably stronger for it.
It’s entirely another to hear from a brand-newly minted librarian who should be idealistic and confident about the significance of what we do that they don’t expect faculty will care at all. Undue optimism, I can overlook. Unearned pessimism – that breaks my heart. And makes me a little annoyed at all of the library school faculty out there who start their students off with the premise that faculty won’t want to work with them.
So, for all of you out there who think getting faculty to teach information literacy in a meaningful way is a hopeless goal, that those of us who hold out for that are just tilting at windmills, I’d like you to meet Julie. Julie and I have worked together on our FYC (first-year composition) class for the last two years. Julie is a master’s candidate, working on her own thesis while she teaches her own FYC course, and acts as a program-level teaching assistant as well. And Julie is well on her way to making me redundant in her class.
And not in a bad way. This is the kind of redundancy I dream about. We have one required first year composition course at OSU. Information literacy assignments represent 10% of a student’s grade in that course. Generally speaking, instruction librarians like me grade 3 assignments that introduce information literacy concepts to FYC students and also do an hour-long face to face session with them building on the concepts introduced by the assignments.
Because of the extreme pressure put on this one required course, most students do the information literacy assignments during a week where they don’t meet in-class; instead, they meet with their instructor in individual conferences. In those conferences, students focus on a different paper that the research-based argument paper. So they are truly doing these assignments in a vacuum, without a focus either from their librarian or their writing instructor.
Julie is trying something else. She’s taking her students through the information literacy assignments, as a writing instructor. She’s talking to them about research skills in a rhetorical sense. And it’s awesome. Seriously – she’s talking about concepts we can only introduce briefly, in the abstract, in depth. And she’s blogging about it, so you can see it as well.
Here’s the thing – she’s barely started the process and there’s one area where things are different from the norm in an obvious, tangible way. Her students have come up with awesome, interesting topics. I have graded approximately one gajillion IL assignments in WR 121, our FYC course, and I know what kinds of topics FYC students usually argue. Julie’s students are *starting off* from a more interesting place. They’re writing about topics that are unique and rhetorically interesting. We have no idea where they’ll end up after this experiment – it might be the same place that all of the other WR 121 students end up in, but I doubt it. And I doubt it because they’re starting out in a more interesting place. Seriously, isn’t interesting half the battle?
I am so excited about the face-to-face sessions for her classes. She’s even bringing them to the library herself before they come over to meet me – they will have thought about questions that seem simple. Questions like “how do i find a book source for my topic which happened last week.” Let’s not pretend otherwise – this is what we mean, what we care about when it comes to information literacy. The ability to think about different sources differently, to think about their topics holistically and in context – that ‘s what I want for my students and I believe that their chances of getting there are better in Julie’s hands than they are in mine.
Which means I can think about that face to face session in terms of how can I build on what she’s already given them? That gives me the chance to talk about some seriously interesting stuff. And, honestly, I can’t think of anything more exciting than being that kind of redundant.
showing not telling
October 2nd, 2008 § Leave a Comment
I’ve been working today on a presentation for next week – not a typical conference or workshop presentation, but a presentation for a class I’m teaching. I thought I was thinking of it more like a presentation than like teaching because the environment I’m teaching in here is so different than the environment I’m used to – 100 students, lecture-style classroom – very different than the 20 students/ hands-on workshop that I’m more familiar with.
Today, though, I’ve been realizing that I’m thinking of it more like a presentation as much because of the content I have to cover as anything else. AND – because I’m thinking in terms of ‘coverage’ – which is not only something I don’t usually have to do, but also a focus I usually find myself arguing against. So I had to think about it – why am I thinking about coverage now? Why am I thinking about the stuff I want to introduce more than the stuff I want students to be able to do when they’re done?
On Monday, I need to talk about college student development theory. Part of this is to supplement their textbook’s super-brief description of Chickering’s seven vectors of college student development, because all of the 700 students (our section + six others) are supposed to apply that model their midterm paper. Part of this is to introduce the concept of theories and models, what they means for academic discourse, and what it means to use theory critically. The following Monday, I need to talk about critical thinking. For fifteen minutes.
So, the thing is, there really isn’t anything concrete that I want them to be able to do – or, there’s nothing specific that I want them all to be able to do. I don’t really want to break down critical thinking, or what theory is, and have them take the first step in this class – which is the only way I can think about active learning in this case. That might be a limitation on my part, but there it is.
Because a huge piece of these topics, a huge issue that I actually do want to communicate to the students, is that no one can make these students (or anyone) take theory seriously and apply it to practice. No one can make them think critically – even if they have all of the skills and understandings necessary to do those things they can still choose not to do them and there is nothing that I, or anyone else, can do to change that.
Take this paper assignment. Yes, we can require them to read about Chickering’s seven vectors, we can require them to understand them well enough to write about them. We can even require them to write a paper about their own connection to that theory — but we can’t make them do it for real. We can’t force them to reflect. We can’t require them to be honest in their analysis and application. They can make up every specific example from their own lives and there is truly nothing that we can do about it. And, to be sure, doing so successfully would exhibit some high-level critical thinking and creativity skills, but it wouldn’t get at everything we want to get at here.
On at least one level, this is what the content itself is all about. College student development theory is, in a very real way, describing the process by which students get to the point where they can do those things not just because they can, but because they want to.
So, what I’m thinking is that the issue isn’t how to figure out active learning exercises for teaching these topics. On some level, the papers and projects in the class are the active learning experiences – and they are active learning experiences that give the students a lot of freedom to do these things in a way that makes sense for them.
No, what I’m thinking is that the best thing to do is to acknowledge up front that no one can make them use this stuff. Correction – no one can make them meaningfully use this stuff. Acknowledge that up front, and keep the focus of the presentation on why it’s useful to me. Why I like it, how I use it, how other scholars use it and why it’s useful. After all, if we’re going to ask them to be honest and reflective, it seems only fair to provide them with a little of that in my own presentation.
Oddly, I’m fairly comfortable with this focus, even though it means I’ll be talking for quite a while on Monday. Of course, I have plenty of places where I can ask them questions and check in with them, but still it’ll be a lot of me-talking. And I’m sure part of the class will never engage with what I say, no matter how many cool pictures and analogies I use to supplement.
All of this has me thinking as well about library instruction. In a lot of cases, we do teach the stuff that we can (kind of) require people to do – we can require people to find articles using databases. No matter how resistant they are, if they go through the steps and the exercises, they’ll learn something about how to do that. It’s easy to come up with concrete, “what I want them to be able to do,” learning outcomes for that stuff.
But there are also these bigger picture questions we would like them to start thinking about, and start applying to their own lives, their own practice, and their own world view about how knowledge is communicated and valued. And I realized, in those segments I do the same thing I’m doing here – I’ve stopped telling students that the quality of the information they’ll find in databases is inherently better, for example. Or that the quality of peer-reviewed articles is inherently better. Generally, I approach the “why you should use databases” piece as a demonstration, and from the perspective of “here some reasons why I use these tools or sources. Here’s why I think they’re cool.” It seems to work. I’m certainly more comfortable with that approach, and they seem to be open to hearing the message in this way.
Which gets me rethinking some of these ideas about coverage. Certainly, there are lots of situations where we value coverage over learning. The whole idea that if I mention 10 topics in an hour, they’ll somehow learn about 10 topics in an hour is bad and has to go. But maybe the flip side is also unbalanced – if we try too hard to make everything about active meaning-making for them, do we leave ourselves out of the equation too much? If learning is social, and I think that it is, constructing meaning together is a crucial part of that. We know that when it comes to group work, and to peer groups. But maybe showing why and how we care, why and how we really use the stuff we want them to use – isn’t the same as telling so much as another way of constructing meaning together?
