While using my iPad for article-reading, a blog post about Storify appeared

It has been ages since I talked about a new tool/service like this but Shaun came home talking about Storify the other day and it sounded good so I got myself an invite.

Basically, it lets you pull content from the dynamic web, including all of the social social media suspects plus search results, into a timeline-like interface. You add text (or not) and you have a story.

Reading the “one year out” iPad posts that have been popping up, I have been thinking about how I use mine — especially how I use it differently than I expected. One thing I didn’t expect was the extent to which I have used it to replace some of the paper in my life. Not all of it, but some of it. And one of the most interesting pieces of that story, to me, has been the extent to which some of the papers being replaced are the reams and reams of paper worth of article printouts I used to create.

Those printouts were totally outside my workflow in so many ways – but I had to be able to:

Take them places (even my laptop is so much less mobile than a folder of paper and a pen).
Read them (which I could technically do, but not really do on my phone).
Take notes on them (typing doesn’t count for me. I wish it did. But it doesn’t).

With the iPad, some of that started to change. Here’s a story about how.

There are definitely some glitches – the integration with Flickr wasn’t working at all for me, for example. But it was quick and intuitive and I like the output a lot. I have some more interesting ideas for using it than this one.

Zotero group bibliography assignment

I decided before the start of this term, the first term in which I would be teaching a credit class in almost eight years (and I’m teaching 2!) that my Library Skills for English Majors class would collaboratively create an annotated bibliography in Zotero for their main group project.

I want them to develop some facility with Zotero, and this seems like a good way to do this. The ins and outs of working with metadata on Zotero connects back to a lot of the course themes, making even those that are a little abstract seem more concrete. At least I hope so.

I’ve barely explored the Zotero group settings for all that I have been there for a while (and for all that I have group libraries and everything) so I was not at all sure how well it would work or even if it would work for students in this class. I’m still not sure because I’d like them to do a lot of the work in-class, and they don’t have their own computers there. It should be possible for them to sync what they do on library machines to their online libraries, but until we try it, I just won’t know.

So yeah, that’s the reason why I was so happy to find that I’m not the first person to try this -(Profhacker author) Brian Croxall at Clemson did it before and he did it for English and he wrote about it extensively which is so amazingly awesome. I drew heavily from it even when it didn’t directly – it’s amazing how working with someone else’s assignment online is like talking it through, having someone to get you thinking about the stuff you’re forgetting.

Anyway, so the theme they’re building this bibliography around is the scholarly and creative output of their own faculty, This is only a 1-credit class (more on the challenges of doing anything meaningful in a 1 credit class later, I promise) and they don’t have a common research assignment in other classes (or any research assignment, in many cases) so it’s really hard to make it relevant. I am hoping that this focus will add a note of relevance to a kind of abstract skills-for-skills-sake class. I am also fascinated by what our faculty are producing and will enjoy what the students find and choose to add in any event.

The full text of the assignment is under the cut.

Continue reading “Zotero group bibliography assignment” →

SEO does = infolit!

Via Clive Thompson’s twitter, and then via the Nieman Journalism Lab —

Kelly McBride at Poynter Online looks at the connection(s) between the terms people search for and the terms journalists use. There’s a lot to think about here – the connections are multidimensional (and multidirectional) — about the media driving/defining the terms people use to search and the media using the terms people are using to search so they can get found, about the impact of discourse and the language choices we make. Plus also about the insidious effects of a slow news day:

Now that we know that August is the month of distorted facts, and now that Google makes it impossible to move beyond our distortions — even when we know better — we should be prepared. We can start ramping up in late July, toning our fact-checking muscles, warning our gullible relatives to be wary. Next year, maybe those who care about the truth will get ahead of the curve.

cream colored ponies and crisp apple strudel

Another essentially no more than bullet points post — I have a lot of formal writing I have to be doing now, so this will end at some point. So, cool stuff…

via Dave Munger (twitter) Alyssa Milano pushing peer-reviewed research — see, it is relevant after you leave school!

via A Collage of Citations (blog). Former OSU grad student/ writing instructor turned Penn State PhD candidate Michael Faris’ First-Year Composition assignment using archival sources to spark inquiry and curiosity. Note especially the research-as-learning-process focus of the learning goals.

via Erin Ellis (facebook) plus then via a bunch of other people — proof that, in the age of social media, an awesome title can boost your impact factor. But the content stands on its own as well – I’ve been thinking a lot about different information seeking style, and how different people gravitate naturally towards different approaches. By Karen Janke and Emily Dill: “New shit has come to light”: Information seeking behavior in The Big Lebowski

via @0rb (twitter) Journalism warning labels

via Cool Tools (blog) Longform to Instapaper. Long Form by itself is pretty cool, it aggregates some of the best long-form (mostly magazine) writing on all kinds of topics. But what makes it really cool is that it integrates seamlessly with Instapaper, meaning that I can find something there, push a button and have it available on my iPad to read offline the next time I am stuck somewhere boring.

via Cliopatria (blog). Obligatory history-related resource — London Lives: 1690-1800. Pulling together documents from 8 archives & 15 datasets, this online archive asks “What was it like to live in the world’s first million person city?”

snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes

Because the work I have to do is stressful — it’s a dogs biting (not really) bees stinging (not really) feeling sad (not really either) type of time

Tom and Lorenzo’s analysis of the costumes on Mad Men (the season premiere of which I finally got to see late last night) —

It became quickly obvious to us that there was no way we could examine the female fashion on Mad Men without looking at ALL the females. Costume Designer Janie Bryant deserves every bit of acclaim and applause that has come her way since she started work on the show. Think of this series of posts as a mini-retrospective. We’ll work our way up to Joan and Betty by looking at each of the other characters first.

Here’s the thing – I love the posts for the big 3 characters – Joan, Betty, and Peggy – but in some ways, I love the posts about the secondary characters more. In the first group, the conversation is very character-driven, what different costuming choices say about different characters, which is fun and interesting. In the second group, though, there’s just as much about what the costumes AND characters say about the time and place in which they’re set – which is right in my analytical sweet spot.

This digital history project at Stanford: The Republic of Letters.

Using social networking visualization tools to visualize the letters that scholars wrote to each other way back in the early days of scholarly communication.

Forged in the humanist culture of learning that promoted the ancient ideal of the republic as the place for free and continuous exchange of knowledge, the Republic of Letters was simultaneously an imagined community (a scholar’s utopia where differences, in theory, would not matter), an information network, and a dynamic platform from which a wide variety of intellectual projects – many of them with important ramifications for society, politics, and religion – were proposed, vetted, and executed.

You can check out their case studies, or do a little bit of playing with their tools.

Cryptogram for iPad.

This game is very easy (if you let it tell you when you guess a letter wrong) or less easy (when you don’t), and so, so pretty.

New blog to follow

And last, but only because I can’t believe anyone who reads this blog doesn’t already know this – Barbara Fister is blogging at Inside Higher Ed.

Emerging Technology and IL Teaching Workshop, part 1

In the next two days, I’ll be giving a series of talks as part of this workshop in Seattle. Here are the supporting materials for one of them – a short technology demonstration about our Flip video project…

For an example of how we used the Flip video camera we bought — we didn’t use it to demonstrate research processes or to show things in the library. Or, I should say, we did do some of those things but not in the project I am describing.

But we did use the videos in tutorials. Basically, my colleague Hannah and I had to do some work revising a set of tutorials. And as is the case with all tutorials, we had these context-setting pieces that had to go in, pieces where the tutorial explains why the student should take an interest in the process or tool the tutorial will teach them to use. We didn’t want to write up a set of “here’s why you should care” pages to include in the tutorial, but we weren’t sure where to go from there.

And then one of us – I don’t remember who – had the idea to ask our OSU students to talk about research, with the hope that we could then pull out “clips” that would illustrate what it was we were going to talk about.

It turned out to be a fantastic project – so much fun to work on. We worked with our office of Student Leadership and Involvement to identify students who were here in the summer and willing to participate. Then we did a quick 15-30 minute interview with each one. We recorded the whole thing with a Flip camera, and then used iMovie to pull out useful clips. The clips are stored on YouTube, so all of our librarians can use them in tutorials, course pages and elsewhere.

This one is one of my favorites – Emmanuel on how librarians are helpful!

See the videos in action

OSU Libraries YouTube channel. http://www.youtube.com/user/osulibraries

OSU Libraries tutorials pages. http://ica.library.oregonstate.edu/tutorials/ (look at the tutorials for Written English courses)

Our Campus Partners

Student Leadership and Involvement, OSU
http://oregonstate.edu/sli

Associated Students of Oregon State University (ASOSU).
http://asosu.oregonstate.edu/

International Students of Oregon State University (ISOSU)
http://oregonstate.edu/groups/isosu/

Legal Stuff

Model Release Forms (ours were adapted from these at the OSU Extension Office). http://extension.oregonstate.edu/eesc/how-to/permission-people-pictures-model-release

Using the Flip Camera

EDUCAUSE: 7 Things You Should Know About Flip Cameras
http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7043.pdf

Flip Video Camera User Guide (New Mexico State University)
http://brand.nmsu.edu/webnation/flip-video-camera-user-g.html

How to Use a Flip Video Camera
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mh6s9gNoFro

tutorials a la carte

So the thing about DIY tutorials is that even though the technology bar required to build them is pretty low, there are some back-end logistical issues that have to be navigated. When I decided I wanted to try these with some of my distance learning classes, I had to figure out how to create a locally hosted blog, and we ended up doing it in a way that hadn’t been tried before (using Drupal) so we had to go through some rounds of figuring out settings and styling.

Don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t a bad thing to go through for me, or for the library. And when colleagues wanted a similar tool, we were that much further down the road and had some good reasons to try a different tool. Still, when the goal is “I want to get a tutorial up” these kinds of barriers aren’t necessarily what you want to go through.

I realize that a local option wasn’t the only option – if all I cared about was putting up a blog for tutorials quick and fast there are obviously tons of options out there. But that wasn’t the only problem I wanted to solve. I didn’t just want to make tutorials myself, I wanted to do something that would make it easy for all of us to create tutorials and other instructional aids.

The issue of how to share the burden of creating instructional materials has been around for a long time. Learning objects repositories like MERLOT offer lots of options for teachers – the ability to borrow online instructional modules, and the ability to comment on and rate those tools. Shared tutorial projects like ANTS let librarians share tutorials, collaborate on prioritizing and creating tutorials, and also provide a social space to talk about tutorial-related issues. Here, locally, we have CLIP (Collaborative Library Instruction Project) which takes a good step in the right direction – making source files available and shareable, letting librarians share some but not all of the work of tutorial-building.

CLIP is just getting off the ground, so I don’t know what will happen there. But here’s the thing. Whenever I have talked to anyone involved with projects like these, or heard them speaking about the larger issues, they say the same thing – getting participation from educators is really, really hard. They spend a lot of time gathering the content for the repositories themselves, they have a core group of committed people sharing, but getting the concept of sharing — of taking the time to participate in these types of projects and communities – to be part of the normal workflow for teachers is super difficult.

My own experience with the Library Instruction Wiki (now offline due to basement server room flood) left me feeling pessimistic about that project’s stop reinventing the wheel tagline. I have come to believe some things – some things that got me thinking that instead of sharing the final product of tutorials, the way to go is to figure out ways groups of teaching librarians can share a process:

1. Teachers like reinventing the wheel.

This is something Jean Caspers said to me once, and its stuck with me because I think it’s essentially true. Not that teachers don’t want to borrow and adapt and take advantage of other people’s cool ideas and good work, but to really feel comfortable going into a classroom and teaching a group of students something, a lot of us need to feel like we’ve made the stuff we’re teaching ours. And the only way to do that is to adapt, and reshape, and refine. So we don’t want to just point to other people’s handouts and tutorials (sometimes we do, but go with it). We want to make them ours.

And an important part of the cognitive process that a lot of us go through preparing to teach is preparing the materials. I know that when I create a course page for a class, I’m thinking about how I am going to present the material in class, and about how I am going to transition from one topic to the next. And when I make a tutorial for an online class, I want to tailor it to their assignment, and the process of putting it together helps me clarify what they need to know/do for that assignment.

So, it’s not a bad thing that teachers want to reinvent the wheel, not at all. And I think it’s a need teachers have that should be considered by anyone trying to help them work collaboratively.

2. The hard part of developing tutorials isn’t technical, it’s in the content. And that’s the hardest piece to share.

One piece of this is practical – try teaching anyone how to do anything research-related on your campus and see how long it takes before there is some local quirk that you need or want to explain. It doesn’t take long. There’s a reason why the tutorials we’re most likely to share are on topics like plagiarism or citations — things where we are all working on basically the same standards and rules, defined outside of our local institutions.

One piece of this is related to the above point. We want the content to be tailored to the students’ needs – we have strong opinions about how to do research and about how to teach it and about what students need to know about it. I don’t know, I haven’t talked to many people who say things like “I would totally borrow X’s tutorial, but it’s built in Camtasia and I would rather it be in Captivate. The people I talk to are more likely to forgo borrowing a tutorial because they don’t like something about it — they’d like to change the way it explains a concept, or to add just one more piece.

3. There is one sure-fire way to make the technical part hard – that is to tell everyone they have to use the same tool at every stage of the process.

Now this may seem to undercut the whole process-sharing thing I mentioned above but bear with me – I’m really talking about all of the component parts of the final product. If you tell everyone that they have to use the same tool to build webpages, that’s going to leave you with a few people upset yes. You’ll also have a lot of people that don’t really care.

But if you tell them that they have to use the same thing to take screenshots, the same thing to do screencasts, the same thing to create word clouds, or to display bookmarks, or to push useful links — then you’re going to start getting the kind of resistance that makes people decide not to create the thing at all. This is especially true if people have been left on their own to figure out their own best way to do those things before.

So, to get to the point already…

So, Hannah and I were working on redoing our big tutorial – and one of the problems we wanted to address was the bottleneck that occurs when only a few people can edit or make changes to a tool. We also wanted to de-Blackboard our beginning composition assignments, and make them more lightweight and dynamic. Thinking to kill two birds with one stone, we decided to look at content-management-izing our tutorial building process.

The brain trust behind Library a la Carte (an open-source, lightweight CMS for building course pages and subject guides) works down the hall from us, so we had a place to go with this problem. We were initially open to a variety of approaches (including Drupal and WordPress) for building these tutorials, but we ended up deciding that extending LALC to include a tutorial-building function made the most sense.

We launched it barely-alpha, with the fall term beginning composition students. We found a bunch of things that wanted fixing, but even in this sub-optimal situation, there was an awful lot of it that worked well. Now it is in barely-beta, and with about 40 sections of beginning composition using it, the reports we have had about it not working for the students have been in the single digits.

This is what the tutorials look like:

(Here’s a link if you want to look at the whole tutorial. This one is cool because it has modules that feature: images, cartoons, videos and text included. You have to log in to see the quizzes, but not to see the rest)

There’s a few things I really like about it –

First, it allows our teaching librarians to share at a pretty granular (modular) level – I can borrow Hannah’s catalog-using screencast, and put it into one tutorial that is really about how distance students can have books delivered to them by mail, and also into another tutorial that is really about the serendipitous process of browsing for books on the shelves.

And even at that granular level, it lets us borrow-and-then-tweak — keeping things right in most teachers’ comfort zone.

Using an incredibly scientific data gathering method (n=1; n=me) I have determined that instruction librarians just may be more likely to borrow from each other and to remember to share with each other in this format.

Secondly, it solves the problem of where everything is going to live. Because it is integrated with our subject and class guides, the system lets us create tutorials and then automatically puts them on the website, with no pesky decisionmaking steps beyond what to call the thing. Which admittedly, can stymie me for a while, but…

Using the same data collection method (this time n=me and Hannah) I have determined that with this tool available, we are more likely to include tutorials and learning modules in the things we do for our classes, whether we meet with them face-to-face or not.

It also lets the librarian pull in content from elsewhere, so they can use any method they are comfortable with to create the content initially. If I want to store my photos on flickr, and edit with Picnik, that works fine. But so does uploading the photos that I edited with Photoshop. If I want to embed a video I edited with iMovie, I do the same thing I would do to drop in a screencast video I created with Camtasia.

Editing a video module:

It also lets us easily use dynamic content (which sometimes breaks the styling but, live and learn) so if I want to embed a delicious linkroll to recommend links to three different classes of students, I can, and then of course I can update all 3 class pages at the same time when I update my Delicious. Or if I want to do the same thing by embedding a Twitter feed, no problem.

Again, because this is integrated with our class pages system, we’ve already made a lot of decisions about where to share some of our resources. But even though we have a flickr archive, lots of us don’t use that for building the modules. And even though we have a YouTube channel, the videos there can be created in lots of ways.

I have no idea at this point if anyone else is going to start using this, or if it will mostly be used to update our main tutorial and in beginning composition. But I do like the concept of process-sharing, and I think this might be a way that idea makes sense.

Changing expectations

Remember all of those fashion-centric shows on networks like MTV in the 1990’s? This is a bit of one, covering a famous runway show by John Galliano — scratched together with almost no support, held in a socialite’s house, with models who worked for free. I’ve been looking for coverage of this show for forever — because see the model who falls down on the stage in the beginning bit, falls down on purpose to evoke the desperation of the fleeing princess? (starts at 0:25 in)

That’s my little sister, Debbie. Not being in Paris at the time, I have only heard tell of this performance. I would love to see it unabridged, but for now, this will do.

It amazes me how quickly my expectations have changed from what I should be able to find – when I first started looking for information about this show, I was happy to find a review in an article somewhere. When I first started looking at YouTube for videos of Debbie on the runway, about two years ago, I was surprised not to find anything – surprised that there wasn’t a lot of content posted from this pre-ubiquitous digital video, pre-Internet era?

That seems a little unreasonable of me, but there it was. And now there’s lots and lots of video from that era up, and instead of feeling like I am living in the future, I expect it — and I’m really enjoying the trip back to the past.

adventures in e-reading

So I live on the west coast, and many library conferences are on the east coast, and I attend many library conferences which means a lot of long flights. And I’m a fast reader. Which all added together equals this one conference last year where I found myself carrying nine books with me on the plane.

Lest you think that was excessive, okay that was totally excessive. But the thing is, I don’t really like to fly. My legs are too long for the plane seats (and I’m not super-tall. What do super-tall people do?), the air is too dry and I get headachy from the engine noise so my strategy of choice for dealing with all of that discomfort is to find something engrossing to read, and I never know exactly what it is I will find engrossing in the moment.

Plus I never know exactly how much I will get through, and I live in fear of finishing all of my books and being left! on a plane! without a book!

On that flight, I started and finished four of those books on the plane (one was a quick-read young adult novel and one was a totally mindless mystery that my traveling companion started and finished after I did). The other five books included three things I read in the hotel: two comics collections in trade paperback, a novel I had started before and finished after the trip. One book I started on the plane and didn’t have time to finish and the last one was a non-fiction book I never did pick up.

So that’s a long way of explaining why and when I decided that I needed to seriously pursue the idea of e-books. And this video I came across today is the first thing that really kind of gets at why I have been so happy with that choice. It’s in french, but even my lousy french is good enough to follow along.

(via if:book)

(I suggest going to YouTube itself to watch, and watching in high quality: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aK75RSQBZYs)

Happy except for the ever-present issue of e-book DRM. My french isn’t up to telling if they really talk about DRM in the video or not, but even if they don’t that sure looks like what replicating open-formats aspects of the print world would look like. I’m also on a small group looking at the issues surrounding circulating Kindles in the library, which has given me some experience with Kindles even though I didn’t go that way myself — because I couldn’t deal with the DRM issues, that just keep coming up.

At Menucha last year my colleague Terry recommended checking out the iPod touch as an e-reader, so that’s the way I went. Of course, that doesn’t mean avoiding DRM altogether, though Fictionwise’s might be softer. And also of course now Amazon owns Stanza, which is the Fictionwise-connected reader I have been using, so how much longer will that be true?

But beyond the DRM, the movie also reminded me of an issue I am having with the device itself. I have also noticed since using the Kindle for this project, that I am really having trouble using it because it doesn’t have a touch screen. I don’t know if it is because I am trained to use the touch screen on the iPod, or if that is just what we are coming to expect? But it’s been a while now and I keep trying to make that screen work by touching. I don’t think it’s going to get any better.

This, though, this looks like what’s fun about the Internet with books added back in. And as a book lover, I like that picture.