Category: learning

Behind the Paywall — Fugitive Practices: Learning in a Settler Colony

Citation

Leigh Patel (2019): Fugitive Practices: Learning in a Settler Colony, Educational Studies, DOI: 10.1080/00131946.2019.1605368.

Access Issues

Paywall: Taylor and Francis

None, really thanks to some information privilege.  The article is paywalled, obviously. It doesn’t show up in any of our indexes yet because it’s still an early article, not really published.  So I had to do the ILL request manually.  At this point, even the ILL request form no longer requires page numbers or anything else that would be hard with a preprint, so the main issue there was knowing that I needed to and could do it.

I submitted the request before logging onto Zoom for an online meeting, and had the article before the meeting was over.

TL;DR

This is a short article that is more a call to action than a traditional scholarly piece. Patel argues that educators and educational researchers should resist and reject dominant narratives about learning (narratives that are infused and sustained by settler colonialism) to see the practices that create real learning — learning that sustains in the face of violent erasure and dehumanization — which are there in what has been erased.

And here we go…

“The stories that individuals tell about themselves, their people, their nation, other people, and success or failure all have material force in the shape and functions that institutions perform in society.” — page 1

Patel starts by giving a whirlwind summary of U.S. history, national-narrative style — one that starts with religious-freedom seeking European settlers and ends with Barack Obama’s election marking the end of racism.  In between we touch on westward expansion, American exceptionalism, bootstraps and rugged individuals, melting pots, freedom and this land of opportunity.

Slavery is in there, but mostly as an unfortunate (and past) period of time. Settler colonialism is “rarely mentioned” and flourishes in that silence. 

Patel pulls out a few key characteristics of this story: it is linear and progressive — concepts illustrated perfectly by American Progress, a painting so perfect you probably thought of it when you heard “westward expansion” even if you didn’t know what it was called.  It is also a story that is built on, names and entrenches what Patel calls “hierarchies of humanness.” And, of course, in the American story we have to start with the fact that these hierarchies are historically and currently racial

“The perpetuation of the myth that race is biological categorically served the purposes of rendering Black, Indigenous and other people of color as belonging to groups that were less than human.” — page 3.

After this introduction, we go on to dig into some of these concepts as Patel establishes the theoretical lenses we need, starting with settler colonialism and education. 

ERASE and REPLACE

Drawing on Veracini, 2011 Patel describes these as the “core concept and organizing principle” of settler colonialism, and then she digs deeper into the ways that settler colonialism shapes our understanding of: how we know what we know, what counts as knowing, and the policy and practice built on this shared epistemology.  Key elements to this epistemology include:

  • Property has value;  knowledge is property.
  • Achievement is individual.
  • Learning is linear and progressive.

Think about how an epistemology that reflects values rooted in land — as an interconnected, living, life-giving, shared thing — would shift our understanding of learning, achievement and knowledge.

So that brings us to the second lens, learning as fugitive. 

Patel uses descriptions of the many ways that enslaved peoples shared teaching and learning in secret, when being literate was illegal for them. And while some of this fugitivity is about those concrete practices, some of it is about shared epistemology –how people in this context knew what they knew — starting from a recognition that the truth is not always what is taught, that those national histories that that say some are lesser than and erase others, are not unassailable truth even as they are presented as such.

This fugitivity, this resistance, is not just an individual thing. Dominant cultures are dominant, but they are not the only. There are counternarratives and countercultures that exist at the same time, and these are seen in individuals and communities and in activism and social movements, movements that are frequently sparked and carried forward by young people.

Which brings us to the call to action…

Educational researchers (and educators) should shift away from questions of achievement, grounded in the individualist, property-focused progressivism of settler colonialism, towards questions that focus on what learning really is.  And she further argues that the moment we are living in makes this shift essential — “an imperative moment.” She doesn’t deny that this kind of shift could never be neutral or safe and she argues that the risks she’s talking about aren’t romantic, but necessary.

Educational studies scholars can bring in the history, the contextual accuracy of settler state desires, and raise up the authentic and purposeful learning that has been passed from generation to generation. — page 8

Key references: 

Harney, S. & Moten, F. 2013. The undercommons: Fugitive planning and black study.

Mignolo, W.D. 2012. Local histories/ global designs: Coloniality, subaltern knowledges, and border thinking. Princeton University Press. 

Sleeter, C.E. 2017. Critical race theory and the whiteness of teacher education. Urban Education, 52(2), 155-169. 

  • This is paywalled (though it might be available out there perhaps on one of those for-profit scholarly social article places) BUT the author has done an open summary here on her blog.

Veracini, L. 2011. Introducing: Settler colonial studies. Settler Colonial Studies, 1(1), 1-12.  (PDF at the Swinburne University of Technology repository)

Wynter, S. 2003. Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Toward the human, after man, its overrepresentation — An argument. CR: The New Centennial Review, 3(3), 257-337. 

  • This is paywalled but it might be out there if you did some searching, I mean maybe.  BUT there is an extensive discussion of this article out there on the Always Already critical theory podcast.  I haven’t listened to it, but hey, that’s pretty cool.

Again with curiosity (Library Instruction West 2014)

So, not only was this conference in Portland but it was also awesome.  Thanks one more time to Joan Petit, Sara Thompson, and the rest of the conference committee who put on such a great event.

Marijuana Legalization Papers Got You Down?  You Won’t Believe What We Did About It!

Hannah Gascho Rempel & Anne-Marie Deitering (OSU Libraries & Press)

Title slide for a presentation. The word curiosity is displayed across the top. Several images of sparks are below.

Download the slides (PDF)

Download the slides + presenter notes (PDF)

Session handout

Take the Curiosity Self Assessment

Scoring Guide to the Curiosity Self Assessment

 

thoughts about learning sparked by that note taking study

Remember a couple of weeks ago when news articles like this, or this or this were all over your social media?  Mine too.  I’m a little late to replying, but I didn’t want to do it until I’d read the actual study.  I read a couple of the news articles and something about the coverage was bugging me.  Me, an avowed taking-notes-by-hand-notetaker!  

Today, I read it, and I think I know what’s been bugging me.  It’s that when we didn’t have the tools that make things easy, we learned a lot, so the tools are bad narrative.

In other words, the technology (in this case, a pen) puts up a barrier, and what we have to do to get around that barrier turns out to be a useful learning experience.  We learn new skills because we’re motivated to get around the barrier, and we don’t even really notice we’re learning them because we have our eyes on the prize.

So when a new technology comes that removes the barrier we love it and adopt it, but worry about everyone who isn’t going have the important experience of getting over the barrier.  Or worse, we look at those who grew up without the barrier and decide that they’re deficient in some way.

Does this sound familiar?  Of course it does.  How many times have we heard variations of it in libraries?  A million?  A zillion?

The problem with ____________ is that students don’t learn how to _____________ anymore.

First, a quick recap of the study

(I crack myself up, it won’t be all that quick)

Context:  There are 2 main theories about the value of notetaking that were considered here:

  • External storage — this is the idea that notes give you something to study later.
  • Encoding — this is the idea that the cognitive work you do to turn information into notes improves your learning, even if you don’t review them again.

Since laptops enable a more transcription-like type of  notetaking, the authors hypothesize that they will find benefits to pen-and-paper notetaking over laptop-supported notetaking and they designed 3 related studies to test that:

Study 1 — let’s compare laptop notetaking to paper notetaking, without doing much else.

2 groups of students were asked to take notes on the same material, with no instruction on how to take notes.  They were randomly assigned laptops or pen/paper to do the task. Afterwards, they answered both factual/recall and conceptual/application questions about the material.  In addition, their notes were coded and analyzed by the researchers.

Both groups of students did about the same on the factual/recall questions, but the students who took notes by hand did significantly better on the conceptual/application questions.

Those who took notes in longhand wrote fewer words, and had fewer examples of direct transcription in their notes.

Study 2 — let’s do pretty much the same thing, but this time we’ll tell them not to transcribe.

So this time the students essentially did the same thing, but the students who got laptops were split into two groups.  One of those were told to take notes as they usually do, the other was also told that studies show transcription doesn’t work, and that they shouldn’t transcribe.

In this case, the differences between the groups were less significant, but the handwritten notes group still did better.  There was no difference in the laptop groups — inserting a paragraph telling students “don’t transcribe” didn’t have an effect.

Study 3 — this time, we’ll have them study the notes again later.

Instead of TED talks, four prose paragraphs were selected and then read by a grad student from a teleprompter to simulate a lecture. The paragraphs included 2 “seductive details” — information that is interesting but not useful. Students were told they’d be tested later before they took their notes.  Again, some were given laptops and some were given pen and paper.  A week later they came back, half were given the chance to study their notes for 10 minutes, half weren’t.

The results here were more complicated.  You have to look at the intersection between notetaking medium and study time to find significant differences.  Those who took longhand notes and studied did better than any other group of conditions. Additionally, among those who studied, verbatim notetaking and transcription negatively affected performance.

Okay, enough recap, on to my thoughts:

(For more details about the study — see the end of the post. It’s paywalled, so I’m feeling responsible for making sure you have the details the news articles don’t include)

I want to start off by saying that I don’t have a problem with this study – I think it’s useful, I think it’s interesting, and I am fairly certain I will come back to it again and use it in real life.  My issue is with the conclusions that have been drawn from it — mostly in all of those news stories, but also by most of the people who tweeted, facebooked or tumblr-ed those articles.

Reading the actual study – there’s nothing in there that says much about the medium.  Beyond the fact that most people type faster than they write, and therefore can get closer to transcription on a laptop, there’s really nothing at all.  What the study found was that if you transcribe, you don’t learn as well and, as they point out themselves, we knew that already.

See, I don’t think the takeaway is “don’t take notes with laptops.”  I think the takeaway is — we have to start teaching people how to take notes. Better yet, we have to start teaching people how to use the information they gain from lectures, videos, infographics, textbooks, readings and learning objects.

There’s definitely no way one could consider the Just Say No to Transcription intervention in Study #2 “teaching” — this study surely did not prove that people can’t take good notes with laptops, it only suggested that they don’t.

There’s nothing magical about taking notes by hand that makes people process and think and be cognitively aware of what they’re doing — if that’s all you have and you want  good notes, over time you will figure that out because you can’t write fast enough to transcribe.  But that’s not magic, it’s motivation.  It’s still a learned behavior, even if the teacher could remain blissfully unaware of that learning.

And when we learned how subject headings worked, or that we could find more sources by using the bibliography at the end of the book, or that the whole section where that one book was had interesting stuff, or that both the article title and the journal title were important — learning that stuff wasn’t the point and we might not have noticed that learning.  But we learned how to think like the people who organized and used the information because learning that was the fastest and easiest way to getting our papers done.

(Hey, do you think that when copy machines were invented, and we could just make a copy of the article instead of having to read, digest and take notes on it in the library people argued for No Copy Machines?)

Even if we take laptops out of the classroom, I don’t think that students will feel like they have to learn how to think about, digest, remix and capture their thoughts about a lecture in order to function.  I think that ship has probably sailed, that horse is out of the barn, that genie’s out of the bottle.

If a student knows they can record the lectures on their phone, or if the slidedeck and lecture notes are posted before every class, they’re not going to feel like they have to get it down or risk failure.  And if the lectures are already recorded and re-watchable in a flipped or online class — they’re not going to suddenly think they need to be flexing their best cognitive muscles because they have a pen in their hand.

I don’t hear the “put the barriers back up” when it comes to digital information from instruction librarians much anymore.  And I think it’s fair to say that I’m hearing it less from faculty too.  But I still worry when I see things like the coverage of this study — because it’s not like I disagree that things are getting lost when these barriers come down.  Skill type things, tacit knowledge type things and also habits of mind type things — the tools I had to work with as a young learner left me with a lot that still serves me well now, when I have better tools. If my students can’t learn those things the way I did – and they can’t — how will they?  I don’t think answers like “ban laptops,” or “just use a pen” are going to get them what they need.

Study details

Mueller, P.A. & Oppenheimer, D.M. (2014). The pen is mightier than the keyboard: Advantages of longhand over laptop note taking. Psychological Science.  doi:10.1177/0956797614524581 Study 1

  • Princeton students.  n=67 (33 men, 33 women & 1 other).
  • Laptops had no internet connection.
  • Students watched 3 TED talks and took notes.  No instruction on taking notes.
  • Taken to another room to provide data:
    • complete 2 distractor tasks
    • complete 1 taxing working memory task
    • answer factual/recall questions
    • answer conceptual/application questions
    • provide demographic data
  • Notes were coded and analyzed.
  • Results:
    • factual/recall = both groups the same
    • conceptual/application = laptops significantly worse
    • more notes = positive predictor
    • less verbatim notes = positive predictor

Study 2

  • UCLA students
  • Laptop groups = 1 control (take notes as you normally would), 1 intervention – studies show that students who take notes verbatim don’t do as well on tests. Don’t do that.
  • Data:
    • Complete a typing test
    • Complete the Need for Cognition Scale
    • Complete Academic self-efficacy scales
    • Complete a shorter version of the reading span task
    • Complete the same dependent measures (questions) as study 1.
    • Demographic data
    • Notes were coded and analyzed
  • Longhand students did better, but not significantly.
  • None of the other measures had an effect
  • Longhand students took fewer notes than any of the laptop groups and took fewer verbatim notes.
  • Telling people not to take notes verbatim had no effect.

Study 3

  • UCLA students
  • 4 prose passages were read from a teleprompter by a grad student standing at a lectern simulating a lecture.
  • Students saw the lectures in big groups, wearing headphones
  • 2 “seductive details” — interesting, but not important information — were inserted into the prose passages.
  • Students were told they would be tested on the material before taking notes.
  • Tests were 1 week later.
  • Study group was given 10 minutes to study notes in advance of taking the tests.
  • Data:
    • 40 questions, 10 per lecture, 2 in each of five categories:  seductive details, concepts, facts, inferences, applications
    • notes were analyzed
  • No main effects of note taking medium or chance to study.
  • Significant interaction between note taking medium and chance to study.
  • Longhand notes + study = significantly better than any other condition.
  • For those who studied, verbatim negatively predicted performance.

Images

The new way of taking lecture notes. Some rights reserved by Natalie Downe (flickr) https://www.flickr.com/photos/nataliedowne/1558297/

reading my notes. Some rights reserved by gordonr (flickr) https://www.flickr.com/photos/gordonr/430546423/

pen. Some rights reserved by Walwyn (flickr) https://www.flickr.com/photos/overton_cat/2267349191/

Copycard. Some rights reserved by reedinglessons (flickr). https://www.flickr.com/photos/reedinglessons/5909073392/

Sailboat. Some rights reserved by jordaneileenlucas (flickr) https://www.flickr.com/photos/jordanlucas/4027830675/

So much more than you wanted to know about that one session on culturally relevant assessment

Just wish assessment acknowledged roles race/class/etc play in student learning outcomes. Not being able to pay for books affects learning.

— Emily Drabinski (@edrabinski) May 9, 2014

Guest Post! Speed friending in the Library

This is a guest post from my awesome colleague Laurie Bridges.  She’s been working hard over the last couple of years to expand and improve our outreach, instruction and programming for our very quickly growing international student population.

Laurie said that she had written up a lengthy description of her most recent innovation – a speed-friending event in the library that brings international students together with students from the U.S., so I asked her if she’d be willing to post it here.  She was, so here it is.

 

Librarian Laurie Bridges looking straight into the camera and smiling
Laurie Bridges, OSU Libraries & Press

Speed Friending!
Co-sponsored by the Valley Library & INTO OSU
Laurie Bridges (OSUL&P) and Mary Hughes (INTO OSU)

By Laurie Bridges, Instruction & Emerging Technologies Librarian

What we did

Approximately one year ago, I was passing through our University’s Memorial Union when I saw a poster advertising “Speed Friending.” The title, but none of the details, got lodged in my brain. Months later, while working with international students and listening to their stories, an idea popped into my head, “International students are in our library…maybe speed-friending would help them connect with domestic students.” I floated the idea by a few people, including Anne-Marie. Everyone I spoke with was supportive of the idea

(Note: it probably helped that our library’s strategic plan includes working toward “building community” within the library.)

To gather more information, and hopefully a plan, I contacted the Memorial Union to find out who had sponsored the speed-friending event the previous year. The staff looked through their calendar, and found no record of it. I then went online and googled “speed-friending” where I found a few mentions of the idea, some advertisements, but no information about how to organize and run such an event. Despite this setback, I mentioned the idea to a program manager at INTO OSU (our international English language program), Mary Hughes, and she was incredibly enthusiastic about the idea. We collaborated on the first event winter term, and held a second event spring term.

We plan to continue with one speed-friending event each term. In addition, the College of Business and the College of Engineering are meeting with Mary and I this summer, and may possibly host speed-friending events for their domestic and international students in the fall.

The most difficult part of the event is getting American students to register and then finding the “hook” to get them there; this is in large part why we offer free pizza and host the event in the evening around dinner time.

Why it matters

Libraries are often viewed as “safe” spaces on college and university campuses; they are spaces where students of all backgrounds come together to study and socialize. Libraries can and should have a role in helping students create an inclusive campus environment. We should all take steps to help prevent misunderstanding and create cultural bridges in our libraries.

After the jump

The rest of this post is my “brain dump” about the events, organizing, planning, and assessing. Hopefully this will help more campuses and librarians organize their own speed-friending events and improve on the format and structure we have created.

(And please, send any ideas you have for improvement: Laurie.Bridges @ oregonstate.edu).

students sitting on either side of a long, rectangular table laughing and talking
Photo courtesy of INTO OSU (Facebook)

Continue reading “Guest Post! Speed friending in the Library” →

on the Makerspaces thing

Unless there actually was a thing? This post isn’t about a specific thing, just about makerspaces and libraries.

I was at an event last week where a student from a local high school explained how his initial reaction to the word “maker” was that it was a buzzword, something not to be taken seriously.

And that was definitely my first reaction too. Even though I am a committed maker in that I make things and I make things a lot — makerspaces, maker culture, maker movement — these things just sound a little bit made up.

(I also tend to make things in that 19th century artisinal way that’s frequently mocked on Portlandia, not with 3-D printers, so there’s that)

What happened?

About a year ago when I had some money left from the allocation that comes with my professorship and a really smart colleague who wanted to explore makerspaces, I thought that sounded like a good idea.

And now, after she’s been exploring and doing stuff for a year with some more of our colleagues, I’m really, really glad we did that.

What did we do?  We bought a 3-D printer for the library, we found or started tons of conversations around campus, and we built the outreach cart I talked about last month to take it all on the road.

(And by “we,” I mean Margaret and the team she put together)

screenshot of the Oregon State University webcam showing the library's 3-D printer

That’s the webcam on our library 3-D printer.  The reaction to it has been pretty striking.  We have about 50 jobs in the print queue all the time, our students have been really excited, and the university put a webcam on it so y’all can watch it all day long if you want.

Poster advertising an April 2014 event at Oregon State called A Community of Makers
Flyer for A Community of Makers Event

Two weeks ago a lot of Margaret’s hard work turned into A Community of Makers — a keynote talk by OSU alum Travis Good followed by a lot of events bringing different campus and community groups together — including a Micro Maker Faire.

So why am i really, really glad — just because that event was fun and the 3-D printer has a bunch of stuff in the queue?

Well, certainly other people being excited is cool.  But it’s why they’re excited and how that excitement ties to some pretty core values of libraries that has me so happy.

Starting with something simple — the library is where people learn things.  That’s pretty basic, right?  I don’t have to explain or document that one?

books on a library shelf, with the title Metalcraft for Amateurs visible
metal working books in the OSU Libraries

We’ve always supported making stuff in the library.  We have cookbooks and knitting books and carpentry books.  With our books you can learn how to create historically accurate costumes, or edit digital videos.  You can learn how to build houses or how to build bridges. You can learn how to propagate seeds, build garden structures and preserve your harvest.  We have all that stuff – you probably have all that stuff – we have it even though we’re an academic library.

One piece from Travis Good’s talk that stuck with me was the idea that learning about things doesn’t look the same in a world where we have technology that makes us feel like we’re living the future plus a complex system of networked computers that makes it possible for us to share what we know in major new ways.  He acknowledged that making is not a new thing, but argued that in the past, making usually involved thousands of hours of apprenticeship and training, resulting in skills that were held by the few.

In some areas, technology now allows those skills to be shared by the many.  Using tools like 3-D printers, 3-D scanners and laser cutters, people can make things that used to take a different kind of skill/knowledge acquisition to make.  He argued that this accessible (to use) technology, plus the widespread availability of designs and patterns that have been shared on the Internet creates a world where people can jump in and play and learn by doing.

The library is the place where everybody can learn things.

And I mean this in a couple of ways —

We have a lot of 3-D printers on our campus already.  We’re not only a research university, we’re a land grant research university with a lot of emphasis on technology and applications for it – it’s not at all surprising that we have all of this equipment on our campus.

But like a lot of research universities, our campus is pretty siloed.  The colleges do their own thing, and our students quickly identify as much with their college as with the school as a whole.

round buttons with the slogan Choose Civility
Civility campaign buttons in the library lobby

A couple of years ago we launched the Civility Campaign — a campaign to raise awareness and start building a culture of civility within the library space.This campaign took off like I don’t think any of us really expected — it got a lot of campus-wide and state-wide attention, and students embraced it.  Or at least they collected the buttons.

About a year after the campaign started, I was sitting on some focus groups the library was having about a new strategic plan. One thing that came out of those really stayed with me — there were people who said that the civility campaign “could only have worked in the library.”

The suggestion there was that because so much of the campus is turfed out – owned by one group or another – there’d be politics and baggage inherent in any similar effort to have this kind of campaign.  Our campaign has at its heart the message that the library is a shared space, not owned by any one group and open to all — they argued this could only have worked in a space that walks that walk.

Believe it or not — that idea has come up again with the 3-D printer.  We have all of this technology out there.  Some of it siloed by policy.  Some isn’t – but it’s still siloed by practice, or by location.

Let’s face it – it’s  hard to picture a student from any college but the College of Engineering walking into a COE building and asking to use their 3-D printer, no matter how much COE makes their stuff open to all.  And that’s true for any College – not just Engineering.

Before we got the printer we asked students what they would like us to do with a newly opened space in the library learning commons, and 3-D printing was #2 on their list — even though we knew (though they may not have) that they could see and use this technology on campus already.  Putting it in the library means that it is everyone’s — and students are more comfortable figuring stuff out on something that’s theirs.

Right now, the excitement and wonder at the new technology is pretty universal — but pretty soon, I’m guessing that won’t be the case.

We have a big huge SmartBoard in the library classroom.  I was going to take a picture of it for this post but there was a class in there so I didn’t.  I don’t know what class it was, but I know they weren’t using that SmartBoard because we hardly ever use it anymore.  When we first got it though — most of our students had never seen such a thing as a screen you could control by touch. It was magical.

Within a couple of years, students at the better resourced high schools had seen SmartBoards already.  And of course now, lots of people have touchscreens in their pockets.

I can see this coming with 3-D printing.  Right now, everyone’s excited – hardly anyone has seen it in real life.  Pretty soon, students from the better resourced high schools will come in and they will have used one already in AP chemistry or Intro to Engineering or something.  Not long after that, students with means will have them in their homes.

But there will still be others who won’t have had those experiences — and who won’t get them from their home departments at OSU.  The library is about access and about making knowledge available to all — I think this is what it looks like now, at least some of the time.  No one is going to learn about this technology in a book – you learn about it by doing it.

I’ve had enough students tell me in the last month that seeing it was important to them — that the printer being in the library meant that they got to see it and play with it — that I’m sold.  Just seeing the printer in the library is important  to these students — seeing it and getting to try it out and play with it, even more so.

Context and Community

The other thing Margaret has been doing is starting and joining conversations around campus – bringing people together.  Like I said, we have a lot of siloed things happening on our campus — we also have a lot of partnerships and interdisciplinarity.  But the thing is, those usually only involve some of the players.

The conversations around 3-D printing have grown larger, and the conversations around making and learning by creating now include people from many colleges – from the humanities, social sciences and STEM fields.  And every time there’s another conversation a new potential player emerges.

At Menucha 2 years ago (that’s Pacific Northwest-speak for the ACRL-OR/WA Fall Conference) we were taking about the enduring values of librarianship in breakout sessions.  As the conference chair, I was flitting between groups and I landed on one that was talking about the enduring values of collections.

One thing that came up was how few spaces there are on a campus where the connections between fields and disciplines can be experienced — and that a traditional library collection provides one way of seeing those connections, particularly when it’s browsed.

This isn’t about the collection, or even the library space really — but that value – that broader view of knowledge and the connections within it – that’s a value that endures.  And that’s the value I’m seeing in these connections and conversations about makerspaces and learning by creating.  Everyone wants that connection to happen – everyone wants and understands the shared context – and the library – through its librarians – can provide the point that allows those swirling conversations to coalesce.

We’re an academic library, but we’re still our community’s library.  They still need us to be the place where everyone can learn, and where people come together.

We’re probably not going to build a makerspace tomorrow.  Or ever.  We don’t think that’s what our community needs from us.  There will likely be a makerspace on our campus, and soon — and the library will we right there.  Not in the stands, but on the ground, shaping what it becomes. And I’m excited about that.

Shiny! Our new outreach cart

Our new outreach cart
Our new outreach cart

You know how to brighten up the Friday of Dead Week?  Getting your new outreach cart delivered to your office!  Even better? Getting it hand-delivered by the senior Engineering students who designed and built it from scratch with their own hands!

We were inspired in part by the Mobile Library cart at Claremont colleges. The initial inspiration came from the small group we have exploring makerspaces and maker culture.  That group is headed up by my colleague Margaret, who really deserves most of the credit fort this project.  She developed the initial plan and proposal here, and talked to people all over the library to figure out all of our requirements.  We found out that the OSU Press unit had an interest in it as an outreach tool, a number of our teaching librarians would use it to participate in outreach events around campus as well as the the Maker group, which has plans to do popup maker spaces.

Display area in front, storage in back

Students in the School of  Mechanical, Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering at OSU complete a Senior Capstone design project. They choose from a pool of projects that have been submitted, and then work in groups with the clients who submitted the projects to bring the final product to life.  Margaret created the proposal for this cart and submitted it to the school for consideration.  We were lucky enough to have one of the groups choose our project.  Margaret met with them throughout the process, answering questions as they came up and managing the sometimes complicated financial end of things (we paid for the project out of the research and project fund attached to my professorship).

Battery + power

You can see the display area across the front for Press books, 3-D printed objects, or whatever.  It’s lockable, if needed.

There’s a battery in there too.  It has power enough to run a laptop, and to support the maker activities.  Although, we were told that its ability to run a hair dryer for long “depends on the hair dryer.”

It’s waterproof.  We are in western Oregon after all.  The students tested it by pouring water on it for several minutes – to simulate a steady and significant rain.

Along the back side, there’s a storage drawer and a pretty significant storage cupboard for maker materials, extra books, a laptop, the 3-D printer – whatever is needed.

I’m so excited – they did such a great job. And it’s pretty cool to have something to support learning that was itself the product of a significant learning experience.  But, at the end of the day, the best part of the whole thing is always getting to meet the students.  Because they’re awesome.  And this is a public thank-you to Margaret for making it happen and for including me in that part of it.

Before you tell me not to take notes

Don’t.

I mean it.  Please don’t. Just don’t.

You’re not encouraging me to engage with your talk; you’re not making your class more fun or easier for me.

hand writing math notes with a green stylus on a tablet computer
some rights reserved by Viking Photography (flickr)

I need to take notes, preferably by hand. These days that means with a tablet and stylus.   I use a tablet and keyboard when I forget and bring the bad stylus and in meetings. And in some situations, I post notes on Twitter.

When you tell me not to do any or all of those things, you’re actually alienating me. You’re making me feel unwelcome. And you’re stressing me out.

(And if any part of your talk has to do with reaching all learners – you’ve lost me already)

Don’t misunderstand.  I’m not saying that everyone should take notes.  I’m not saying that anyone but me should take notes.  I’m not going to project my preferences and my learning habits on to you — I’m just asking that you don’t project yours on to me.

Here’s a secret.  My brain is a super busy place. Not always a productive or focused place. Seriously, say one interesting thing and I am off to the races. It doesn’t even have to be interesting, really. Even something that just reminds me of something that’s interesting will do.

handwritten mindmap describing faceted classification including circles squares arrows and text
some rights reserved by Jason-Morrison (flickr)

(Okay, that probably isn’t much of a secret)

And I’m not complaining about this. I spend a lot of time in my brain and most of the time, I like it there. I like to think. I get excited by ideas and connections. I get an almost visceral thrill when thoughts snap into place.

And don’t take this the wrong way, but there’s almost nothing you can do, no amount of humor or engaging activities you can build in, that will be more fun or compelling to me than thinking about what you say. The more awesome you are? The more I want to play with your ideas.

Taking notes is how I stay grounded in your thoughts. Taking notes is how I stay present. Taking notes keeps me from chasing my thoughts down those intellectual rabbit holes right now – I wrote a note, I drew a star and a circle and an arrow to the other thing, I can relax now and go back to it later.

And I know you’ve given me a handout or put up a website with all your references on it. I really appreciate it – I do! I do this too. Who wants to be scrambling to write down sources and links? I don’t, but I’m going to write down the why, and draw the circles and the arrows to show how they fit in and work for me.

(And if I ever gave you the impression I didn’t want you to take notes when I pointed out the URL for one of those resource lists – I’m sorry. That’s not what I meant!)

Man with wedding ring scanning a handwritten notebook page into Evernote with his cell phone
some rights reserved by Evernote (flickr)

If it makes you feel better, I even take notes when I’m alone. I couldn’t start reading on my tablet until I figured out a note taking workflow.

For marginalia and highlighting, that’s PDF + stylus + Notability, if you’re interested. But there’s also my Evernote moleskine, which I use to create my holding pen notes — a writing trick I learned from Vicki Tolar Burton that I also use now for reading.

The holding pen is basically a place to put all of those questions and thoughts I don’t want to lose, but which will keep me from reading to the end of the article (or writing this paragraph or section) in the time I have if I don’t put them somewhere —

This might explain that theme we pulled out of the interviews, but I can’t remember exactly what she said. Argh, didn’t that Juarez paper I read last year dealt with this trait. Hey, Laurie’d be interested in this to help turn that one project into a paper idea. Oh, maybe that term will work better in PsycINFO. OMG that’s a good example to use in class. Wait, no, I don’t think that’s what she was really arguing in that book. Ooh, that methodology might work for me with the other study.

Basically, I’ve been doing this a long time – learning in classes, in workshops, from books and texts, in lectures and presentations. I’ve had decades at this point to figure out how to make learning work for me, and while there’s always more to learn, I need you to trust me that I know what I’m doing, and to remember that for some of us, engagement looks a little different.

FYE Conference – notes and links

ETA – Presentation slides (they’re image heavy, and only moderately helpful, but here they are)

Information Literacy

Learning the Ropes: How Freshmen Conduct Course Research Once they Enter College. Alison Head/ Project Information Literacy. December 2013. (PDF)

The Citation Project Pilot study. Howard, Rebecca Moore, Tanya K. Rodrigue, and Tricia C. Serviss. “Writing from Sources, Writing from Sentences.” Writing and Pedagogy 2.2 (Fall 2010): 177-192.

Rempel, H. G., Buck, S., & Deitering, A. M. (2013). Examining Student Research Choices and Processes in a Disintermediated Searching Environment. portal: Libraries and the Academy. 13(4), 363-384.

Kim, K. S., & Sin, S. C. J. (2007). Perception and selection of information sources by undergraduate students: effects of avoidant style, confidence, and personal control in problem-solving.The Journal of Academic Librarianship. 33(6), 655-665. (Elsevier paywall)

Curiosity

Curiosity Self-Assessment  – try it yourself!

Scoring Guide

Based on:
by Jordan A. Litman & Mark V. Pezzo (2007). In Personality and Individual Differences 43 (6): 1448–1459.
by Jordan A. Litman & Charles D. Spielberger (2003) in Journal of Personality Assessment 80 (1) (February): 75–86.
by Robert P. Collins, Jordan A. Litman & Charles D. Speilberger (2004) in Personality and Individual Differences 36 (5): 1127-1141

Exploration

What we used in FYC:

WR 121 LibGuide

Science Daily

EurekAlert!

Twitter (for example: @HarvardResearch, @ResearchBlogs, @ResearchOSU)

Creating an embeddable twitter timeline (we are using the List Timeline option)

Mapping OSU Research – Google map

7 Ways to Make a Google Map Using Google Spreadsheets.  Note: ours is made by hand right now – but there might be interest in these options.

Other possibilities:

Newsmap — treemap style visualization of Google News.

Tiki-Toki — timeline generator

TimelineJS (integrated with Google Spreadsheets)

Good Library Assignments – The Outcome

So remember when I said that the 3-part Good Library Assignments brain dump was in preparation of a workshop? That was true.

And I’ve done the workshop a few times now and I’ve completed the accompanying materials.  Both of these are (obviously) intended for a faculty-librarian audience and both are entirely shareable.

There’s a LibGuide.  This was created as the “further reading” site for the workshop. It includes that information, as well as the slides and a transcript from the actual presentation.

Effective Research Assignments – LibGuide

There’s also a WordPress site where you can find sample assignments. Many of these are from Catherine Pellegrino and the awesome people at Saint Mary’s College.

Sample Assignments

Shameless begging – if you know of/ have used an activity or assignment that reflects these principles, would you share it?  I’ll totally be your best friend.