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Update on the New Job

This past week I started my new job with Manchester University as the Instruction & Emerging Technologies Librarian. So far I'm loving it! The people I am working with in the library are amazingly nice and helpful and have welcome me and my pregnancy with genuine happiness (if you're coming to this news late - yep...the hubs and I are expecting in March!). I couldn't be more thrilled! The job itself is starting to pick up, and from the looks of it, I'm going to have a very full fall semester. So far, here's what I've been up to:

- I am the subject liaison to the schools of Business and Accounting, Education, and Exercise & Sports Science. I've been learning the pertinent databases that fit each of those areas, and soon I will be updating the online research guides with new content.
- I am also in charge of coordinating, scheduling, and instructing the majority of the first year seminar sessions (and eventually I will be teaching this as a full course). The instruction sessions are basic first-year research sessions, so it shouldn't require too much work since I did a lot of that with Harrison.
- I am in charge of implementing a chat reference service and a text reference service. Texting will be rolled out immediately and chat will follow for the spring semester. I've started getting coding together for the website and preparing for the launch.
- I am also responsible for setting up a campus-wide distribution of the Firefox browser in order to install zotero (a citation generator and management tool)
- Finally, I've been working to update our library Facebook page. It needs quite a bit of work!

In terms of instruction, after sending out the first email batch to faculty, I already have scheduled on my calendar more instruction sessions than I ever had with Harrison - all within a 2 hour time frame! This was just for the first year students and doesn't even count the subject liaison areas ... So needless to say, I will be a busy busy woman! But I'm loving it! I really feel like this will be a good fit for me and I am excited to see what new projects I'm able to get my hands on.
Posted by Rebecca Johnson 2 comments


One Chapter Closes: Another One Begins

In two weeks, I will be transitioning into a new position as an Instruction & Emerging Technologies Librarian with Manchester University. While I'm excited about this new venture, I have been busy busy tying up lose ends with my current job at Harrison College. As such, I thought I'd reminisce a bit in order to chronicle some of what I've learned and accomplished over the past 2 years.

When I came to Harrison, I had never been in an academic setting as a librarian - but I knew that's where I wanted to be long term. I had worked in just about every department in the public library system which helped me to gain lots of experience, but I knew I ultimately wanted to be working with students and research and technology. In some ways, I was lucky to have a friend and previous coworker who was already working here. While that helped me get my foot in the door - I am indebted to Harrison for giving me the opportunity to grow as a librarian, as a teacher, as a mentor, and as a person!

Over the last two years I have been able to:
-Develop a classroom instruction strategy that leans on the participatory side of learning.
-Come alongside faculty by developing a faculty development program that focuses on incorporating emerging and web 2.0 technologies in their classrooms (based on the 23 Things program).
-Pilot one of the first flipped classrooms with my Information Literacy course.
-Present for multiple conferences (a first for me!).
-Collaborate on projects and committees with the other amazing librarians on our Harrison team.
-Write a guest post for the Free Tech 4 Teachers blog that literally thousands of educators read!

There's been more - but these are the major highlights. And with these accomplishments, I'm looking forward to trying some of them within my new role. Change is always difficult at first, but after the transition, I know I'll be right at home! I'll miss all of my librarian friends here too - but thankfully technology is a powerful thing that helps us to stay in touch better than ever before!

So as a chapter closes - an exciting new chapter begins!

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Articles Read This Week (weekly)

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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Articles Read This Week (weekly)

  • Academic Librarians As Campus Hubs

    Very interesting article brainstorming ways to continue making connections with other higher Ed depertments.

    tags: article read librarians higher ed higher education

  • Understanding Web 2.0 Embed Codes | Mark Brumley

    This article includes an amazing video where I learned so many new things! For instance:

    * I didn't know that within a YouTube embed code, the YouTube link can be copied/pasted into a browser and it will open in full screen mode!
    * The same thing can be done with a slideshare presentation by locating the src code link within the embed code.
    * Prezi? Yep same thing...but a little more complicated. Locate the src code. You'll have to do a little bit of adding... copy to the .swf within the src area. Type a question mark (?) in order to ask what file should be loaded, and then copy the information in between quotation marks from the flashvars section (prezi_id...). Add this copied information to the front half of the URL and you're set to load the link full screen!

    tags: article read Web2.0 codes embed codes

  • Library Instruction: No More Lecturing, No More ‘Death by PowerPoint’ « Mr. Library Dude

    Great ideas for first-year research instruction

    tags: article read library instruction

  • Online Courses Can Offer Easy A's via High-Tech Cheating - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education

    I'm a huge supporter of Google Docs for group project collaboration. I never would have guessed that it would be used for cheating purposes, but it makes sense. 

    tags: article read higher education cheating chronicle

    • Mr. Smith figured out that the actual number of possible questions in the test bank was pretty small. If he and his friends got together to take the test jointly, they could paste the questions they saw into the shared Google Doc, along with the right or wrong answers. The schemers would go through the test quickly, one at a time, logging their work as they went. The first student often did poorly, since he had never seen the material before, though he would search an online version of the textbook on Google Books for relevant keywords to make informed guesses. The next student did significantly better, thanks to the cheat sheet, and subsequent test-takers upped their scores even further. They took turns going first. Students in the course were allowed to take each test twice, with the two results averaged into a final score.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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Articles Read This Week (weekly)

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Daily Library Technology and Education Links (weekly)

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Daily Library Technology and Education Links 05/23/2012

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Daily Library Technology and Education Links 05/21/2012

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Daily Library Technology and Education Links 05/20/2012

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Daily Library Technology and Education Links 05/19/2012

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Daily Library Technology and Education Links 05/18/2012

  • What Really Matters to Working Students - Do Your Job Better - The Chronicle of Higher Education

    The comments are actually more interesting than the article itself. Many of the comments hit on the issues that I see with "coddling" students through their education. At the end of the day...the students that have gumption are the students who will succeed - both in their classes, as well as in their career.

    tags: library chronicle students education higher education

    • But, are you really doing them a favour by allowing their outside interests to dictate how or whether they attend the classes they have signed up for?

    • But students who make it a habit of not showing up for class (such as the student who attended a class only 6 times in 11 weeks) because she had "business to attend to" is going to fail in the real world. An employer is NOT going to accept "I had business to attend to" as a reason for showing up to work 50% of the time. The student should have been advised to drop the class and re-enroll when she was ready to actually devote the time necessary to take the class.

        

      Remember, you aren't just teaching your subject, you are teaching personal responsibility (something that is becoming less and less common), time management and other real life skills.

      • I have felt the same way; however, if a student takes the time to contact me vs. the student who just falls off the face of the earth, I'm more apt to work with the student that contacts me regularly regarding their issues!
    • The problem for me is that students constantly want accommodations, and it is really hard for me to tell which student truly has a life event vs. those who simply didn't do the work and want more time.
    • And there is one final problem, which is a big one. I teach material that is difficult and that builds - you can't do the second assignment unless you have completed and understood the first one. When a students gets significantly behind, whether it is due to a family  emergency, working too many hours, or simply partying too much, it is extremely likely that he or she will not be able to complete the course requirements by the end of the semester. I have seen it happen over and over.
      • Another issue with INF1100
      • And I personally think this is where Harrison has dropped the ball. Time management and other necessary skills that will enable success should be taught in Strategies!
    • I'm left with the impression that they may view college as a burden and not a privilege or an honor.
    • Balancing school and work requires a high degree of organization and time management. It's *hard* - but not *impossible* especially if students spend less time watching television and less time engaged in social interaction with friends. Improved time management may help resolve some of their issues.

  • 100 Web 2.0 Tools Every Teacher Should Know About | Edudemic

    A comprehensive list of web 2.0 technologies for classroom use. This could be very useful for a faculty development program!

    tags: library webtools education web2.0 web tools edtech

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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Daily Library Technology and Education Links 05/17/2012

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Synching Diigo & Blogger & Saving From iPhone to Diigo

From Evernote:

Synching Diigo & Blogger & Saving From iPhone to Diigo
Recently I've been cleaning up a Diigo setting that allows me to post Diigo links automatically to my blog. You can see an example posting of the most recent posting here: Daily Library Technology and Education Links . As I was cleaning up the auto post, I got to thinking that there may be someone out there that doesn't know about this feature (or Diigo for that matter); so I wanted to share!

First of all, Diigo is a social bookmarking site that allows you to save and annotate bookmarks. Annotation options include sticky notes, bookmarking, and highlighting features. I switched to Diigo when delicious was up in the air as to whether their service would remain in tact. I've even gone so far as to have my students submit their annotated bibliography assignments in Diigo as well (which worked EXTREMELY well!). All this to say, I have been an avid user of this tool for quite some time...and I wanted a way to automatically post specified links to my blog. 

When logged into http://www.diigo.com, you will see a Tools section at the top right of your window. There are a whole slew of features available, and for our purposes of posting links to a blog, you're looking for the Web Services section in order to choose Auto blog post. 

It's a fairly simple process. Once you've added your blog URL, it should validate without problems (you will have to enter your blogger username and password in order to complete this process).
Once you're validated, to the right you will need to click the option to Add a new job.Give it a name (this will be what the title of your blog post will be each time you auto post), include Diigo tags that you want posted to your blog (for instance, my tag of choice is library. Any link that has library as a tag will be auto posted), and I would suggest leaving the drop-down defaults as is. From here, decide your frequency of posting. Do you want a daily post? Or once a week? You decide - and then give it the time that you would like it to be posted (mine is set for 8am). Submit the job and you're done!

Now, the last thing I mentioned in the title of this post is saving to Diigo from your iPhone. I do a lot of reading on my phone; whether that's reading Twitter posts, or Google Reader feeds, I'm constantly finding links that I want to save, or articles that I want to read later. For those articles that I want to read later, I'm using Pocket (formerly ReadItLater) http://getpocket.com/ (now I just have to remember to go back and read them!). For saving to Diigo, it's a little more intense to get it set up.

I went through this method:
1) Follow this link to open Diigo for iPhone instructions: http://blog.diigo.com/2009/01/09/how-to-post-bookmarks-to-diigo-on-iphone/
2) Scroll to the comments section and click the long Javascript link (it will fail to load...that's ok).
3) Click the Share button in your browser to save this link as a bookmark.
4) In the bookmark area, change the title to reflect something like: Post to Diigo
5) You can't edit the link yet, so click Save
6) Open your bookmarks section of your browser and click Edit
7) Click your Post to Diigo link (don't click the red delete option)
8) Place your cursor on the link right after the question mark and delete everything preceeding (including the question mark).
9) Click Done

From here, you must be logged into your Diigo account, but any link you wish to save will take you to the Diigo bookmarking area where you can add a description and any tags that you wish to include.

Hopefully you've found something useful here - I personally like the easy work flow it has allowed me to have!
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Daily Library Technology and Education Links 05/16/2012

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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Library Links (weekly)

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Grading with Jing: Part of My Flipped Classroom Experience

From Evernote:

Back in January, I wrote a post on the Flipped Classroom method and how I planned to incorporate that type of instruction with the Information Literacy course that I teach. I haven't updated on that in quite some time (saving that for another blog post), but it's going extremely well! My post for today touches on how I'm grading some of my research assignments using a combination of Diigo and Jing. Keep reading for more info:

My students have an annotated bibliography due as their final project; but there's one issue that I continue to run into time and time again - students search for their information (websites, journal articles, and books), but they have trouble saving their sources to retrieve later. I toyed with the idea of going paperless and trying to find a way that students could save their work as they search but still be able to add notes and comments. The natural vote would be to use something like Zotero. And I tried that one quarter and ran into quite a few problems... 1) At the time, I had administrative rights and tried downloading Firefox myself to each computer lab desktop. That's fine well and good if I'm logged in...but students couldn't see it under their own log ins. 2) I then turned to the portable firefox option. The only problem was... I only tested it under my account. It worked like a charm, but immediately when the students tried to access portable firefox from their flash-drive under their student log in, an administrative rights error occurred. 

I then had to think on my feet and decided to log into a select few computers under my own log in. This worked fine, but students had to work in groups and they really couldn't save their own work for later use. It was a disaster to say the least!

So, for this quarter, I decided to go a different route and use a social bookmarking tool (Diigo). Students created individual accounts, installed the Diigolet toolbar (a bookmarklet) and went to town saving their sources as they searched. It has worked PERFECTLY! Below is a screenshot of a website being saved, but it also works with databases (extremely well with EBSCO), and our OPAC. 
You can see in the image to the left that students are required to give an APA citation for the source they find, and then to provide a summary that details what the article entails. All they give me is their Diigo url (the formula is http://www.diigo.com/user/usernamegoeshere) and I can instantly see their work and grade it accordingly.

And speaking of grading, that's really what this post is supposed to focus on. I toyed with how I was going to officially grade from the Diigo url's. 
1) Do I try to comment within Diigo? I never could find a feasible way to do this without opening a diigo group...and I didn't want an extra step for my students (I'm using the K.I.S.S. method!)
2) Do I refer to their Diigo url and then type specific comments into our LMS? This seemed like an ok option, but it also seemed to defeat the purpose of using Diigo...I wanted to find a way to look at their work and grade it on the same page.

Enter Jing! I love love love Jing. I use it every day...multiple times a day. I rarely use Jing as a video screencasting tool - mainly I utilize it as a screencapturing tool that allows me to annotated a screen image. With each Diigo assignment, I'm only grading 3 sources at a time, so generally that fits nicely within one browser window. I can easily capture the whole page and then start marking it up with arrows and text. Here's an example to the left.

It's so so easy! Jing allows you the capability of saving the image to your computer, copying and pasting, or - my favorite - sharing via a screencast link. This is what I send my students (the link that is). They're able to click the link, read my comments, and immediately know what sources I'm referring to because it's visual. 

That's it for now - more tips coming soon from my flipped classroom experience!
Posted by Rebecca Johnson 6 comments


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Addicted to Google Docs

From Evernote:


I recently read an article detailing how to create a fully customizable online statistics form using Google Docs. I've been an avid Google Docs user for quite some time, but it's mainly been for collaborating on documents or for hosting my course assignments. About a year ago, I discovered Gdoc Forms (I used this feature to create a contact form for faculty to request library instruction sessions). Since then, I have created online quizzes (a script by the name of flubaroo will grade the quizzes for you!), a competency tracker, and a statistics tracker thanks to this article!

Below is an example of the form I created.
If you look closely, you'll see that nothing is required for each submission. This allows you the freedom to choose multiple categories if needed. So far, I've been able to use the Notes field to track specific research questions I receive (perfect for collection development tracking), as well as tracking specific titles of ILL requests (including the shipping cost that needs to be tracked).

And speaking of tracking, that's one thing that this article lacked instruction in. I fully understood how to set up my form, but I couldn't logistically figure out how to compile everything at the end of the month. Did I want to keep the same form all year round? Should I create multiple forms for each month? Will it be easy enough to create graphs for the monthly report?

If you're curious to know how to maximize your forms, keep reading! 

1) I decided to create my form template and make 12 copies - one for each month of the year. This will allow me to easily go back if need be to view the raw statistics. The template also includes a workbook devoted to graphs (more on that later)

2) When you submit something to the form, it's automatically placed within a Gdoc spreadsheet. Here's an example:
You can see the time stamp on the far left which is VERY handy when tracking when questions are coming in each day for coverage-sake. I'm also wanting to know In-Person questions vs. Chat vs. Email vs. Phone. You can see 1 Email option (line 4) stuck in there.

3) At the end of the month, it's super easy to compile all areas by using the Show Summary of Responses feature:

4) It's then super easy to either copy the graphs that are automatically generated here - OR - you can use Google's graph function within the spreadsheet itself. In my new workbook (on the same spreadsheet as the form itself), I have a template that's used to transfer the numbers per category:

I then highlight everything here and create a nice pie graph:
I also took time to create a graph using the time stamp material:
All in all, I can have all my statistics and graphs compiled in under 30 minutes (whereas before it took me an entire day to compile it all).

If you choose to try this, I'd love to hear what tweaks you make to enhance the workflow!
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Library Links (weekly)

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Flipping the Classroom and Other Projects

Flipped Classroom
Hello Blog...it's been awhile!

I have been extremely busy since my last post in November. Finishing touches were made to my Harrison 2.0: 23 Things for Faculty Development program (with my colleague Erin). We are super excited with the participation so far and are looking forward to monitoring discussion and ideas as the Winter progresses (more information on the program will come soon).

In addition to taking a 12-day vacation (with total relaxation!), I have been working on finalizing plans to flip my classroom for this quarter. If you're not familiar with that term, start Here; then take a look at a better developed curation Here.

Background
The course that I teach (Information Literacy) lends itself to heavy interaction with hands-on activities. In previous quarters, I have run into issues where I would lecture...moving extremely fast through the material for time-sake...and then would have 1 good in-class activity only to find there wasn't any time left for questions or further hands-on research.

Enter the Flipped Classroom Idea
I first got a taste of this concept with the Kahn Academy's TED Talk. It seemed to make sense and in the Fall of 2011, I started making plans to officially flip my classroom (a form of blended learning). Tonight, I was doing a bit of reading in my RSS reader and came across two items that have further peaked my interest:

1) This post, by Andy Schwen made me think... there's GOT to be a way to have Google Docs do this without having to pay for a 3rd party app to work within an already free system.

2) Which led me to follow a search to this post that provided detailed Google Docs info for student assessment.

For this quarter, on the weeks that we have open research labs (my wording for students' in-class "homework" assignments), I am requiring students to have watched an introductory lesson at home. They are also required to fill out a Google Docs form with fill-in-the-blank questions so I know whether students have watched the material like they should have prior to coming to class. After watching the video within point #2, I learned that you can display nice graphs of student responses! I didn't know this (and I'm a HUGE Google Docs user)!

So, with the capability of instant responses and a nice graphical display of said responses, an attendance requirement at the start of every class will allow me to see whether students have questions about the material they were supposed to watch. This could really work well!

To further add some fun to my class, I will also be using Facebook. Having a class Facebook page will allow me to post additional course content (like you-tube videos and articles) throughout the week. Students will also be required to complete a "discussion" post at the end of every class meeting on the Facebook page. I'm hoping that this will help students to be engaged with course material since they know their peers will be reading their responses. My single question for each day will be: "What did you learn today that you didn't know prior to this class meeting?"

I'm hoping my students end up really benefiting and liking this new system. I'm super excited about it and will be documenting how it goes!

And ....

My husband seems to think I should bring along a pineapple upside-down cake to our first class meeting... I'm still pondering this idea...



Infographic Created by Knewton and Column Five Media
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Library Links (weekly)

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