Choosing the Winners

"To an extent, teaching users to use IP-restricted databases is to prepare them for rare experiences."

While it has been a couple of months since I read The Tower and the Cloud, I continue to think about a number of themes in the book and plan to write about them at some point. In Bryan Alexander's essay, "Social Networking in Higher Education," this one sentence (p. 200) continues to stick in my mind. I think about the typical instruction session or online tutorial, and we do tend to focus on mechanics--this button takes you to the full text, click this box for peer-reviewed articles, use this search interface when you know the title of the item, etc. These things are not unimportant, but in the end, when the student graduates and loses access to (and any sort of interest in) library databases and catalogs, what have we really left them with? What happens when they have a personal information need, such as buying a car or a home, dealing with a medical condition, making an important financial decision, or a more scholarly issue such as doing research at work for a presentation or for making mission-critical decision? Likely the proprietary databases they used in college will not be available to them, and likely the interfaces would have long since changed anyway.

Of course many instruction sessions and tutorials cover evaluating resources, but to what extent? Shouldn't that be the central message?

In the fall, as part of several new initiatives for first year students, we launched a new online tutorial in four parts. The fourth part, Choosing the Winners, focuses on evaluating resources, but it mostly serves to get students started. We realize that we need to do more, and one of our projects for the year is building more tutorial content.

In an ideal situation, we would weave information literacy skills throughout the curriculum (along with technology literacy, but that's another post). Here at the University of Kentucky, we are currently in the process of establishing a new general education curriculum. One of the key learning outcomes from the new curriculum will encompass information literacy skills:

Students will be able to identify multiple dimensions of a good question; determine when additional information is needed, find credible information efficiently using a variety of reference sources, and judge the quality of information as informed by rigorously developed evidence

It is wonderful to see such an emphasis on information literacy; in fact, the curricular team for each broad subject area includes a librarian (myself included).

So perhaps we will soon be fortunate have a curriculum that integrates information skills into the classroom to a greater extent than ever before. In the meantime, what other things can we be doing? What kinds of tutorials and other content can we create to help students be prepared for the common, everyday experience of finding and evaluating information?

New Ways to Reach Students

The University of Kentucky Libraries have completely revised the way we do library orientation (part of UK101). Last year, we created an orientation video, "Saving Student Brian," to replace an orientation PowerPoint. It was well-received by students and even recognized by librarians. This year we're launching three new elements to the program:

Question of the Week
Each week students are encouraged to answer the Question of the Week (the first one's a gimme) in order to be eligible for some terrific prize drawings. The first drawing, on September 29, is for 8 GB flash drives. Drawings later in the semester will include a Nintendo DS Lite and a Wii. We're hoping this will be plenty of incentive for students to stick it out and hopefully learn a few things about using library resources in the process.

Passport
To encourage students to visit various library service points across campus, the Passport game requires students to visit five service points in the Young Library and a choice of three branch locations. Students who return a completed Passport by October 30 are eligible for a drawing for a Sony PSP.

Your Research Tool Box
Finally, the biggest project: we moved from our version of the TILT tutorial (FindIT!) which we had been using for several years to a completely new tutorial we created in-house called "Your Research Tool Box." The tutorial consists of four parts:

	Getting Started What's a Research Strategy? print version (pdf)
	Beyond Google InfoKat: The Library Catalog print version (pdf)
	Beyond Google Periodicals Databases print version (pdf)
	Choosing the Winners The Best Information Sources print version (pdf)

The first part of the tutorial is a combination of video and narrated PowerPoint. The other three parts are all PowerPoint with voice-over. I think all four balance information and humor pretty well--it's hard to be funny when talking about your library catalog, but I think our writers succeeded!

Summer Projects: Hubbub, New Tutorial, etc.

As with last summer, I've been too busy to post much to the blog. I've picked up a few readers so I thought it might be nice to summarize a few of the big summer projects I'm currently working on. As time permits, I'll write up much longer posts on each of these projects--the usual what worked, what didn't, what I'd do differently next time. Whoever said summer was quiet on a university campus?

The Hubbub/10th Birthday of Young Library
Last year we launched our Information Commons (the Hub) to students with a big party (The Hubbub) during freshmen orientation week (K Week). Our second annual Hubbub (Monday, August 25, 6-8 pm) conveniently coincides with the 10th anniversary of the William T Young Library, so what better idea than to make this year's Hubbub birthday-party themed? Some of the fun stuff on tap:

Video games. This year I've been more focused on my backup plan more than on anything--some of you may recall that our video game provider failed to show up for last year's party. Thankfully free pizza kept the crowd calm.

The Palm Reading Librarian. This was a wildly popular activity last year which we definitely plan to bring back for the Hubbub, Part Two.

Zumba dancing. We've got to keep it fresh, so we're trying a Zumba demo/instruction/dance class rather than bellydancing this year. Some of you may know that I'm a Zumba freak so it seemed appropriate.

Photo booth. We considered this last year but just ran out of time to get it together. Basically we're planning a blue screen setup where students can get their pictures made with various silly props and then we'll Photoshop 'em like crazy. Upon signing a release, we'll post to a photo gallery online.

Pimp my Avatar. We did this last year and I expect we'll have an even bigger audience now that UK has its own island. Two UK library staff are also Second Life fashionistas who will help students with the hottest new avatar looks.

Cariacature artist. An art student is going to draw cariacatures for us (one of many birthday party-inspired ideas).

Balloon artist. Who wouldn't want to take a cute little Kentucky wildcat back to the dorm? Everyone loves balloon animals!

Board games, cornhole, ladder golf. These are all easy things to throw together pretty quickly thanks to staff lending us games, and I plan to have them spread around the area. I have a feeling that Scrabulous mania might translate over to the real deal.

Whiteboard art. When you prepare your information commmons for at least 500 students, the furniture has to go somewhere. Even if you use a bunch of the whiteboards for signs, what do you do with the rest? Have a silly whiteboard art contest, of course!

Makeover counter. I really wanted to do this last time, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the opening of a new cosmetics store in the mall will give us the opportunity to do this. So far, they are interested but not yet committed. Can you imagine how exciting a free makeover would be to the average 18 year old (or any woman, really--I've already had staff asking me if they could partake!). Wish me luck on this one.

Free pizza, cupcakes, snacks, and prize drawings. This is a lot of work to coordinate, let me tell you, especially trying to get prizes for the drawings (thank you, Krista!).

With that many activities, you can imagine all the planning going into it. I haven't even mentioned staffing or publicity yet. I'll save that for a series of lengthy posts after the event.

New Library Tutorial
You might recall last year that we redesigned our library orienation PowerPoint to a video, "Saving Student Brian," filmed partly in Second Life (more about this project). This year we decided to tackle our library tutorial and do something different.

Basically we're taking a series of PowerPoints and video clips and editing them in Camtasia to create a series of videos. How's it going? Ask me again in a week.

New Video Content for Welcoming/Orienting Students
The Hub's video windows are a perfect venue for orienation information, at least for the first few weeks of class before our art exhibits begin. Where are the vending machines? How do I put money on my account for printing? What the heck is a core? It's also a good opportunity to remind students what exactly librarians and IT staff can help with, since we still get that "help with what?" question at our library/IT desk in the Hub. Several of us will be working on this and I hope we'll have the new displays up a week before classes begin.

Speaking Engagements
I was a little crazy busy this spring with a state conference, AISTI, LOEX, and SLA within just a few weeks of each other. That will pick up to a lesser extent this fall as I already have a few things lined up or in the works on various topics: cloud computing, information commons, technology planning, and Second Life.


So that's a little bit of my summer so far and a preview of what's to come. I expect the next few weeks are going to be far from leisurely. Hope everyone out there is having a good summer!

Saving Student Brian

Back in November, I wrote a bit about the orientation video several of us here at UK created, "Saving Student Brian." I'm delighted to report that the video has been recognized twice in the last few days: not only were we selected to present about it at the 2008 LOEX Conference, the video was selected as an ALA/ACRL Peer Reviewed Instructional Material Online (we're not in the database just yet--still working on the form). We've already started talking about an update to the video for the fall (my editing skills have improved, we have access to a better camera, plus we have we have the reaction of ~1500 students to consider what worked and what didn't). Yet another busy year ahead!

UK Libraries Orientation Video

In summer 2007, three librarians and I embarked on a project to revamp the freshman library orientation experience. In previous years, freshmen taking the university orientation course (UK101, which at this time is not mandatory) spent one class session at the library. The class was split into half PowerPoint presentation from a librarian, half tour of the library.

We were happy with the tour portion of the class but knew that the PowerPoint presentation was in need of updates. Several of us felt it might be lost in a sea of other introductory PowerPoints from other campus entities. How many orientation spiels are first year students treated to in their first three weeks of classes?

For a number of reasons, we thought it might be interesting to try a short video using Second Life avatars for at least a portion of the video. Each of us had some experience or skills to contribute to the project: library instruction experience, script writing abilities, Second Life building skills, a sense of humor, some editing skills, and a desire to see what's possible. We shot half of the film "on location" in Second Life and the other half on campus (with an albeit shaky hand camera). The acting (real and virtual) was done by students or library staff.



UK101 students either laughed at the right times or rolled their eyes--a reaction I was expecting, but figured was satisfactory nonetheless. After all, how much can you really cover in a short orientation in those first critical weeks? Our goal is to simply offer up the library as a friendly, convenient place to go to get help. At this stage, there's no time for database searching demos or the like. Just show that all our libraries are full of helpful librarians, computers, writing help, and other services. And by showing them a video, our hope is that it will be memorable, not lost in a sea of PowerPoints.

I have a great deal more to say about each step of our process, particularly how I edited the video and how I would do things differently next time (steady cam for sure!). The four of us are working on a presentation proposal about the entire experience so I'll likely save many of the details for that. In the meantime, take a look at the finished product.

My Avatar Visits the Hub

Earlier this week, we did a first pass at "filming" our freshman tutorial using Second Life. We had been using a PowerPoint presentation for several years but decided to attempt something different this year.

I'm pretty pleased with how things look so far. I took this shot in between takes, as my avatar hung out in front of this "real world" set of the Hub we created. I particularly like this shot because if you look really close, you'll see a librarian in the background (a former IL librarian here).

Our tutorial is shot in two locations--in a dorm room we built in world, as well as this Hub set. We still need to record the audio portion of the script and have a great deal of editing yet to do. I'm anxious to get started but we really need all of the content before we get down to editing. At the very least, this has been quite a learning experience (and a lot of fun) for everyone involved.

We wear buttons in the Hub as a way to identify staff. We created the button as a Second Life clothing item (thanks, Beth!), so that my avatar could wear one in this scene. How cool is that!