Instruction Retreat: Digital Literacies

Last week was a busy one that included my presentation on learning outcomes assessment at a North Carolina Library Association workshop as well as our annual instruction retreat on digital literacies.  The retreat has generated a few blog posts already, but I'll add mine to the mix.

Ellysa Stern Cahoy came down from Happy Valley aka Penn State to be our keynote speaker.  Ellysa led a great workshop on digital literacies.  She asked participants to define "information literacy," "technology literacy," and "media literacy" and we're looking forward to seeing the Wordle word clouds from that exercise.  Later we were joined by five faculty members who talked about the new kinds of assignments they are giving -- everything from video field notes to photo essays to creating virtual environments.  It was clear from the faculty panel that students aren't as tech savvy as we imagine.  And it was terrific to hear from faculty that they want closer collaboration with librarians in order to help students identify, use, and document sources that they incorporate into multimedia presentations.

We ventured downstairs to our library instruction room to look at some tools for finding and using images.  Ellysa demonstrated Kaltura, which they're using at Penn State.   Jill Vermillion showed participants how to access digital collections at Duke, and Kevin Smith shared an encouraging message about transformative uses of copyrighted material (you can read Kevin's thoughts in this blog post).

The last part of the retreat featured a panel of folks from across Duke who support faculty and student acquisition of digital literacy skills.  It was a lively discussion that helped librarians understand what training and assistance was available on campus.  Out of that discussion came suggestions for information sharing and further collaboration.

Emily and I are grateful for the collaborative energies that contributed to a lively, thought-provoking and idea-generating instruction retreat.  Lots of ideas to follow up.  And what will next year's retreat topic be?

My Favorite Instruction Blog

There are many blogs in the world of library instruction, which enable us to keep up with current thinking about how best to teach students to do research using library resources.  My favorite of them all is info-mational, the blog of the amazing Char Booth.

Char is the E-learning librarian at UC-Berkeley, where she explores “ways to integrate education, technology, and design in library services.”  Those of us in library instruction are eagerly awaiting Char’s new book Reflective teaching, effective learning: Instructional literacy for library educators.  I’m particularly interested in the models and templates Char provides in the book that guide librarians through a process of intentional instructional design.

But back to Char’s blog, whose title comes from a comment she received from a student: “thanks. very info-mational.”  Char’s posts get to the heart of why we teach and how we teach.  I could quote endlessly from the blog, but I’ll just choose one example:

"Most practical library instruction seems to spend a necessarily disproportionate amount of time explaining  the range, breadth, and function of ultra-similar resources (use this for that and this for this other thing), which does more to reinforce the way students (mis)understanding of how the web works than to counter it."

And let me add, perhaps most importantly, that Char is one of the best and wittiest writers and presenters in librarianship today.  Not for nothing was she named a Library Journal Mover and Shaker in 2008.  So, if you’re going to read anything about library instruction, read info-mational.  And enjoy.

Conferences and posters and showcases, oh my!

The past three or so weeks have left my head spinning (in a good way!), as they've been filled to the brim with learning from and networking with librarians and other information professionals from around the country! 

I started at Texas Library Association's Annual Conference in San Antonio, which was pretty impressive -- 8,000 librarians gathered to hear Keynote Speaker Scott Simon and explore ways of "Filtering Chaos: From Information to Knowledge."  I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to share what we're doing at Duke to integrate library resources into Blackboard -- the energy level after my presentation was high, and it sounds like more and more librarians are thinking about ways to embed their services and resources into their institutions' Learning Management Systems.

There were so many things going on TLA that it was difficult to choose which sessions to attend.  The highlights for me were Megan Oakleaf's presentation on outcomes-based assessment for library instruction and Keene Haywood's talk on The Horizon Report on Emerging Technologies.  I've followed the Horizon reports for the last few years, but it was fascinating to learn more about how Keene and his colleagues at New Media Consortium actually research and write these reports.

Next up in my month of professional development was a day-long training session on using Zotero, which Diane blogged about last week.  I'm impressed with Zotero's functionality and look forward to learning more about the tool and helping students put it to use.

Duke's Center for Instructional Technology's Showcase, "Learning beyond the classroom," followed last Friday and proved to be the best Showcase I've attended.  The final plenary of the day was especially enlightening -- as Joel Thierstein from Rice University and the Connexions Consortium and Michael Boezi of Flat World Knowledge shared their views of Open Educational Resources and the work that their organizations are doing to make textbooks and other learning resources more accessible, customizable and affordable for students and faculty. 

I spent yesterday afternoon at the LAUNC-Ch Research Forum, where I learned more about the work that NC State's Josh Boyer and consultant Abe Crystal of More Better Labs are doing with NCSU Libraries' new discovery tool Summon.  While the tool is undeniably powerful (it indexes hundreds of thousands of resources), Josh and Abe's usability studies reveal that actually using the results of a Summon search isn't as easy as it might be.  Field experience student Alice Whiteside and I presented a poster related to our usability studies of LibGuides and came back to Duke with ideas for enhancing our own LibGuides interface. 

And my whirlwind tour's not over yet -- the Instruction and Outreach Department will be hosting its annual retreat later this month.  We're looking forward to welcoming Penn State's Elyssa Stern Cahoy as nearly 40 librarians and info professionals explore digital literacies and the role librarians play in helping faculty teach and students master these "new" literacies.

Looking at Zotero

We were fortunate that TRLN sponsored two sessions of Zotero training – one at NCSU and one at Duke – with Trevor Owens,   Zotero’s “community lead” and super trainer.


Our full day of training began with a look at the four major functions of Zotero:  collecting, organizing, citing and collaborating.  Trevor encouraged us to think of Zotero as more than a citation management system -- it is a tool for organizing research resources and managing scholarly workflow.  Many of Zotero’s strengths flow from that conceptual base.  For example, Zotero is flexible and accommodating to a wide range of research materials, there’s free storage space for PDFs and other files, and collaboration doesn’t depend on whether a researcher’s home institution has a subscription to a particular product (like EndNote).

Emily asked Trevor to summarize the strengths of Zotero, and he pointed to ease of use, emphasis on sharing and collaboration, the active Zotero community that comes from being an open source product, and the fact that it’s free.  And weaknesses?  Because Zotero works with “messy data,” users might need to do more clean-up than with products like EndNote; and the I-Tunes like interface and functionality might be difficult to get used to for long-time users of other systems.

I asked Trevor to describe the current landscape of library citation management support, since he is in touch with the library community through his training and support work.  He said that major research libraries tend to support EndNote, RefWorks and Zotero, but that budget cuts mean that campuses who have site licenses for EndNote are discontinuing them.  Here at Duke, we’re thinking seriously of how to support Zotero in some of the ways we now support EndNote and RefWorks.  First up is a “train the trainer” session this summer, so we can informally explore Zotero and share what we learned before we forget!

A Survey of Instructional Video Tutorials

In preparation for updating and expanding Duke's library tutorials, we decided to first get a sense of the current landscape of instructional video tutorials. As part of this project, Alice Whiteside and I completed an environmental scan of peer institution tutorials. Of the twelve institutions that we surveyed, five did not have any tutorials. Our conclusions are drawn from tutorials created by UNC, UVA, Yale, Stanford, NCSU, Cornell, and Emory.

There was a fair amount of consistency in terms of content, especially related to “how-to” tutorials. Many libraries had tutorials on how to search the catalog. Another popular topic was how to access materials that are not readily available: ILL, requesting off-site materials, and how to use a proxy server. There were several tutorials on how to search article databases, either generally or a specific one such as Google Scholar. A few libraries had tutorials related to RefWorks. Some libraries, such as NCSU, tend to focus on more topic-oriented issues. The most common type of topic-oriented tutorial was explaining either the difference between popular and scholarly resources or what defines a scholarly resource.

There were some consistent issues related to presentation, particularly regarding the location of tutorials within library websites. Many universities with multiple libraries have a main library homepage in addition to homepages for individual libraries on campus, and we found that tutorials were sometimes linked from the latter without being directly accessible through the former. Some libraries presented links to videos, while others embedded the video directly. Video tutorials that were simply linked were not always clearly identified as such. We think that it is most effective if videos can be embedded rather than simply linked, as students will be more likely to click on them. If this is not possible, then they should be clearly marked as video tutorials, so that users understand what is available and what to expect if they click on the link.

In all, we felt that Cornell offered very strong tutorials that provide an excellent example of effective delivery. Promoted under the title of "Research Minutes," these tutorials are brief, creative and consistent. NCSU has created some unique and informative topic-oriented tutorials such as Peer Review in Five Minutes and Wikipedia: Beneath the Surface.

Libraries wishing to develop or expand tutorial offerings may want to consult The Animated Tutorial Sharing Project (ANTS), which is a shared repository of library tutorials created using screencast software. Since many libraries may wish to create tutorials on similar topics, it is worth checking to see if something meeting your needs may already be available here before reinventing the wheel.

For more information on developing video tutorials, we recommend the following links:

Learning to Teach Through Video (Kim Leeder)

Guidelines for Animated Online Tutorials Used in Database Instruction (ANTS)

New Ways to Share Notes

As part of our work with Instruction & Outreach this semester, Julie Adamo and I have been researching a range of emerging technologies and reporting our findings at weekly department meetings. I recently tackled online collaborative annotation tools, which allow users to highlight content on a webpage, add comments, and share their annotations. Going into this, I understood the dictionary meaning of these words strung together, but I was not familiar with any of these tools. And I had no idea there were so many! I investigated a handful of them: Google Sidewiki, MyStickies, Webnotes, DotSpots, and Diigo. I found that each had a slightly different focus, and, of course, different strengths. DotSpots is geared towards commenting on news, creating a public forum that adds different perspectives to stories. MyStickies is a tool for personal annotations, for organizing information on the web for yourself, rather than sharing notes and content. Diigo emerged as the favorite for collaborative work.


Using Diigo (an acronym for "Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other stuff"), you can make your annotations private, public, or shared with a group. You can highlight content on a page, add "sticky notes," archive pages (take a snapshot of the page, instead of bookmarking it), and organize pages with tags or in lists. Having an appreciation for controlled vocabularies, I like the "group tag dictionary" feature, which allows a group administrator to define a set of recommended tags.

Thinking about the use of collaborative annotation tools in a library setting, I was mainly envisioning these as a good thing to know about, a handy card to have in our back pocket to suggest to students and faculty when the right type of project or conundrum presented itself. Online collaborative annotation tools can be useful for a wide range of projects, and they can also be useful for sharing information with colleagues. We are now using Diigo to gather and share materials related to our upcoming Spring Instruction Retreat which will focus on digital literacies.

If you'd like to read more about collaborative annotation tools, I recommend this article from Educause (Oct. 2009) as a starting point.

Do you use any web annotation tools? Is there one you really like? Tell us about it!

Internships 101: Research for the "real world"

Duke's librarians teach hundreds of library instruction sessions every year to support courses with topics ranging from Modern Chinese Cinema to Sport in the 19th Century United States.  Subject librarians work closely with faculty members to ensure that students have the resources they need to produce well documented research papers and dynamic multimedia projects.

But we certainly know that not every Duke undergraduate is going to spend his life in academia, passing his days mining bibliographies and exploring arcane archives. While it is critical that undergraduates learn how to find relevant scholarly literature and then frame a research question that will continue the scholarly discussion in order to be successful in a their coursework at Duke, these skills are not the only ones they will need when starting a job in an engineering firm, on Wall Street or on Capitol Hill.

Duke Student Government students realized this, too, and came up with a way to help students translate the research skills they gain in library instruction sessions and by drafting countless research papers and projects into the ones required for "the real world."

And, thus, Internships 101 was born.  Now in its second year, Internships 101 sessions offer students who have secured summer internships the chance to meet with librarians in their field to learn strategies for doing research not in the classroom, but on the job.  This year, sessions will be held for students who plan to work in politics, finance and engineering.  Participating students can expect to learn suggestions for writing memos chock full of persuasive data, tips for using financial modeling software, and strategies for searching for patents and standards.

Interested in learning more or registering for a session?  Check out the Internships 101 event page.  Have an idea for another Internships 101 session?  Leave a comment.