lauren's library blog

Lauren for ALA Council

Many of you know that I am a supporter of ALA. Since first getting involved, I have found it to be a rewarding experience and have met many inspirational colleagues through the organization. I’ve also seen that there are things that need to change to align the organization with the expectations of people today. As such, I’ve advocated for more virtual meetings, online interaction, and flexible ways of doing business.

I’ve been doing this from the different places within the organization that I spend my time: LITA, as the (co)chair of the Distance Learning Interest Group; ACRL, through the Women’s Studies Section Instruction Committee; the Committee on the Status of Women in Librarianship, where I learned about how council works; the Emerging Leaders Program, and various other small groups that I’ve rotated on and off.

So this year, when I was asked if I would run for council, I jumped at the opportunity. If you’d like to see the formal information I included on the ballot, other candidates I can vouch for, I have set up a website for the election. I also included the video you can see here:

Lauren Pressley for ALA Council from lauren pressley on Vimeo.

I believe that the best way to improve ALA is from within the official structure of the organization, and council is an excellent place to work on those goals. Please consider voting for me, and I’ll do my best to make ALA better for you.

If you’re also voting in the LITA and ACRL elections, I have a few candidates I can vouch for there as well:

LITA

Jason Griffey for Director at Large
Cindi Trainor for Director at Large

ACRL

Kenley Neufeld for Director at Large

More on Teaching Teaching

I just posted my first real post to the ALA Learning Blog. Here’s the first little bit:

As Paul pointed out, train the trainer programs are really useful but are not necessarily offered all that often. Since one of my most recent projects was one of these programs, I thought I’d kick off my posts on this blog with a discussion on that project.

The program? We called it Teaching Teaching. (I described it in detail on my blog the other day.) Instead of going into the specifics of planning and content, I’ll use this space to talk a little bit about the drive behind the program, what made it successful, and how we knew it had done its job.

Click on over to see:

Defining “Teaching Teaching”
Why it took off
What made it successful
How we knew the program was a success

¶ Posted 26 February 2010 † lauren pressley § actions § projects ‡ Comments (2) ° Tagged: alalearning, teaching teaching, train the trainer

Notes on Plagiarism Tutorials

I’m about to get started on a new tutorial project, and wanted to get a lay of the land. This one will be a lot different from the Toolkit, since the topic is plagiarism and can’t be covered in 2-3 minutes. And what better way to do that then to ask your Twitter friends what tools they think are great? So, after a little bit of poking around, and taking a few brief notes, here are some that good folks think are good. None were quite what I’m thinking of, which is a good sign (there’s nothing worse than reinventing the wheel), but all had several good aspects worth considering. Do you know of any awesome ones that I didn’t check out?

You Quote It, You Note It!
from Vaughan Memorial Library at Acadia University

Two panes: one with text, one with moving graphic
Conversational
Explained Learning Outcomes and time
Allows you to chose a player
Looks like same content for each

The Plagiarism Court: You Be The Judge
from DiMenna-Nyselius Library at Fairfield University

Box of text, with menu on the left
Mostly text, though voice reads headings and there is a moving image on the main screen
Ends with a quiz

Plagiarism: What Every Student Needs to Know
from Cannell Library at Clark College

Four part tutorial; can be taken in parts
Last part is a quiz
Lists outcomes, shows how far you are in process
Includes some interactive questions along the way
Mostly text, some images

The Plagiarism Tutorial
from the University Libraries at The University of Southern Mississippi

HTML based
Start with a pre-test, ends with a post-test; emails results, but doesn’t tell you on the website which ones you got right and wrong
Mostly text based
Includes other quizzes along the way

Plagiarism Tutorial
from the University of Texas Libraries at The University of Texas at Austin

Tabbed tutorial including: defining (interactive and multimedia), avoiding (interactive and multimedia), links, explanation of tutorial, and a tab to help instructors know how to incorporate it into their class
Questions along the way provide immediate feedback for right and wrong answers

A Guide for Rutgers Students
from the libraries at Rutgers University

Mostly text
Last link is a video and quiz
Video a bit slow to load, but is very visual and quickly moving; it reminds me a bit of some of the types of the mashup style videos you might find elsewhere on the web
Video, though very interesting to watch, is not interactive

Plagiarism & Academic Integrity at Rutgers University
from the Scholarly Communication Center/ Rutgers University Libraries

Presents a video and text version
Video, itself, explains the layout of the screen
User controls when the video advances to next screen
Narrative story supports the plagiarism content
Prompted along the way to answer questions to help the characters with

Plagiarism Tutorial
from Jackson Library at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Vido based, with length of video clearly notated
Presents acted out scenarios with spots along the way to answer questions about if the behavior is plagiarism or not
Vignettes are acted out by students

Information Ethics Tutorial
from the libraries at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

HTML and text based
Questions along the way
Links out to other relevant resources along the way
Multiple ways to navigate through the content

Doing Research: Avoiding Plagiarism
from the libraries at Texas Woman’s University

Incorporates video, quiz questions, and text
Offers a way to navigate through the tutorial to sections you might want to focus on or review
Some of the videos include professors explaining strategies to avoid plagiarism and how to write papers

Plagiarism Resource Site
“A collaborative project originally funded by the Center for Educational Technology, Middlebury College, and developed by Colby, Bates, and Bowdoin Colleges.”

Brought to my attention via Plagiarism Prevention Without Fear from some colleagues at work
Mostly text based
Multiple ways of navigating through the content

Miami Integrity Quickstart
from the libraries at Miami University

Made using Prezi
Mostly text and images, though feels more interactive due to presentation format
Have a good sense of how far into the tutorial you are based on layout

Thanks for helping generate a list of tutorials, Twitter friends! Amy Thornley, Jason Griffey, Beth Filar Williams, Emily King, Anna Van Scoyoc, Erin Lawrimore, and HPER Library all had great suggestions. Susan Sharpless Smith sent a few as well, and PRIMO (of course) had a number of good ones.

¶ Posted 24 February 2010 † lauren pressley § info lit § my job § projects ‡ Comments (5) ° Tagged: academic library, instruction, library, plagiarism, tutorial, tutorials

Looking forward to the TechSet!

Wikis for Libraries

Hi everyone! I’m excited to let you know that my book, Wikis for Libraries is due out next month! It’s part of a great collection of books, The Tech Set, edited by Ellyssa Kroski and published by Neal-Schuman (as a joint project with LITA).

This book is for those who have been thinking about implementing a wiki, but haven’t taken the plunge yet. It’s also for those who have, but didn’t find the results they were hoping for. The book covers wikis you can sign up for on the web, and those you host yourself. We’ll talk about a number of different problems that wikis can solve, and walk through the steps to make sure your wiki is a successful one.

It’s been an especially fun project to work on; I’ve been using wikis to solve problems for the past five or six years, and gave my first presentation on them in 2006. The world of wikis looks very different today from those early days, and it’s nice to be able to pull together the most recent thinking on wikis into one concise guide.

I’m looking forward to the whole series. Check out the interesting titles and great authors! There’s something on the list for everyone:

And as you might guess (and hope for), there’s also a corresponding wiki with additional information and updates. Anyway, I was excited about the project, and wanted to make sure you knew about it, too.

¶ Posted 16 February 2010 † lauren pressley § actions § announcements § projects ‡ Comments (4) °

Lifestreaming with Facebook, Friendfeed, and Google Buzz

What fun timing! I had scheduled an emerging tech talk (a regular talk I do at work on emerging technologies) for this morning, and then two days ago Google Buzz was announced!

That night I was using it on my cell phone, and yesterday morning it was integrated into my Gmail. After the long anticipated introduction of Google Wave, only to be a buggy release of a preview version, I’m impressed with this immediate roll out. Way to go, Google!

So, I revamped my plans and incorporated Google Buzz into the talk. It’s funny: in 2008 there was FriendFeed. It was created by folks who had left Google (one from the Gmail team in fact). In 2009 it was bought by Facebook. Now, in 2010 we have Google Buzz. Oh, the incestuous nature of the quickly paced internet communication business!

The plan for the workshop is to run through the following presentation, then live demo whatever anyone’s interested in, and hopefully have a discussion of the usefulness of these tools in participants’ lives (as professionals) or their work. Here’s hoping it goes well!

Lifestreaming

View more presentations from Lauren Pressley.