Site Design and the Negative Ninny

A sad truth in any service industry is that you'll hear mostly (and most loudly) from people who are unhappy with what you're doing. This is just something we have to deal with. People who have no problems with our services; who find what they need from our libraries, rarely tell us about it, even when we go out of our way to solicit that kind of feedback. This imbalance is probably why there is so much burnout in the service industries. 

via Flickr CC, by Shtikl

A real problem with this is when it comes to making changes or improvements in your services or processes. The biggest example many librarians have probably encountered is when redesigning the library web site. I believe this negative feedback then often has a very real chilling effect on the redesign process. It probably prevents lots of innovation. It makes us timid in our decision-making. It's perhaps why so many library homepages try to shoehorn everything but the kitchen sink right on the front page. Why is "About the Library" so prominent on so many sites? Who the hell reads that stuff?

The result is all too often a redesign process rooted in fear of pissing off those overly loud negative voices. Most libraries have these kinds of often power-user "negative ninnies." I'm not saying we should ignore the feedback from these important users. What I am saying is that we need to recognize and counter our sometimes unconscious deference to those voices. Have you encountered this kind of redesign process? How do you fight this, especially when dealing with multiple stakeholders and a large design team? I wish I knew...

Change is Everywhere

• Ambiguity
• Motivation
• Exploration
• Flexibility
• Creativity

via CC license: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mrszeppie/8196836796/

What do these all have in common? Beyond the fact that I've written or talked about all of them in the context of library instruction, they might also be seen as central aspects of everyday life, and more to the point, in being a successful lifelong learner.

It's really all about recognizing and dealing with change. Change of tool sets. Change of environment. Change of focus. Change of perspective. Change of culture. Culminating in a change in how we react to or even instigate change. Several recent readings have brought home to me the centrality and importance of this in my own work with library instruction and information literacy:

• Pegasus Librarian: Focal Flexibility "It hadn’t occurred to me before that moment how important focal flexibility is — the ability to see a given work in all its richness and unpackable complexity, and also see it as one of a constellation of other works — to be able to plot it dispassionately amongst its peers, and also gaze at its internal universes."
• Wired: Tim O’Reilly’s Key to Creating the Next Big Thing "Yes, founder Jen Pahlka figured that instead of talking about how government should change, you have to demonstrate how to do it. The key output of Code for America is not apps, it’s culture change."
• Attempting Elegance: Plant your Flag "You need to know where you stand so you can plant your feet and lean into the change rather than be knocked over by it."
• Lifehacker: Ask Naive Questions to Spark Creativity "When you're stuck on a big problem, it's easy to pound your head against the wall trying to solve it. However, it might be best to step away for a little while and look at the problem from a different perspective."

All of the above discuss, albeit in very different contexts, the importance of recognizing and dealing effectively with change. 

I've written about change literacy before. I've written about dealing with ambiguity. I've talked about motivation. I've talked about fostering a sense of creativity and exploration in our students. I've written about transliteracy. And I certainly try in practice to (subtly) stress that being agile as you engage in the research process (your topic may change as you read the literature; searching is an evolutionary process of trial and error; every search tool has different features and labels, but look for the commonalities; become familiar with all the different information types; style guides can't cover every eventuality, so you may need to adapt what is in hand to available examples).

Now I wonder if we can tackle the idea of change and recognizing and teaching our students (and ourselves) how to effectively deal with it, more directly... 

Takeaways from the Newest PIL Report

Project Information Literacy (PIL) seems like a wonderland of awesomely interesting and important research work and very intelligent and well-spoken (and written) folks doing that research.

They have put out a plethora of very informative publications and data sets over the last few years. They just put out another that may be their best one yet

Go read it NOW! How College Graduates Solve Information Problems Once They Join the Workplace. While you're at it (or if you're short of time right now), also read this great discussion of the report by Barbara Fister, from Inside Higher Ed.  I'll wait...

The report contains tons of ammunition for librarians and other champions of information literacy (and especially transliteracy). After all, equipping students with the skills they'll need after they graduate is one of the major reasons for higher education in the first place.

Here are a couple of quotes from the report that stood out to me (i.e., that I intend to use for ammunition at my own place of work to bring more instructional/curricular focus onto these skills).

On the employer needs side:

"information work has become an identifiable and fundamental component of most jobs, no matter where someone is on the organizational chart." [pg. 7]

"employers said they needed college hires who would take on information problems with "patience" and "persistence" and who possessed "a high tolerance for ambiguity" about both questions being asked and the answers being found."" [pg. 11]

"They told us that college hires needed to "move off the script," "be resourceful and look in every place," and "fact-check across multiple sources." [pg. 13]

 On the recent graduate experience side:

"this generation of workers for whom research often begins by plugging keywords into a search box, also discussed how they learned that the traditional forms of research, like tapping the expertise of a trusted and knowledgeable teammate, could be more fruitful--and efficient--than they had ever imagined" [pg. 19]

via CC license, by Fanboy30

"Graduates soon discovered that the workplace pace moved more quickly and less predictably than the academic calendar...Second, focus groups members said they received little guidance from employers about research expectations in the workplace." [pg. 24]

"many graduates in our sessions appeared to assume that any question could be answered as soon as with the "right" source of information. Still, however, employers in our interviews needed and expected newcomers to make "reflective judgments"--to construct knowledge and new interpretations from all the different answers they had found." [pg. 25]

A word that is used a lot in the report is transition; from college to workplace, between varied traditional and digital information sources, and from structured to ambiguous work structures. Which, of course, feeds directly into the importance of the concept of transliteracy (or view my own take on this concept); having an ability, being agile, at moving between information platforms and locating and becoming part of the relevant conversation, to accomplish an information task.

Barbara Fister's article above sums things up nicely from the librarian/faculty/higher ed "what might we do with this data?" perspective:

"In practical terms, I think perhaps what we really need to do is help students understand not just how the library works and how the university works, but rather how all knowledge is social, how knowledge seeking isn’t a linear process of finding answers but rather is tapping into ongoing conversations in which they may play a role."

That plays into not only taking a holistic view of the information cycle, but also plays into the idea of motivation; involving the undergraduate in the process of actual knowledge creation rather than just regurgitating what they find.

The Importance of Informal Assessment

Image via CC license, by jrhode

Ever since I took a library conference workshop years ago by the always engaging Stephan Macaluso, my awareness of and use of informal assessment methods has continued to grow. This kind of non-quantitative assessment is especially invaluable when teaching live, online workshops.

What exactly is informal assessment? A more exact term, at least as I use it, might be observational assessment. As that name implies, it consists of observing your students as they interact with the learning, with you, and with each other. What are they asking or saying or typing? What aren't they asking? What does their voice and body language convey? How are they reacting to/interacting with a given activity or piece of information? What do these and any other observations (and even intuitions) you have tell you about the effectiveness of the teaching/learning? What adjustments need to be made given this?

The tough part isn't the observations - every teacher does that instinctively. The tough part is recognizing what to do with that constant stream of often very subtle and sometimes even contradictory information. Also, when to do it.

Of course, this is even more complicated when it comes to teaching online. Missing are the most commonly used observational tools of facial expression and body language. It can be very nerve-wracking when you teach those first few live online sessions, or give a webinar presentation. You're flying blind, with what at first seems like little to no way of gauging how things are going. There are, however, ways around this.

The key, in my opinion, is building your lesson plans (or your presentations, etc.) so that non-visual observations come to the fore. In my own environment, using the Blackboard Collaborate webinar software, there are actually lots of ways to do this beyond the more formal active learning activities. Almost all of it, of course, involves building in constant interaction and encouraging student input. I go out of my way to encourage (even beg!) students to engage me and each other and the content through asking open questions and posting observations and answers to questions throughout my workshops in the text chat area (most of my students don't have a headset, but when they do I also encourage that). I also give students access to the whiteboard drawing tools and use Collaborate's breakout rooms feature to build small group activities and make sure I go in and observe the activity of each group.

These simple steps help me in overcoming the loss of visual observation. They help me constantly tweak and improve my lesson plans and teaching methods both during the sessions themselves, and afterwards (a perk of webinar software is it's all recorded) so that learning objectives are met as effectively as possible. Whether face to face or online, it takes time to juggle these things with the formal teaching and assessment processes, but once you get used to it, it becomes another invaluable skill to add to your teaching tool belt.

Initial Workshop Assessment Thoughts

My pre-workshop (for the "Introduction to Searching one-shot) survey takes the form of 2 questions:

1. Provide a topic of your choosing or choose one of the examples I provide
2. Given the topic, type in what you might put in a search box to find articles on the topic

Overwhelmingly, in the 53 responses I've gotten to date in it's current iteration, students show a distinct "Googlization" in their search strategies. Full-sentence questions and long lists of keywords make up ALL of the responses to question two. A couple of responses use and or double quotes, but all are used incompletely or incorrectly.

My post-workshop results (that include the same question) show vast improvements on this (and I go to great lengths to show why common Google search strategies don't work in most library databases), but still highlight some gaps, especially in correctly using, or not using, double quotes.

It's a start...

Upcoming Webinars

Hi folks,

Just wanted to alert you to some upcoming webinars/presentations I'll be doing over the next few months:

• 9/18: Teaching Information Literacy to Distance Learners (via SCRLC)
• 9/19: Small Group Learning Activities in Synchronous, Online Library Instruction (via SUNY Center for Professional Development) 
• 11/8: Information Literacy for Distance Learners (NYLA Annual Conference)

Time to get rid of the term "Information Literacy"?

• Information Literacy
• Information AND Literacy
• Information OR Literacy
• Information NOT Literacy

• Information Skills?
• Research Skills?
• Lifelong Learning Skills?

Don't get me started with all the other, mostly specialized, "literacy" and "competency" and "skill" models out there. If this is how I feel about the what of library instruction, imagine how our faculty and students feel about that, as well as the more important why:

(http://www.flickr.com/photos/bueny/2472455690/)

To me, the base of all of this is "information." This encompasses, at least to my understanding, anything and everything a student encounters (or a faculty or library teaches or facilitates access to) during the learning process. "Literacy" is far more problematic. It implies, to many, a far too basic connotation. In other words, in our society "illiterate" means not being able to read, which comes with a stigma. "Skills," set on a continuum from basic to expert, seems more appropriate to me, with "competencies" perhaps reserved for internal/assessment use.

Your thoughts?