The one educational program I went to, “Riding the Publishing Rollercoaster: Practical Strategies from Research to Writing,” was amazing, and I’m so glad I found the time to make it to the program! It was later in the day on Monday when lots of folks had already gone home, but the room was still packed to a somewhat uncomfortable standing-room-only. It consisted of a panel of experienced authors and editors providing advice for librarians who wish to publish.

I’ve attached my notes from the program to this post. Please check them out!

And then there’s ALA. We’re so big that there are only a few cities in the country that can hold us–20-28 thousand strong. (You can see past conference attendance figures here.) Local businesses put out welcome signs for us. You might not think it, but even without our conference badges on, we stand out. You put that many librarians together in one place, and there are going to be a lot of parties; my fiance still finds this hard to believe, but librarians are some pretty hard partyers. Even at my relatively smallish state conference, folks stay up until the wee hours of the morning at the one conference-sponsored social. You put this many people together who only get to talk in person once or twice a year and there’s bound to be some late nights. One conference guide I read actually recommends taking hydration tablets for when you’ve been up till 2 but have a meeting at 8am! And guess who’s taking him up on that?

What does all this mean? So many interesting sessions happening concurrently that my planned conference schedule usually has about 4 programs for every time slot. Free books. LOTS of free books. Vendors giving out booze and snacks in the Exhibit Hall (the fact that the Exhibit Hall alone takes 4-5 hours to get through is also a source of amazement).

And, oh yeah, the most important part: the sheer energizing giddiness of spending 4 straight days with people who are just as excited and passionate about the profession as you. Going to ALA is my absolute favorite part of being a librarian:  it affirms all the reasons I became one, inspires me with ideas on how to become a better one, and going has always led to so many opportunities to get involved and connections that have turned into longstanding professional ties. And it’s just so much fun, even for an introvert like me–the book signings, the cooking stage, hearing literary heroes and professional crushes speak (I was in the front row for Neil Gaiman’s talk with Nancy Pearl last year!), all the amazing things other people are doing in their libraries.

I get on the plane to Anaheim tomorrow. I can’t wait!

• Motivation 101 with Nan Carmack (slides here)
  • Motivation 3.0: doing a task for the love for the task
  • In order to motivate your employees, you need to do 3 things: your motivational strategy must develop, involve, and validate your employees
  • How to involve your staff?
  • Think of things that would motivate you to be more excited about your job
  • Think of things your department could implement that would help motivate
  • No one can make you feel unmotivated without your consent
• Free Tech Tools for Better Library Instruction by Jennifer Whicker, Kathy Shields, and Amy Pace
  • Use bubbl.us or Mindomo for students to write their sentence, pick out keywords, and write synonyms
  • Jing for annotated screenshots (e,g., for use with virtual reference)
  • lino.it for digital corkboard
• Teens Can Read, But What Comes After the Young Adult Titles (slides here)
  • Display of adult crossover books in YA section

The semester’s going well for the most part–everything is MUCH easier, having already taught it all last semester–and several of my students from the winter have dropped by to give me hugs and say hi. We just finished playing Jeopardy as a review for the take-home midterm, and I think in the future–if I ever have a small class again–I want to alter the format to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? instead. Jeopardy works great in larger classes, because most of the fun comes from the class being rowdy and smack-talking the other teams; my teeny Friday night classes are just too well-behaved. The WWtBaM format would be more dynamic with a smaller group, I think. “Ask the Audience” could be turned into “Ask Google”; 50/50 would work the same way; and I could have name their “phone-a-friend” (another classmate) before the game starts. I’ll have to do some research and see if anyone else has used the WWtBaM format.

If you’re going to be in New Orleans for ALA and want to meet up, I’ll be giving presentations/acting as hostess at the following programs/events:

Friday, 3-4pm @ MCC 271-273: Emerging Leaders Poster Session

Friday, 5:30-7pm @ Howlin’ Wolf Den (907 S. Peters St.) for ACRL-IS Soiree (I co-chaired the committee that planned this)

Saturday, 8-10am @ MCC 293-296: ACRL 101 (helping out as part of EL project)

Saturday, 1-2:30 @ MCC Exhibit Hall booth 2556, table 4: Congratulations! You’ve Landed an Interview: Now What Do Hiring Committees Really Want? (results of this survey)

Saturday, 4-5:30 @ MCC 271-273: LLAMA/NMRT New Leaders Discussion Group

Sunday, 12-1:30 @ ALA JobLIST Placement Center (in Exhibit Hall): Inside an Interview: Understanding What Hiring Committees Want (more detailed results of this survey)

See you in NOLA!

Well, in the interim, I had peer-reviewed a really quite engaging interactive tutorial on plagiarism for MERLOT. So after a brief opening discussion on plagiarism and how it relates to copyright (which was covered in the first half of class), I had them walk through the tutorial, which involves selecting one of four students majoring in various fields as your avatar, and going through the research process as it relates to plagiarism–with all of its dead ends and pitfalls–with that student. It included questions throughout the tutorial where the student had to choose which statement needed a citation, which one was plagiarism, etc.

The students seemed much more engaged with this than the NPR segment I played Friday, asking me questions about the answers they’d gotten wrong in order to figure out why they were wrong. Yay! I followed the tutorial up by having students partner up to complete the activity from the end of the Library Instruction book lesson that I hadn’t used on Friday. The activity quotes a two-paragraph section of an article, and then has three “student” samples that use this article, and asks whether each–or any–of the student samples show plagiarism, and if so, why. This was also an enlightening activity for my students; they all caught the sample that was blatant word-for-word, uncited plagiarism, but I had to explain that the sample which also quoted the original article word-for-word–but cited–was still plagiarizing. They don’t really understand what paraphrasing is or how to do it or that even re-working an author’s words into your own requires citation. I’m hoping to get one of the English instructors in at some point to help clarify this for them.

Overall, I’m quite pleased with how class went last night and think I’ll be sticking with this format–perhaps with some minor modifications–in the future!

I did attend a local workshop on patron-driven acquisition and e-book readers, though! I didn’t have much to take notes on since the information, while interesting, was much less applicable to my day job than I was expecting.

Collections Unbound

VLACRL Spring 2011 Program

May 9, 2011

Virginia Commonwealth University

Greg Raschke: “Clay Shirkey, Fantasy Football, and the Future of Library Collections”

• Economics are not sustainable
• Need to lower cost of overall cost
• Supply-side collections
• Print-based , unpredictable demand, and legitimate need for just-in-case
collections
• Demand-driven collections
• Not just PDA, but a portfolio of approaches
• Reducing unit cost – data analysis
• Scope your titles: put enough money in budget
• Time-honored role as custodians of scholarship vs. enabling digital environment for
scholars
• Fantasy football: Meets a need, it’s fun

Program slides/materials (scroll down to 2011 ACRL Spring Symposium, May 9, 2011)

Emerging Leaders Webinar

Leslie Burger, Princeton Public Library Director and Past President of ALA, 2006-2007

April 21, 2011 at 1pm

#alaelseminar

• 10% of ALA is actively engaged in management of association
• Not easy to quickly move and adapt an association made up of tens of thousands of members
• ALA has a motto! “The best reading, for the largest number, at the lowest cost”
• YOU have to decide how you want to be involved in ALA; there is no one right way and no one to tell you how
• Observe ALA governance in action! Council = 186 policy-making members. Go to at least 1 Council meeting in your lifetime
• ALA Executive Board
  • Meets 4x/year
  • 11 members (all but 3 elected by membership)
  • Attend at least one of these meetings in lifetime, too!
  • Committees
    • Appointments to association committees made by president-elect
    • Go to committee meeting to see if you’re interested, then contact chair and ask if you can help
    • Be forthcoming about expressing interest in joining committee; proves you’re a leader and contributor
• Membership Initiative Group (MIG)
• Decide what needs to change, find others who feel the same way, and make it happen
• Conferences take on a life of their own at each location
• Become friends with @LibrarianJP on Facebook! He knows how to connect with people and throw a party

“Ok, so I am going out of town tomorrow and I COMPLETELY forgot that I have class on Friday nights. I have no clue how since this is one of my favorite classes!!!! (Well, not really the class just you, lol).”

What I’ve come up with so far:

• Lesson plans
• Assessment for every class
• Learning styles
• 4 I’s
• Rubric for each assignment
• Better PowerPoints

In order to help with this last point, I attended a webinar on creating better PowerPoints yesterday. My notes are below.

Bozarthzone! Where’s the Power? What’s Your Point?

Jane Bozarth

April 12, 2pm

• Determine the most critical 20% of your content and focus on that
  • If you aren’t spending 50% of your time on these points, you’re trying to cover too much
• People can fill in the details on their own
• Need to surprise audience
  • Mind is lulled into inattention by slide after slide
  • Surprise them!
• Make content memorable
  • 1 medium movie theatre popcorn has 37 grams of fat
  • A lot, but not really memorable
  • USDA showed a picture of 1 popcorn = 1 plate of bacon and eggs, 1 hamburger and fries, and 1 steak platter
  • Be emotional, concrete, credible
• Stories or any kind of narrative are memorable
• Remember the journalism triangle

http://bozarthzone.blogspot.com/

I’ve been reading Jane Vella’s Taking Learning to Task (on the recommendation of “Adults and Library Instruction: The Four ‘I’s in Instruction,” a chapter in one of those Library Instruction books I’ve mentioned before), which is how to teach using active learning, or the 4 Is (Inductive work, Input, Implementation, and Integration).

Basically, the premise is something all teacher ed students learn in our education classes; that students have a certain amount of preexisting knowledge about any topic, and in order to teach them effectively you have to draw on this knowledge and then “scaffold” the learning process in order for students to reach the understanding you want them to. Vella and Fernando Menendez’s 4 Is model starts by connecting the new material with the students’ preexisting knowledge, then an activity that encourages students to interact with the new material, then an activity that gets students to implement their new knowledge somehow, and then an activity that integrates this newfound knowledge into their lives. (So it’s a circle, really, with the student and his/her life as both the starting and ending point.)

My lesson on copyright wasn’t as true to these active learning precepts as I would have liked (all four stages are supposed to be an activity–this is active versus passive learning, after all), but it still seemed to work out well.

Inductive work: I started by asking the class what they thought copyright is, and we discussed it a bit in terms of plagiarism as well (since we’d covered that in an earlier class.

Input: A 3.5-page reading from their textbook, during which I asked them to keep in mind two questions: “Can you copyright an idea?” and “What’s the difference between fair use and public domain?” We then discussed the answers to these questions as a class, as well as the deeper issues behind them (WHY can’t you copyright an idea? Fair use items are still copyrighted, but ones in the public domain are not. etc.)

A short video, recommended by Sarah Houghton-Jan, that explains the basics of copyright in a much more entertaining way than I ever could. (My students were totally baffled on why I asked them to take notes on this. It was a revelation when I said it might help them study for the final exam. Obviously I’ll need to take some of the suggestions from this ProfHacker post on encouraging effective note-taking next semester!)

An interactive PowerPoint based on a resource recommended by one of these Library Instruction books I’ve mentioned before: 10 Big Myths About Copyright Explained. (By interactive, I mean I introduced the myth, asked for ideas why it is false, and tried to encourage discussion by using real-world examples they’d be familiar with.) This allowed for more interaction with the students, and they really got into discussing derivative works (why Pride and Prejudice and Zombies doesn’t violate copyright, for example, but a Twilight and Mr. Darcy would, and “Weird Al” Yankovic’s albums are okay because they’re parody but Beyonce’s modified cover of Des’ree’s “I’m Kissing You” is not) and whether authors/artists should be okay with unauthorized reuse of their work because it’s free advertising (the creator gets to decide whether s/he wants free advertising, and sometimes they don’t, such as when J.K. Rowling shut down a Harry-Potter-themed Hindu festival in India–but is okay with Harry Potter partyware licensed through Warner Brothers).

Implementation: I asked my students to visit The Copyright Website (another resource recommended by the Library Instruction book Teaching Information Literacy Concepts: Activities and Frameworks from the Field (number 6 in the series). This Web site is a great resource of case studies of recent copyright infringement cases, and is organized by media type (movies, music, software, etc.), so there’s a wide variety of options to choose from. I asked my students to pick one case to look at with a partner, and after reviewing it to write a 200-word paper summarizing the facts of the case, why it was considered a copyright infringement, and whether (and why) the student thought it was indeed a copyright infringement.

This last activity was wildly successful–both classes spent about 40 minutes on it, which is much longer than I expected, and a good deal of that time was spent comparing notes with their classmates on their respective cases and looking closely at the details of the cases to see if they really were copyright infringements. I heard lots of “I can’t believe Beyonce did that!” and “I won’t be buying any more of her albums!” And judging by the papers they turned in, there was some good critical thinking that went on. Yay!

Implementation: This was the weakest of my four; they have a new paper to work on, and part of it involves describing the information literacy process, including the “ethical use of information”–i.e., what we went over in class that night.

Overall I’m quite pleased. Only two weeks of class left, which will be spent working on this paper and reviewing for/taking this exam, so no new material to present. (Though I’m working on a fun way to prep for the exam this week!) I’m looking forward to doing this all over next semester–which starts a week and a half after this one ends–having learned from my mistakes this first go-around and implementing the great activities I’ve stumbled across in the Library Instruction books.