Spurious Tuples

Why I’m a teaching wimp

March 3, 2010 – 11:47 am

This post¹ isn’t so much for all you instruction librarians out there, since you all probably know what I’m going to say already. It’s more for any teaching faculty who might be out there (anyone? anyone? Bueller?) and anyone else who’s curious.

So most of my teaching for this semester is done: I have three more sessions for two classes coming up after Spring Break, and then, unless someone comes to me with a completely out-of-the-blue request (which could happen) that’s it for the semester. It’s been relatively busy for a spring semester: I did ten sessions in February, which is the most I’ve done in any one month except for one September when I did twelve.

When scheduling classes, I try to limit myself to no more than three preps per week, and no more than one prep per day if I can possibly manage it. One week this term I did five sessions (only three preps) and at the peak of the term, I did eight sessions in the space of eight workdays, which I think is a new record. That was pretty rough and I was very very glad that most of those sessions were repeats of lesson plans that I’d done in previous semesters.

Any teaching faculty out there reading this? You’re probably either chortling with disdain or picking your jaw up off the floor right now. Double bonus points if you teach at a community college with a 5-5 load.

“What do you mean, only three preps per week?” you’re probably howling. “I do three preps per day some terms. What a total wimp!”

Yep, I admit it. But here’s the thing: every class I teach is the first day of class.

It’s true: every time I meet a class, it’s the first — and most likely the only — time I meet with that class. The term “one-shot” for a library instruction session means just that: I get one shot with these students, and I’d better hope that whatever I need to get across to them, even if it’s something as basic as “come ask us for help,” gets across.

Remember how exhausted you are after the first days of every term? Now imagine that you had to do that every time you teach, and there was no opportunity to go back and fix anything you did wrong on the first day, or add a reminder of something you accidentally missed, or…well, anything.

Yeah, it’s exhausting. The real problem, though, is that it doesn’t scale well: I can’t do a whole lot (like, orders of magnitude) more instruction than I’m already doing, and our campus is going to need a whole lot more instruction than I’m already doing. And we’ll need it soon, once our new General Education curriculum comes online. I’m not at all sure what to do about that.

Disclaimer: this post is by no means an argument for the tyranny of content. Just the opposite, in fact. ↩

By Catherine | Posted in Faculty, In the classroom, Instruction | Comments (1)

14 Things About Me and Books

January 8, 2010 – 1:10 pm

Inspired by Steve Lawson’s post, which was in turn inspired by John Scalzi’s post:

When I was in elementary school, I read a book called There’s a Rainbow In My Closet that made me want to paint, and paint, and paint. I checked it out of the library a bazillion times, and read it many more times than that. The library I checked it out of, still has it. It’s out of print, and used copies are running in the $250 range, or else I’d have bought myself a copy.
My first library job was in the Preservation Department of Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library in the summer of 1993. I was working on a project to survey the condition of the books in the stacks (as part of a campaign to advocate for — wait for it — air-conditioning in the stack tower). We did brittleness and other tests on long runs of serials including volumes of The Gentleman’s Magazine that went back to the 18th century. And were sitting there in un-airconditioned stacks. OMGWTFBBQ.
When I was three, a friend of the family gave me a copy of The Dot and the Line, by Norton Juster. I still have it, and read it to James on occasion. My mom swears that I actually got the joke of “he found himself completely on edge” at the age of three.
I do not remember the first book I could read. (Though I do remember being able to read a traffic sign that said, “NO TURN ON RED.”) I really don’t remember not being able to read.
In first grade, we worked through some progressive readers of some sort at our own pace, and at the end of the year I made a point of remembering which reader I had just completed, and actively maintained that memory through the whole summer, so that when I came back in the fall I could pick up where I left off.
I really despise “gift books,” those little useless tomes that bookstores keep by the cash register so you can buy a cute book of cat quotes for your friend who likes cats, or whatever. They’re usually awful books, and I never know what to do with them when people give them to me. Which they seem to do with alarming frequency.
I don’t have memories of my parents reading to me, though surely they did. We didn’t read chapter books aloud as bedtime stories or any of that, at least not that I can remember, possibly because by the time I was mature enough for chapter books, I was reading them myself.
I am NOT an audiobook person. Not not not not not. Partly because I cannot fathom when I’d have time to listen to an audiobook, but mostly because I want reading to be a self-directed activity: at my own pace, with the freedom to go back and re-read a sentence, check a reference, etc. However, having said that…
Before our son was born, my husband would read aloud to me on long car trips. That was okay because I could interrupt him to ask a question, make him go back, etc. Our favorites were P. G. Wodehouse (Leave it to Psmith) and Harry Potter books. He does a wicked Hagrid accent. It’s possible that we’ll get back to reading aloud once James is of an age to appreciate it (and pay attention to books without pictures).
My third library job was in the undergraduate library at Yale, where among other things I sorted and shelved books. Since it was a small, compact collection, I eventually covered the entire LC classification system, and pretty much learned at least the initial letters, as well as some of the second letters (PQ vs PR vs PS vs PZ, for instance) long before I started library school.
The first author-signed book I owned was a copy of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, which I picked up at the greatest used bookstore in the universe (now defunct), and it’s inscribed to the Oberlin College Science Fiction Society.
Also at that used bookstore, I picked up a copy of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting that was inscribed by a friend of mine to his ex-girlfriend. I’ve never told either of them that I have it. Heh.
The best used bookstore in the universe was Miranda Books, in Oberlin, Ohio. I won’t hear objections to this.
The band director at Yale once gave me a set of the 1961 edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians that was missing the first volume (A-B). Not that there are any important composers whose names begin with A or B. Some years later, I told this story to the music librarian at UNC-Chapel Hill, and he promptly marched me back to the room that contained their unprocessed gifts, and plucked one (of several) first volumes off the shelf and gave it to me. He also tossed in a Liber usualis for good measure.

Sorry, I really couldn’t come up with a fifteenth!

By Catherine | Posted in Off-topic blather | Comments (2)

First screencast

December 18, 2009 – 9:49 am

One of the things you do at Immersion is prepare and present a 5-minute teaching segment; this is where you work on all the “public speaking” aspects of teaching: vocal projection, filler words, hand gestures, etc.

My 5-minute segment was a quick set piece about how the “Find Text” (OpenURL resolver) links in our databases work. It went over well, and I was pleased with it, but my fellow cohort members mentioned that since it was such a set piece, totally the same in every class I used it in, and didn’t need to be customized to the particular disciplinary context, perhaps a more efficient strategy would be to do a screencast that covered the same content.

So, that’s what I did. After a semester of waffling and considering options, we got a license for Camtasia last week, I watched a bunch of tutorials on how to use it, and eventually produced this (which unfortunately is too wide for this blog, but I think the embed works anyway):

I’m quite pleased with the results!

By Catherine | Posted in Instruction, Those dang databases | Comments (4)

Tuesday Toddler Blogging

December 15, 2009 – 9:03 am

Things have been pretty quiet around here lately: actual in-class instruction has been done for several weeks now, but we’ve got a lot of projects cooking on various back burners. We’re going to be doing usability testing on the new library website in January, so we’re getting geared up for that, and I’m working on some new instructional tools including my very first screencast. So there’s a lot going on behind the scenes, but not much to talk about.

Here are some recent photos of my little guy J, though, just so this blog doesn’t go all dormant:

By Catherine | Posted in Off-topic blather | Comments Off

Critical thinking and knowledge bases

November 25, 2009 – 9:22 am

A couple of weeks ago our campus hosted a guest speaker who gave a presentation on assessing critical thinking skills, especially in the context of general education. (This was part of an ongoing project on our campus to reform our general education curriculum and move more in the direction of assessment of learning outcomes.)

The presentation was engaging and thought-provoking, but one piece in particular stood out to me as particularly relevant to information literacy instruction. The presenter cited research¹ that had been done to try to get at what constitutes generalized critical thinking skills. This research had focused on expert chess players, because the researchers figured that there were few better models of generalized, disciplinary-context-free thinking skills than chess. So they investigated how expert chess players think, what drives their decision-making, how expert chess players’ thinking differs from novice chess players’ thinking, etc.

What they found, however, was that instead of anything that could be described as generalized thinking skills, what the expert players were drawing on was a vast knowledge base: of patterns of chess moves, of strategies, of famous games, of players’ personalities and their likelihood of making certain strategic decisions, etc.

Click to enlarge

And that got me thinking about information literacy, and specifically, the process of sorting through vast reams of search results to find the relevant and reliable results, and to sort them from the rest. I’ve recently become more and more aware of the incredibly dense and complex filters that I apply to a set of search results. Try it yourself with the search results for “affirmative action” in Academic Search Premier that are linked in the image at the right: how quickly did you pull out the popular magazine article and the editorial; how quickly did you sort the other, more scholarly, treatments into their disciplinary pigeonholes?

It’s astounding to me how quickly, and on how little evidence, I’m able to make these kinds of decisions. (Admittedly, I sometimes get them wrong!) And I always have to remind myself that 18-year-olds simply do not have the knowledge base yet to do this as quickly as I do. Even a hypothetical college senior who had achieved all of the ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education couldn’t do it, at least not as quickly as I — or any of you — could. It’s not a question of the student’s information literacy skills, it’s a question of her knowledge base, or lack thereof.

And that’s my question: how do we impart that knowledge base to our students? Can we? (Should we, is another question I suppose.) Or is the best we can do, to throw up our hands and say, “go out and live mindfully in the world for twenty years and then come back and ask that question again?”

I’m not sure precisely what the citation is for the research; it was probably the following article, which I have not actually read, because our library doesn’t have it and I’m not about to tax our already-overburdened ILL system just to verify a citation for a blog post. Ahem. Where was I? Oh yes, the citation:
Perkins, D. N. and Gavriel Salomon. “Are cognitive skills context bound?” Educational Researcher 18/1 (1989): 16-25. ↩

By Catherine | Posted in Critical thinking, Students | Comments (4)

Classroom management win!

November 12, 2009 – 6:46 pm

This is, in many ways, a post-Immersion success story.

Earlier this week, I taught a one-shot session for an introductory class that had about 15 first-year students and 5 seniors. As soon as we got started, it became apparent that there was one student, evidently a senior, in the class who simply would not stop chatting with her neighbor. She chatted all through the professor’s introduction, and all through my introduction, and she was loud enough that I could hear her from halfway across the room. And she was sitting in the front row!

I thought about calling her out on her behavior in a variety of ways, but since the professor hadn’t done anything about it while she had the floor, I didn’t really figure it was my place to do anything public about it either. Various forms of the Stern Librarian Glare weren’t working, so I was kind of at a loss as to what to do.

So I went about working with the class – the first 10-15 minutes were mostly lecture, so it was a real problem – wondering what to do about Chatty Cathy here in the front row. And then a little voice in the back of my head started whispering, “what would Randy do?” See, Randy Hensley is one of the faculty members at Immersion, and he does a lot of work with the Teacher track participants on using our bodies and voices as instructional tools.

One of the techniques that Randy advocates is moving around the room – a lot – standing at the sides, the back, wherever you can fit, both to keep the students focused on you, and to emphasize what’s going on in the class. We’re lucky enough to have a room where usually I can get around the whole perimeter, so I’ve been doing more of this and I really like it. It’s especially useful when we’ve done a group project and the groups are reporting back to the class: I move around to stand behind the group who’s reporting, which encourages them to deliver their report to the class, not just to me, and it keeps the class’s attention focused on the group.

So anyway, I was moving around the room, and it occurred to me that not only was Chatty Cathy in the front row, she was on the end of the row. So as she was chatting, I very casually moved around to stand next to her. And by “next to her,” I really mean “uncomfortably close to her.” Like, in her personal space close to her.

And then I did one other thing: under ordinary circumstances, my voice projects pretty well. I’ve never had a problem being heard in that classroom (or, um, any other room actually), and I generally don’t have to concentrate on projecting in that space. But this time, I cranked it up to eleven. I didn’t shout, or do anything that would have been obviously intentional. I just…really projected.

And it worked!

It only took a sentence or two of this treatment for Chatty Cathy to stop chatting. So I moved away from her and continued my class. A few minutes later, she started up again, so I moved back into position, and she stopped again. It took a few more back-and-forths for her to get the message, but eventually she got it: her behavior was unacceptable, and I wasn’t going to tolerate it in my classroom.

I’m not at all sure what the other 19 students in the class took away from the session, but as far as I’m concerned, getting this one student to stop an inappropriate behavior made it a success.

By Catherine | Posted in In the classroom, Students | Comments Off

If you need a flowchart to cite an article, you’re doing it wrong

October 15, 2009 – 8:08 pm

So the APA just recently published a new edition of their style manual, the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. And hoo, boy: what a mess. Among other things, they’ve made substantial changes to the way writers are supposed to cite journal articles accessed online, especially via licensed subscription databases.

This blog post is likely to get a bit ranty, so just to keep myself focused on the topic at hand, let me get a couple of preliminary mini-rants off my chest first:

The MLA just released a new edition of their style manual last spring. Two at the same time? Shoot me now. Librarians across the continent have been scrambling to update guides, figure out which citation tools are working with which editions of which manuals, figure out which faculty members are working with which manuals (real quote from a faculty member: “there’s another new edition? I haven’t updated to the last new edition yet!”) etc. I think it’s all a terrorist plot.
The first printing needed seven supplemental pages of corrections for all the errors that made it through the publication process. Seven pages of corrections? Did nobody proofread the danged thing? (Inside Higher Education has a great piece on the errors and corrections; my favorite bit is when the editorial director for APA books says that the manual was “very complicated to put together.” Um, yeah, it’s a style manual: of course it’s complicated. It’s your job to make sure it’s also correct.

Okay, so now that we’ve got those things taken care of, let’s get down to discussing the changes for how to cite articles obtained through subscription databases:

First off, the new style dictates that if there is a digital object identifier (DOI) for an article, you should include it in your citation. All well and good. I have nothing against DOIs; they’re mighty handy things, and I can imagine that, like ISBNs, they will only become more widely-used and understood by the academic community. There will surely be some education required for students (and, dare I say it, faculty) about DOIs: what they are, how to identify them, etc., but I think they’ll catch on quickly. Look at how quickly students picked up on the usefulness of ISBNs once they discovered online purchasing of textbooks. Now, sending authors (read: students) to sites like crossref.org to try to find a DOI when it’s not included in the index or on the first page of the article is an added complication that I don’t think anyone is happy about, but again: it’s not a huge deal.

No, the huge deal is here: what you’re supposed to do if there is no DOI for the article. As I read the flowchart, in most cases where there is no DOI, and you accessed the article through a licensed database, you’re supposed to list the homepage URL of the journal.

Say what now?

Take a moment to think about this. Say a student found an article in the Journal of Underwater Basketweaving through Academic Search Premier. She’d have to construct a citation that looked like this (apologies for the lack of hanging indent):

Oliver, C. D. (1981). New developments in basketology: Weaving the strands toward a new science. Journal of Underwater Basketweaving, 3, 153-168. <http://www.basketology.org>.

Now, there are three kinds of problems with this rule: logistical problems, practical problems, and epistemological problems.

Logistical Problems

The APA guide makes a passing reference to “oh, you may have to do a quick web search to find the publisher of the journal, but it shouldn’t be too big of a deal.” Oh, really? When journals change publishers on a regular basis, and old websites linger in Google’s cache? When multiple iterations of a journal title (Journal of Sociology, American Journal of Sociology, Journal of the Sociological Association of America, Journal of Sociological Research) abound? Does a URL, copied in 2009, that looks like this: http://www.elsevier.com/basket_journal do a reader in 2011 any good if that journal was sold to Wiley in 2010?

Practical Problems

If, as I’ve always assumed, the point of a citation is to give the reader the necessary information to locate the full text of the item in question, how exactly does having the home page of the journal (or its publisher) help the reader? While open access is a fine and grand thing, it isn’t exactly the coin of the realm, nor is that situation likely to change drastically in the near future. Most articles on most publishers’ web sites, if they’re there at all, are only available for a fee to subscribers. Any researcher who’s going to attempt to locate a source cited in an APA-format paper is going to go (we fervently hope) to his/her institution’s licensed resources first, not to the publisher’s home page. So that URL, even if it is still accurate when it’s read years later, is practically useless.

Epistemological Problems

Again, the purpose of the citation: it’s essentially saying to the reader, “here is where I found this information.” By citing the home page of the journal, the author is essentially saying, “I found this information at http://www.basketology.org.” When s/he did nothing of the sort: s/he found it in Academic Search Premier, or PsycINFO, or JSTOR, or wherever. How on earth are we supposed to explain and justify this to our students? When we tell them, “you have to cite your sources so that your reader can find the same information that you found,” how does that URL fit into the plan?

The answer is, it doesn’t. It doesn’t make any sense at all to me, and it smacks of intellectual dishonesty. You know, the kind of thing we’re supposed to be socializing our students not to do. Which is why I think it’s a load of bunk, and I’m sorely tempted to simply advise students to cite the article as though it was print and just ignore all the madness.

In fact, that’s exactly what I advised a faculty member recently, when she told me she had a stack “this high” of printouts of articles that she’d downloaded from CINAHL, but she had no idea when (this was when retrieval dates were still part of APA style). “What am I supposed to do about the retrieval dates for these?” she asked. “Ignore it,” I told her, “just cite them as though they were print. Your reader will still be able to find the sources, and that’s all that matters.”

Update, 10/21/09: Barbara Fister, writing for ACRLog, covers much the same ground, with way more style and panache than I’ve managed here, plus ties the whole issue into carbon footprints!

By Catherine | Posted in Reference, Students | Comments (4)

On the uses of Wikipedia: Noted almost without comment

September 25, 2009 – 12:28 pm

My husband, Chris Cobb, wrote to me recently:

I was twigged to a most exciting (for a medievalist, that is) news story last evening that I wanted to pass along to you, just because. It was announced today that the largest Anglo-Saxon hoard ever discovered has recently been found in Staffordshire, England. It is several times larger than the Sutton Hoo treasure, and full of exquisitely crafted pieces.

If you’d like to take a look, the website that the curators have developed is here:

http://www.staffordshirehoard.org.uk/

I will add that, in a supremely ironic twist, I picked up this story as I was watching a video on [Daily Kos] of Michael Moore being interviewed by Wolf Blitzer on CNN about “Capitalism: A Love Story.” While Michael Moore was doing an absolutely devastating takedown of the vacuous and insinuating questions that Blitzer was asking, “Largest Anglo-Saxon Hoard Discovered” flashed across the “Breaking News” line. I finished watching the interview, which was awesome, and then flipped over to Wikipedia, figuring that they would have the best information, and they did. It was in their “in the news” section, they already had a detailed entry written up about it (the public story broke today!), and a link to the official website. …. It’s not every night that the archaeological find of the century is announced…

Anyway, I thought you might find the story amusing, and the artifacts are worth a look: they are astonishing.

Mad props to Wikipedia!

By Catherine | Posted in Off-topic blather | Comments (1)

What am I doing differently this semester?

September 23, 2009 – 2:53 pm

So the instruction season is in full swing (I have 5 sessions for three classes this week, and 4 sessions for two classes next week, yikes!) and I’m back from Immersion, so I’m sure you’re waiting with baited breath to find out how Immersion has transformed my information literacy instruction!

Wait, you’re not? Oh.

Well, I’m going to tell you anyway, so there. What I’m doing this semester is … actually, not all that different from what I was doing before. Which is kind of depressing and is making me feel rather useless.

Here’s what’s different:

I’m writing the learning outcomes up on the board at the beginning of class, and when it’s possible, I leave them there throughout the class period (we don’t have much whiteboard space, so sometimes I have to erase them). I’d always talked through them at the beginning of class, but having them up there reinforces the structure of the class, and maybe helps address multiple learning styles.
I’ve experimented a little bit with asking the students to help me prioritize which learning outcomes to spend the most time on, and which to spend the least time on. In two cases, I’ve been able to do this ahead of time (not, as I had hoped, via Blackboard, sigh) and in a couple of cases I’ve done it on the fly at the beginning of class. In one of the cases where I asked them in advance, I got really good information that I’ll use to construct a session on completely different tools and skills than I’d planned to do — the session is next week, so we’ll see how it goes. In at least one of the cases where I did it on the fly, and the students said, “oh yes, we know how to do this, you don’t have to spend any time on it,” it became apparent later in the session that no, they did NOT know how to do that. Oops. I’m not sure what to do about that.
I’ve asked students to come up and “drive” the instructor’s computer a couple of times. This has worked out fine but hasn’t felt revolutionary, almost more like a gimmick. I’m going to keep trying it, though.
When I teach search strategy, I use a handout that helps them brainstorm keywords and combine them using AND and OR. In yesterday’s class, I collected the handouts, and I intend to make comments and suggestions and then return them to the students via the professor. This both gives the students feedback on their work and an additional contact with me, and also allows me to assess how well they did on the worksheet. Over time, I hope to develop a rubric for assessing the worksheets and start building a collection of data for assessing their learning. The only drawback is, I just created a big pile of work for myself: clever, that!

What hasn’t changed:

I’m still doing the same blasted “construct a Boolean search; run it in an EBSCO database and sort your results; use the article linker to get full text” lesson plan I’ve been doing over and over and over. And over. Because it’s what the professor wants. And it’s what the students need, primarily. It’s pretty effective, but inevitably I’ll have one or two students in the class who’ve seen me do the same schtick once or twice before, and they’re totally checked out. And I’ll have anywhere from one or two, to a bunch, of students who really struggle with search strategy, which kind of defeats the purpose of the whole rest of the class, if they can’t construct a coherent search to start with.

I’m really not sure what to do about this situation, or how to get around the Golden Oldie lesson plan that I always get asked to do. For the assignments our professors give (most of the time), it’s what (most of) our students need. And until we get some mechanism to provide some baseline IL instruction in their first year or two, we’ll still have students who reach their junior or senior years and still don’t have the first clue how to string more than one keyword together. (Seriously. I taught some seniors, writing their comps, this week, and some of them had a heck of a time with it.)

But I’m going to keep plugging away, trying to do better, and hope that the new General Education program will give me some leverage to work with.

I do hope to be able to do a no-demonstration class in the near future, and I have high hopes for a history senior comps class I’ll be teaching next week (I may even show them OAIster!) and an intro communication class I’ll also be teaching next week. But the sense that I should, after all that time and energy at Immersion, be doing better than this is very strong.

By Catherine | Posted in In the classroom, Instruction, Students | Comments (2)

Upgraded to WordPress 2.8.4

September 6, 2009 – 8:20 pm

There’s a really nasty worm out there that’s attacking WordPress blogs, so if you’ve got one, and you’re a lazy bum like me and haven’t upgraded to the latest version of WordPress (2.8.4), please do so!