Tips for Ending PowerPointlessness

Free webcast on Thursday, November 10th (3-4pm) from the Blended Librarian folks…http://home.learningtimes.net/library. I’ll be tuning in for this.

The Class of 2009

Just coming up for a bit of air after 3 solid weeks of back-to-school activities. This is my first full “fall” semester and it has been a doozy. I haven’t done a tally, but I have to believe the early indicators that our new IM service is a big hit. We launched on the first day of classes, sent campus-wide emails the following week, and we’re now receiving several IMs a day. Lot of reserves queries, messages for full-text assistance, longish reference questions and research appointment requests. I have also personally witnessed my share of “hi library” pulse checking IMs.

The new kids are sooooooo plugged in. They come to the library in search of usb ports to download the papers stored on their Ipods. They are sprawled all over the library with their own laptops, wander through the reference collection, and more importantly, ask lots of questions about our services.

The staff here also seems to be keen on IM, which is great. I won’t say we’re fighting over them, but everyone is eager to answer them. We are also dealing with privacy issues (storage, chat cleansing, etc.) and different levels of comfort using IM. I created two FAQ’s–one for patrons and one for us. It’s a process, and all of the anecdotal feedback I am receiving will be very useful for my November talk to public librarians about launching an IM service.

OLIS Trillian training confirmed!

I’ll be talking to librarians in RI about Trillian in November for the Office of Library and Information Services’ (OLIS) Continuing Education program. OLIS offers free CE programs for every variety of librarian throughout RI. Pretty cool service.

Trillian training materials

Presentation: http://edificeref.info/presentations/trilliantraining.pdf

Trillian install tutorial (Windows Media file, best viewed full screen): http://www.providence.edu/library/trillian/trillian.wmv

Trillian training for HELIN consortium

I believe I mentioned here earlier that my consortium was discontinuing use of a certain VR product in favor of a decentralized IM reference service using Trillian. I ran the training for about 20 librarians from RI this morning, and we were lucky to have two librarians from Brown stopped in to update us on their use of Trillian over the last year. They’ve had just over 400 chats with 65% reference related. They don’t seem too overwhelmed by it. I think the training went pretty well, I’ll upload my materials shortly. (more…)

Are Interactive Tutorials dead?

While at the ACRL NEC, I also sat in on part of the Interactive Tutorials/Streaming Videos breakout session. Three librarians from BU demoed ShowMe, an interactive tutorial on searching databases. It is modeled after TILT and incorporates ACRL information literacy standards.

I could be wrong here, but whenever I see the word TILT, I think too big, too much and “bandwidth sucker”. It took the BU librarians 4 years to develop and design the product. A testament to the power of collaboration, to be sure, but for those of us who only get one shot to speak and work with select groups of students during a semester and don’t have an Info Lit program or required course, I can’t even imagine how we’d get students to do the tutorial.

I think I’d rather see more scaleable, integrated learning objects. The XSLT workshop I went to this week has started me thinking about how we deliver some content at my library (web pathfinders, Camtasia tutorials, powerpoint and handout links). I don’t have any answers yet, but I know there has to be a way to maximize the limited time I get with students. Part of the answer is going where the students are (yeah yeah everyone’s read the Born With A Chip article and seen the Pew Report by now), but another important part is making it useful (slicing, aggregating and syndicating is making more sense to me by the minute).

Testing eLiteracy story on Morning Edition

I’m on Day 1 of a beast of a week, but I caught Audie Cornish’s piece NPR this morning discussing the new Computer Literacy test developed by the ETS people. They also discuss the info literacy movement at libraries, interview students about how they do research, etc. It’s only 4 minutes long, check it out. There’s isn’t a separate mp3 link and I didn’t have time do a tiny url, go here and listen in WMP or RA: eLiteracy on Morning Edition

Upcoming Podcasting in Education presentation at Providence College

My toes curled a little when I read this announcement from the faculty listserv. Very very cool that teaching faculty at my school are pondering the value of podcasting in higher ed. A Higher Ed Systems Engineer (that’s his title) from Apple will be giving the presentation. From the description: “This presentation will introduce you to podcasting. It will not only cover what podcasting is, but how it can be leveraged in education to provide a richer learning environment. There will be demonstrations of how to subscribe and create podcasts. Finally, we will look at how the iPod is being used in education.

Overview of topics:

Definition of Podcasting
Podcasting in Education
Demo of Podcasting
How to subscribe to a podcast.
How to create a podcast.
iPods in Education

Podcasting was recently featured in March’s Wired magazine and has been exploding in popularity since its inception last summer. ” They also link to this recent Wired article:

http://wired-vig.wired.com/wired/archive/13.03/curry.html

My school gives out instructional technology grants to faculty and I have been thinking about a couple of things for a tech grant proposal. I am encouraged.

Jybe Talkin’..

What do you do when technology bites back? I got an email today from the “free” wiki provider I used to set up the wiki for my RI database committee work. They very politely informed me that they had set up their pricing structure in the event I want to use the product beyond beta. Do I switch to a new tool now(like the people that transfer their credit card balances to get a low interest rate) or keep building on the beta version with the hope that I’ll have access for at least as long as we need it up to show the steering committee? Ugh. Today I tried to show my colleague co-browsing with Jybe today during our web meeting. Jybe is a free tool. I like that they address the “How Much Does This Cost” question in their FAQ like this: “Zero. Zilch. Nada.” That’s what I’m talking about. I don’t know if was the fact that we were logged in remotely or what, but we couldn’t get it to play nice. I installed it in Firefox and she installed it in IE, but we couldn’t find the tool in the IE browser after the install. And what a difference between Firefox and IE installs. I agreed to the Service terms at the Jybe website (immediately thinking thanks to comments at CIL that I rarely look at the service terms any more, I just “agree”), clicked the download for Firefox button, and BOOM, my plug in was there when I restarted the FF browser. 5 seconds tops. My colleague did the IE install, had to sign a second agreement in the wizard screens and it literally took several minutes (when you factor in the wizard screens, etc.) We restarted her browser a few times, but couldn’t find the Jybe session buttons. We’ll have to try it again from our own computers. This tool would be a nice little plugin for Trillian. Greg Schwartz of Open Stacks talks about co-browsing, Jybe and virtual reference in his March 28 podcast. I’m thinking that the fact that both parties need to have Jybe installed would be a barrier with patrons. Unless there is a way to “direct connect”.

Internal uses for IM

Today, I am working with a colleague on an upcoming instruction workshop. It’s for an Education class that will be writing annotated bibliographies after finding and critiquing several research articles. We’ve divvyed up the work and have been using Trillian to brainstorm and send files back and forth without having to be in the same physical space. Our offices are actually in close proximity but I’m a raging multitasker, so it works better for me if I can stay connected to everything from within my office (students walking in with reference questions, phone reference, etc.) Total coolness (warning, I occasionally talk like the 25 year old I am not, and overuse the parens; I am millennial-adjacent). Confession: Thanks to the unusual configuration of our offices, ( I like to call it the “Les Nessman” (WKRP) syndrome, except it’s the detached ceiling if that makes sense) I did have to restrain myself from just yelling out my office door.
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