Tag Archives: academic libraries

What do we do?

I got into a discussion with a friend who knows I left Facebook last summer because of their abysmal response to the civil rights audit that indicates they uphold white supremacy through their inability or unwillingness to stop hate groups and misinformation. She shared a post our mutual friend wrote the day after the domestic terrorist/white supremacist attack on the Capitol this week. She wanted to talk about several things, but one of them was what I thought we should do.

Well, for one, we have to all face what so many commentators noted this week: this IS America. We are a country where black and brown people earn less, where white privilege is encoded in our laws and policies, and where law enforcement supports white supremacy either tacitly or actively, as broadcast around the world on January 6.

We also have to face the fact that as I saw in a Twitter post this weekend, people who embrace untruths in spite of overwhelming evidence are no longer the fringe and seem to be incapable of examining information to discern truth. For example, people who believe Coronavirus conspiracy theories even though millions of people are sick and have died. Or believe election results are inaccurate, even though election officials, judges, and Justice Department personnel (including many, many conservatives) have confirmed that the election was conducted and results tallied fairly and accurately. While some news outlets are quick to point out that a majority of Americans DO trust the election results (around 60% depending on where you look) it’s very important not to overlook that 40% do not.

I’ve written about information pollution, filter bubbles, and information literacy here before. The idea that information literacy can backfire is not new. But we have millions of people who not only can’t seem to evaluate information critically enough to discover untruths, but also embrace misinformation. I strongly believe that some do so knowing they are spreading misinformation — not just foreign actors, but many politicians, public officials, and corporations who callously manipulate public opinion for their own benefit.

But in addition to these bad actors (who have always existed), there are also millions of people who feel confident that the untruths they embrace are true. They believe in their own ability to find truth — mostly online — in the sources they trust. And they believe others’ sources are not trustworthy — as evidenced by the anger, mistrust, and violence directed at the press during the insurrection this week and during the last four years in particular, but more generally over my lifetime as conservatives worked hard to convince their adherents that the media is too biased to believe. Progressives too believe the media is biased, for different reasons, and although that has not manifested in as much vitriol, it’s still undermining our ability as a society to find common ground, because we don’t begin with any sort of shared understanding. Let me be clear: I don’t think people shouldn’t question or hold the media accountable, but I do think wholesale mistrust of the media is unhelpful.

What should we do, my friend asked.

Talk about it, is one thing. And continue to try to teach information literacy carefully, including how information is created as well as how to evaluate it. Call on the government to direct resources towards stopping the state sponsored misinformation that sows discontent and mistrust, and disrupting hate groups’ (including white nationalists’) communications.

For me, there are two more things: I’ll try to continue to write to and call local, state, and federal officials to ask them to work on mitigating inequalities, large and small. And to actively seek to dismantle white supremacy. Neither of these is easy or straightforward. Both are pretty tedious and will involve making mistakes and having to apologize and try again. Both require a lens through which everything — including being a librarian — are viewed, to reveal injustices and opportunities to correct them. The justice lens gets dirty sometimes, or slips, or cracks, and has to be cleaned or replaced.

None of us can do this alone. And those of us who are privileged — because of our whiteness or our socioeconomic status or our gender in particular — have to listen to and learn from those whose privilege has been systematically diminished. And then we have to act. As I prepare my library’s budget and consider my database renewals, I want to be sure we are spending our money on sources that not only support teaching and learning, but do so while making an effort to center Black experience and Black voices. For example, I’ve been discussing replacing CQ Researcher with my colleagues, in part because it is not making that effort.

I have no delusions that these actions are enough. But that’s my answer right now to “what should we do?”

Advertisement
2 Comments

Zooma zooma zooma zoom

If you grew up in the 70s you might recognize that back then, Zoom was a PBS show for tweens/teens. Strange that today it is the way many of us work, learn, meet, and even socialize. It’s been a while since I’ve posted because it felt like I had nothing to say about COVID-19 librarianship that wasn’t being said elsewhere. And I was busy zooming, like many of you.

It was a strange summer, and much like other summers in an academic library, many of the projects I hoped to get to did not come to fruition. I wonder if we’ll ever finish weeding? But I did spend a lot of time thinking about how to approach information literacy instruction this fall.

For one thing, I want to be more collaborative, allowing students to co-create sessions with me by sharing their experiences and what they are interested in learning. I’ve worked on this to some extent in person, but man professors expect us to “teach the databases.” On Zoom, no one knows what to expect, so I feel this is chance to experiment more.

Which is great, but, I get “one shot” classes with students, where they may have met me in similar one shots but they know they’re not going to see me again this semester. It’s hard to feel invested quickly in collaborating with a near stranger. To build a little comradery in advance, I tried sending a link to a Padlet yesterday ahead of a class I had today, letting them know it was low stakes – no need to sign their post, no right or wrong answers, ok to say “I’m not sure.” One person responded to my prompt in advance.

If you’re curious, the prompt was, roughly, “Think of a time when you needed information outside of classes. How did you decide where to look for the info? How did you know whether it was accurate? How is your experience different when you have to find info for class?” I answered, so they’d have an example. I looked up when to get a flu shot. I was starting from a New York Times article, I took a link to the CDC, which is our national public health agency and is tasked with overseeing flu shots, so I knew the information between these two sources was a) as official as it comes in our “every man for himself” country and b) edited and fact checked by professional journalists. When I do an assignment, I check first to see what kind of sources are required.

In class I gave them five minutes to answer the prompt, since most people hadn’t yet, and realized many of them didn’t know how to add to a Padlet. I let there be an uncomfortable silence with very little typing. Finally I asked if anyone was wondering how to add to the Padlet. No one spoke. I said into the silence: “In case you ARE wondering, click the plus sign.” And repeated the low stakes spiel I’d put in my announcement ahead of class.

Some responses! Not much discussion. A little, and then I caught myself filling the silence, so I moved on to asking what they’d done so far with the assignment. The professor, likely sensing that Zoom seems to be an unlikely place for people who don’t know a guest speaker to open up, called on a student who she knew had found something interesting. She shared her screen. We talked about why it was interesting — a lobbyist wrote an article for a peer reviewed journal. It passed through peer review, with a conflict of interest statement. Cool — something to talk about!

This gave me an opening to work in another thing I vowed I will bring up in every instruction session this fall: equity. Who controls academic research and publishing? Whose voices are included? Whose are left out? Where is the power (which translates to authority in information literacy terms)? What groups are not studied? I was happy to see many heads nodding when I pointed out the equity issues in research.

So, that’s one class down. Not counting four nursing orientations I did with my coworker the last week. Which were little more than “we’re here for you, get in touch, here’s our website.” Where, by the way, we post photos of our pets.

Which got some smiles, and a tiny glimpse of human connection – the nursing students were on campus and we were off, so we couldn’t see them very well, since they were in a classroom and we were on . . . Zoom. They could see us, projected onto a big screen. I will hang onto those glimpses of eye contact and enthusiasm and try not to sweat the silence and the fear of admitting uncertainty and the worry about whether people are getting what I’m saying or wondering when I’m going to shut up.

Because really, Zoom is not that different than in person “one shot” sessions. It’s not a great way to teach, nor a great way to learn, having an hour or 90 minutes with a group, one time during the semester. I’d like to build relationships, get to know my students, even over technology. Over the summer, one student responded to a post I put in her course, inviting students to ask me for help with their research assignment. We “met” several times over the next two months, and I helped with each paper. I learned, over chat, and one attempt at Zoom, that she is a mom of three young kids, trying to get her associate’s degree while caring for them. By the end of the term, it felt like in some small way, we’d made a connection. I had glimpses of what she was juggling, how hard she was working to keep it all going. And what kind of help was most helpful.

So, can I keep co-creating learning with my students over Zoom, or in person, if I only get one shot at working with them? I can try. Being in their courses as Librarian helps, because I can post announcements with tips and a little bit of humor if possible, a little personality. So they know there is a person beyond the screen, someone who cares about their research success. Who really wants to hear about their experiences finding information — which I hope helps them see they are already competent researchers outside of class, and can easily be in class as well. And who is aware of racism and gender bias in research.

This year will be memorable, I am sure. I’m not going to predict which changes will last and which will be forgotten post COVID. But I’m trying to make the best of things, as we all are, and I think there is always room to learn from my students, even in Zoom, even “one shot” at a time.

2 Comments

Digital equity & digital redlining

Like many of you, I’ve been online a fair bit lately. This is week six of working from home as a community college librarian. We’ve been able to run the library remotely, because we already had services in place to make it easy for students reach out for assistance online, and to use our website as a virtual branch of the library. Yes, we’ve closed off access to our print collections right now, but we are able to help students complete research assignments via our online resources. They can get what they need to succeed.

Right?

Well, that is the theory. And to my college’s credit, our leadership polled students about their technology and internet needs as soon as they decided to make the switch to online only classes during the COVID-19 pandemic, before students had returned from spring break. They are actively working to ensure everyone taking classes can complete their work online. But around the country and the world, COVID-19 is revealing the open secret our society has not faced: digital equity is a long way off. As with so many other kinds of inequity, people who could most benefit from digital inclusion already face other systemic barriers to opportunity. Something I’ve written about before.

I’m sure you’ve read about K-12 students facing technology challenges as their schools have closed; if you haven’t, Klint Finley’s Wired article provides insight into the current problem as well as a thorough look at how we’ve ignored or even, in the past three and a half years, openly undermined, the question of equitable access to broadband. Even as it has become almost impossible to get an education, find a job, access government documents (including benefits and court documents), etc. without internet. (If you’ve been reading Nocturnal Librarian for a long time you know this is one reason public libraries are so important, because they help close the digital divide). Last week I also read a very thought provoking piece by Georgia university system students who highlighted the equity issues of their online-only courses, including the challenges rural students in particular have with internet access.

I have also given what I now see is cursory attention to the problem of algorithms — by which I mean, I’ve read  (and written) about them in terms of teaching information literacy, and worried about them as a social justice issue. But recently, I read an article about digital redlining in the newsletter of the Library Instruction Round Table. I took some of the links in the article and fell into a world of eye-opening ways that housing discrimination, banking, hiring, and other everyday life activities are impacted by the ways that algorithms use data that is informed by already institutionalized racism, xenophobia, and gender inequality and perpetuates it.

And yes, how higher ed is not without its own digital redlining, even, and perhaps especially, according to professors Chris Gilliard and Hugh Culik, at community colleges. As they put it, when explaining what digital redlining is, “It may have to do with the growing sense that digital justice isn’t only about who has access but also about what kind of access they have, how it’s regulated, and how good it is.”

I am not entirely empowered to solve digital equity issues like broadband access and redlining. None of us are, single-handedly. And I am fortunate to work somewhere where diversity, equity, and inclusion are values we aspire to live by, not just talk about, so I know we are working on some of these issues. That said, I feel a renewed sense of responsibility to make sure my elected officials know we need a better national solution to broadband inequality. And I am going to try to use what I’ve learned to reconsider the student experience at our library from a digital equity perspective, especially now as our we live through COVID-19 physical distancing.

Leave a comment

Another reason libraries are vital

I finished reading one of my Christmas gifts, Educated, on Friday evening. You can read my thoughts on this memoir by Tara Westover over at bookconscious. This morning I read Michiko Kakutani’s essay “The 2010s Were the End of Normal” and it got me thinking about why Educated has resonated so strongly with readers of all kinds (I’ve had more people recommend this book to me than any other I can think of). And why Educated illustrates the importance of libraries, even though Westover doesn’t necessarily say so (although she mentions several libraries in the book).

I watched a brief interview Westover did with Bill Gates, where she talks a little bit about divisions in our world and describes the potential of education as “this great mechanism of connecting and equalizing.” She also describes the way some schools become “an instrument of that division” because of the way “we self-segregate, and schools become reflections of people’s homogeneity.” In other words, depending on where a child grows up, they may or may not learn the same history as a child who grows up somewhere else, even in the same city or town.

Now, I’m not saying everyone should learn one official version of history. We need what Viet Thanh Nguyen calls “narrative plenitude” — where the many threads of being human in America and the world are included in the overall fabric of the history we learn, instead of the majority controlling the narrative. And education, ideally, should present that plenitude, instead of whatever the dominant narrative is. And what Westover was discussing with Gates is that if we really meant what we say about providing a good education for all, we might actually have less division. Because if you know someone’s stories, they become familiar, and you begin to see how they are also like your stories, and how they are different, and since we are born curious, you also start to wonder why.

This morning, I read Michiko Kakutani’s essay “The 2010s Were the End Of Normal” and I think one reason Educated is so powerful is that Westover’s experience, while extreme, explains the divisions we currently face. Knowing only one version of the story of humanity, particularly one that justifies fears in the face of a changing world, leads to what Kakutani quotes Richard Hofstadter as calling “the paranoid style” that Westover’s father embodies. If people then reinforce their views by limiting the scope of information they take in to what they agree with, as Kakutani notes that many people whose world views rely on “alternative facts” do, you can end up with extremes.

Westover provides some hope that anyone who can read and think (potentially, most people) can discover for themselves what has happened in human history and is happening in the world now. So people who are insulated from reality can potentially learn that their “truth” has been mediated and their accepted narrative controlled – but the scary flip side is that if enough people don’t ever learn that we end up where we are now with nationalism on the rise all over.  You probably know where I’m going with this if you’ve read Nocturnal Librarian before: libraries and librarians can help counter division because we help make it possible for people to expand their views and embrace narrative plenitude.

Information literacy, the skills and habits that allow people to find, evaluate, and use information to answer a question or solve a problem, is at the core of what academic libraries do. We teach students to consider the ways information is mediated, what mechanisms are in place to safeguard facts while still presenting persuasive arguments in journalism and academic writing, and how to recognize and critically assess those. Public libraries also foster information literacy, and they act (when they are at their best) as some of the last egalitarian public spaces, where all citizens regardless of where they live or go to school have access to the same resources. Libraries of all kinds support lifelong learning, and collect and preserve all kinds of narratives that are part of our shared human story. They can also promote civil discourse either explicitly through programming or implicitly through their collections.

So, if you want to live in a less divided, more civil world where people know how to recognize and counter “alternative facts,” support your library!

1 Comment

We’re fine without fines

I had an interesting conversation today with a student worker who wanted to know if we charge for replacement ID cards. I said no, and that even if there was a policy in the past, I was not in favor of charging students extra for things, especially since most students have little money. I pointed out that it’s possible a lost ID is at campus safety, so it might be good to ask the student to check there before having a new one made, but otherwise, just make the replacement. The student worker said they hadn’t heard a librarian say anything like that before.

We also don’t charge fines at my library, although if a book is never returned we do bill for replacement. one of our staff has been calling patrons with bills, and she said today that they don’t always believe there will be no charge if they return a long overdue item and some have even said they don’t return it out of fear of a big fine.

When I worked at a public library, “fine free” was becoming popular. In 2017, NY Public Library System president Anthony Marx wrote about some forays into fine amnesty and fine free borrowing for kids and noted that in response to those who worried about what fine free tells people about responsibility, “what is truly the greater moral hazard? Having fines or not having fines? In my view, teaching kids that the library is not an option for the poorest among them is absolutely unacceptable.” Indeed. It has always really frosted me when kids can’t use the library because of fines.

Because it turns out, library fees and fines are regressive. And now the Chicago Public Library has become the largest American library system to go fine free. Library Commissioner Andrea Telli had a similar response to the question of whether eliminating fines erodes accountability: “Libraries don’t necessarily want to be in the morality business, and we don’t want to make the assumption that if a book is late or someone can’t pay for a fine, that they’re delinquent or bad in some way; they may just be in a place in their life where they can’t pay the fine.”

Exactly. It turns out the value of returned items is often higher than that of fines collected, and that fines don’t deter people from returning items late — they just prevent people from feeling the library is for them. Which is not in line with the values of librarianship, or of human decency generally.

If the administrations that provide our funding want fines to be part of our budgets (which is not even necessarily the case — in Chicago, fines never went to the library), we need to help them learn about equity and inclusion, and stand with our colleagues who point out that we’re fine without fines, but excluding our patrons because they can’t pay is not fine.

 

8 Comments

New semester, same challenges

We’re about to enter week two of the fall semester, and even though a new term always provides some of that fresh start feeling, some things never change. For example, printers are always surprised that students are back and generally respond by jamming, making print jobs disappear, or otherwise malfunctioning. Students are sometimes surprised to realize they have no idea what their login information is to get into the various systems that can tell them what time their classes are and in which rooms, who their professors are, and what they need to know about their classes, either because they forgot their logins over the summer or they are new and aren’t even sure they know what it is or where to login yet. Ditto on how to get into or find their college email.

Students don’t always arrive on campus digitally literate, or in other words, able to use the technology we expect them to in college (which is often some of the same technology we all had to learn at work, never by osmosis). Just because they can text and use apps doesn’t mean they can navigate various portals and systems that contain the vital information every department on campus thinks they should immediately take in. They may have limited experience with email and word processing and other productivity tools, and they’ve mostly, at least at my community college, never seen a learning management system before (like Canvas, Blackboard, or Moodle).

But the default in higher education is to assume they can master all this at the same time they are adjusting generally to the freedom and responsibility of college. Some of our students are fresh from twelve years of public school where they had very little freedom and nearly no personal responsibility other than to show up and follow directions. Others may have worked and have some experience making sure they get where they need to be on time and manage their tasks independently, but even these more worldly new students are often in the same boat as recent high school graduates when it comes to digital literacy — they may know a few more tools, but not those specific to higher education, and possibly they worked at places where they had limited access to technology outside their very specific responsibilities.

The library and learning commons staff find ourselves helping students who’ve been told on the first day of class to print a module or syllabus without really knowing what that means — not where to find those, not what they are, not how to print the on the mysterious campus printing system. I’ve been thinking about this digital literacy gap ever since hearing Ben Remillard, a doctoral candidate at UNH who also teaches at a community college and has experience working in student success programs in learning commons settings, speak about it at LAANE last fall. His point was that simply expecting students to grasp what we’re talking about when we tell them to start using their “EasyLogin” to get into multiple systems and tools doesn’t work. We wouldn’t onboard someone into a workplace that way, so why do we expect students to just start using everything at once without any training?

This is closely related to another perennial back-to-school struggle for librarians: convincing faculty to wait to schedule information literacy instruction until a few weeks into the semester, once students have had a chance to get familiar with all the digital tools and systems we throw at them, and they have a research assignment to work on. I always get requests to come on the first day of class or sometime in the first 2-3 weeks to “teach databases.” My gentle response is always that it might work better for students — resulting in better work for their faculty to assess — if we schedule information literacy instruction for later.

And that we don’t really “teach databases,” but instead teach students to seek, find, assess, and use information to answer a question or solve a problem. Because if we start by talking about databases when they don’t even know what that means yet, we’ve lost them. They’ll think using the library is too hard. I hear it often: a student will say that all this info lit stuff is fine for other people, but they can never find what they need that way so they “just Google.” I suspect no one has ever taken the time to help them see that the same skills they use to “just Google” can be honed until they are able to use them to successfully tap into the many collections of information — which is all Google is, really — they now have access to in college. And it’s hard to teach people to identify their information need before they have one, so tying this kind of work to an actual assignment is much more meaningful.

I am not one to let the perfect get in the way of the good; if it’s not possible can’t get on the schedule to work with a class unless it happens in week one, I’m there. At least letting students know who I am, how to find me and my library and learning commons colleagues and how to get in touch with us, and a teeny bit about our resources is better than never getting a chance to meet students and reveal the wonders of the library website to them! But I do think that until students have a chance to get comfortable with all the digital tools afforded to them as college students, they won’t be able to fully absorb everything we librarians have to say about information literacy. And until we help them see what they can already do with technology and how it relates to the new tools they’re expected to use, we can’t close the digital literacy gap and help them succeed.

4 Comments

Information pollution

I’ve been trying to be more active on Twitter, in part because a lot of open education people and librarians share experiences and thoughts there. This morning I saw a thread that a librarian I follow had retweeted, originally posted by @Viveka, that got me thinking about something that came across my desk from the ALA’s Center for the Future of Libraries in their newsletter Read for Later a couple of weeks ago. The Twitter thread was about a bot tweet that was making its way around Twitter, trying to drum up outrage about the way Disney has cast the forthcoming live action Little Mermaid movie. I won’t go into detail because I don’t want to grant this message any more attention but the gist is that it’s written to divide people and drum up racial strife while saying on the surface that it’s not about race. Which sounds like something a human might actually do — claim not to be racist but then make a point that attempts to divide people over race. But Viveka notes in the thread, “we know it’s a bot because it behaves unlike any human” and then goes on to explain the tells that make this so.

If you are not as observant as Viveka or just accept the content at face value without interrogating this tweet too carefully — and let’s face it, that’s mostly how the majority of tweets are read, quickly and without much thought — you might miss it. Viveka points out, “It has the right hashtags, the petition link works, call to action is clear.” Which might make it seem real enough that in the seconds it takes to skim it, most people would either ignore it, engage with it, or feel moved enough to click the petition.  But it’s been posted “about every ten minutes, as a reply to other tweets mentioning the movie or the actess” (@Viveka).

A bot can do that, a human can’t. Which is why I went back and re-read the New York Times article by Cade Metz & Scott Blumenthal that appeared in Read for Later, “How AI Could Be Weaponized to Spread Disinformation.” Metz and Blumenthal write about two AI companies that are making fake news generators that are getting better and better at mimicking human writing openly available — so that researchers know what we’re up against, as more and more content like the thread above proliferates. Why does it matter what people think about the casting of a Disney film? It doesn’t, but the humans behind this bot creation probably have an interest in dividing Americans over cultural issues. Perhaps so we will vote emotionally, or so we’ll be busy arguing while our government cages children, or tries to start a war somewhere, or . . . you get the idea. And AI makes it more likely that we’ll have trouble identifying what’s bot generated and what’s not.

So why is this a library issue? Libraries of all sorts encourage information literacy, or in the case of school and academic libraries, teach it. Information literacy is a set of skills and habits of mind that allow people to seek, evaluate, and use information effectively and responsibly. Will we be able to keep doing this work if, as Metz and Blumenthal quote OpenAI researcher Alec Radford, “The level of information pollution that could happen with systems like this a few years from now could just get bizarre.”

I’m not sure. Yes, we can keep teaching people to examine and consider information carefully but we have to be careful not to go so far as to convince them to trust nothing, as danah boyd cautions in her article “Did Media Literacy Backfire?” which I re-read every few months to remind myself how hard this work is. Will the media be susceptible to information pollution in the same way social media is? Is it already, in the “balance bias” of its coverage of major issues like climate change?

There are no easy answers. I believe information literacy is a help, but knowing how to do something doesn’t mean someone will do it. Ultimately the fight against information pollution is a matter of will — we have to spend more than a few seconds scanning something online before deciding whether it’s valid or not. I’d like to think libraries have a role in encouraging that, but in the end, it’s probably up to each of us to be smart information consumers.

3 Comments

Open beyond the campus

I just got back from the Northeast OER summit (conference #3 in 2 months — my brain is stuffed with ideas). It you’re unfamiliar with it, the William and Flora Hewitt Foundation describes Open Education as “the simple and powerful idea that the world’s knowledge is a public good and that technology in general and the Web in particular provide an extraordinary opportunity for everyone to share, use, and reuse knowledge.” Anyone who knows my past as an unschooling parent knows this makes my heart sing. OERs are open educational resources, which means all the stuff we create and share to make open education happen — in the higher ed world, OER often refers to textbooks and other course materials. It also refers to Open Pedagogy — the idea that students can be co-creators of knowledge.

I introduced myself at the first Community College System of New Hampshire OER Taskforce meeting as a librarian and OER nut. I embrace this work because it speaks to my values. I make no apologies for seeing a social justice role in librarianship and education . . . let me digress on this for a second.

I know that this makes me susceptible to what Fobazi Ettarh calls “vocational awe” but I don’t think libraries, and even more so, formal education, are beyond critique, as those of you who’ve been with Nocturnal Librarian know — I think that like democracy, the idea of libraries as egalitarian places where all are radically welcomed is something we strive for, but I am well aware that as a profession we often do not uphold this, we have definitely got problems with regards to asking librarians to do more work without more compensation, etc. I embrace the values associated with radical welcome and access for all, and the potential of libraries to embody them, while acknowledging we have work to do. I’m at a community college because I value access to education and I believe public education should serve all publics (it doesn’t, especially when it’s under-resourced but that’s another post).

Digressions over. All this is to say, I love OER because it is in line with other things I love — learner directed learning, collaboration, community, equity, justice. So it was an awesome conference, and I was excited to be with other librarians, faculty, instructional designers, learning technology directors, etc. And I got some ideas I think I can transform into action pretty easily, which is always motivating.

One of the things I’ll work on right away is getting other OER interested folks on my campus together informally in a “community of practice” —  we don’t take enough time to do the kind of sharing that happens at a conference. Yesterday I was in a workshop on Creative Commons licenses and copyright and after hearing Meredith Jacob‘s presentation we broke into tables by interest and talked. It was really fruitful, and although we ended up ranging beyond open licensing, copyright and fair use, we learned from each other and built community. I want to recreate this if I can on my campus.

Another really cool thing I heard was a presentation by Grif Peterson of P2PU, which connects people who want to learn something together in learning circles which meet in public places — often, libraries. They describe themselves as “a grassroots network of individuals who seek to create an equitable, empowering, and liberating alternative to mainstream higher education.” Again, those of you who know me can imagine how this delights me! Grif presented on learning circles with Kelly Woodside, a consultant and trainer at the Massachusetts Library System. Kelly’s awesome job involves collaborations between different kinds of libraries and non-library allies like P2PU. I loved hearing what they had to say, and I’m hoping to find intersections among our work — Kelly and I already talked about One Book projects that bring college and public libraries together, like the one I am co-chairing in Manchester with the director of the city library. I see potential intersections between P2PU, higher ed, and public libraries, too — if a small library in NH wants to host a learning circle but is understaffed, facilitating is the kind of real world experience faculty might like to incorporate into courses and students might like to try, so I’m hoping to connect people around this idea.

What interesting connections have you made at a conference that got you motivated? What possibilities do you see for Open Education in your community?

1 Comment

Conferences, end of semester, and summer projects oh my

I’ve noticed in my few years in academia that the year steamrolls until by this time, with just a few short weeks left until spring finals are over, staff, faculty, and students alike are running even in their sleep to keep up. Have you woken up at night to scrawl a note or set a reminder on your phone lately? Me too.

It doesn’t help in the library world that we seem to load all our conferences into a window from late spring to early summer. I’m sure this has to do with making sure people can attend before they are off for the summer if they are faculty or are on a 180 schedule. For those of us who work year round, it is probably a well-intended attempt to get us all fired up for that mythical time in the summer when we are “free” to do projects.

I’ve never really seen summer projects get completed, at least not the long lists we all make in the winter during planning meetings. I’ve got several large projects on the horizon myself, although I am trying to be reasonable and actually said no to something last week. I also have the inevitable end of the academic year  hiring committees,  plus co-chairing One Book One Manchester, our community wide read, with the city library director. I’m still distilling the notes from attending the Association of College and Research Libraries 2019 conference in Cleveland a little over a week ago, and I’m going to a few other learning opportunities or mini conferences in the next couple of months. I have some amazing opportunities coming up to do research, work on student success efforts, and participate in collaborative work on Open Educational Resources on my campus and in our community college system.

This is all super exciting — I’ve never had this many professional development, continuing education, and collaboration opportunities at once, nor so much institutional support for my growth as a librarian and educator. I’m fortunate. But I’m sitting here tonight wondering why the end of the academic year is this stacked up. Why don’t we have conferences in March? Why don’t we set more reasonable expectations for what can happen in the summer (when many people will also take vacations)? Why don’t we (ok, I) take on one project at a time?

For me it’s been a perfect storm, as I say, of support and opportunities that are too amazing not to try. But one thing I heard often at ACRL 2019 was that we have to caution against being overwhelmed by expectations, we have to help ourselves and those who work for us by setting boundaries such as actually taking lunch breaks, not working late or going in early every day, and managing to say no sometimes. I also heard an interesting talk by Fobazi Ettarh about not succumbing to “vocational awe” by making librarianship out to be the saving grace for everyone and everything on our campuses. Ettarh suggested being a “bad librarian” can be good, by which she meant, have a life outside of work, don’t sacrifice your social life or your well being to serve librarianship, and call out libraries and librarianship for the things we don’t get right, as well as celebrating what we do.

It was also my great pleasure to walk up and introduce myself like a total fan girl to Kaetrena Davis Kendrick, ACRL’s Academic/Research Librarian of the Year, to ask her how she does it. She works in a library with 2 librarians, like I do. I wanted to know her secret to doing more with less. Her advice? Take care of yourself, so you can take care of others. Take your lunch. Go home on time. So as we enter the last few weeks of the semester I will be working hard to work less hard — to come home to my family in the evenings close to when they are expecting me. To take a real break every day. To keep myself physically and mentally rested, hydrated, and happy.  I’m going to try to give myself permission to be more like my favorite Zen master, a grey tabby called Gwen:

IMG_1719

We’re going to go curl up with a book now.

5 Comments

Do OERs impact success or “just” save students money?

The answer is complicated. As Open Education Week wrapped up, I read a thought provoking press release and the research it discusses. The paper, by Phillip Grimaldi, director of research at OpenStax, Rice University’s peer-reviewed OER* publisher, and colleagues Debshila Basu Mallick, Andrew E. Waters, and Richard G. Baraniuk, examines the “access hypothesis” and the trouble with studying it — unless you identify which students would not have had access to the traditional textbook, your results will be somewhat murky, because it will include students for whom access was not a problem. As the press release notes:

“Using OER could potentially make a very significant difference in course outcomes for a student who couldn’t afford the traditional textbook, and would try to make do without it,” Baraniuk said. “In short, the ‘access hypothesis’ could very well be accurate, but since it’s only relevant to a certain percentage of any class, those benefits are washed out when measuring outcomes of the entire class.”

Saving students money, however, also contributes to their success. In a far less scientific (ok, not scientific at all) survey that we did this week with a white board in our college’s main entrance, we asked students to share what they would spend money on if they didn’t have to buy textbooks and access codes. Here is a sampling of their responses:

food (another entry was “food for my children”)

paying off student debt

transportation

visiting a loved one in another state

saving money to take another class

saving for an apartment

childcare so I could study or participate in group projects

clothing and shoes

a home

So are OERs important to student success? Yes. Do they directly impact it? Sometimes. Do they make it possible for students to attend to their lives and responsibilities so that they are less stressed out and distracted by financial worries? Absolutely.

OERs matter.

*What are OERs?

“Open Educational Resources (OERs) are any type of educational materials that are in the public domain or introduced with an open license. The nature of these open materials means that anyone can legally and freely copy, use, adapt and re-share them.OERs range from textbooks to curricula, syllabi, lecture notes, assignments, tests, projects, audio, video and animation.” (UNESCO).

OER is related to “textbook free” — a textbook free course or degree may include OERs but often includes library and other reading materials, placed on reserve or uploaded to Canvas (or other learning management systems) and used according to copyright and fair use guidelines.

What’s the difference between “free” and “open?” Open educational resources are licensed to be re-used, while free just means there is no paywall to access something. Both benefit students!

 

1 Comment