Teaching Translitearcy with EBSCO and ProQuest

Today’s post will be about something I love to use. That is, technology. I am an avid user and teacher of the stuff. Sharing some new tick, be it with a database, mobile app or desktop app is one of the key aspects of my job. As librarians, we need to be fluent with technology. After all, we teach students the concepts behind databases, web interfaces and working with file structures. 

There are some great tools out there, which interact with other apps. (Zotero being one such option. ) Being an iPad campus, my institution has purchased a notability license for our students.  This is a nifty little app that works with cloud storage to allow PDF annotation. As a librarian, I view this as an opportunity to teach students how to interact with file structures, save PDF’s, import them into the app and annotate them. 

These types of apps and tools require a student to really understand file structures and user interfaces. They need to understand that a PDF is more common for scholarly articles, whereas a word document is better suited for a working document. An understanding of common UI elements is also required. The larger concept here is transliteracy. 

Translitearcy, for those who do not know is “… concerned with mapping meaning across different media and not with developing particular literacies about various media. It is not about learning text literacy and visual literacy and digital literacy in isolation from one another but about the interaction among all these literacies” (Ipri, 2010).

This is not an easy thing to teach. Students need to draw concepts between interfaces and develop and intuition for graphical user interfaces (GUI). I believe most librarians are transliterate. The nature of our jobs require use to interact with different interfaces, to get desired outcomes. Students are often lost in new interfaces and require a guiding hand. 

Transliteracy is far too large of a literacy to teach in a single library session. It is something that is developed over time. They need experience interacting with lots of GUIs. In my sessions, I have developed a simple technique to get across a basic translitearcy concept.

The interfaces of EBSCOhost and ProQuest are not all that different. Sure, they use different color styles and somewhat different wording, but they both send you to a PDF. They both offer you the ability to refine your search with boolean operators. There is even a way to refine your search based on peer-reviewed status.

In class, I have the students find one article in EBSCO and ProQuest. Usually I leave 5-10 minutes each. If the articles they can find are related to a paper they are required to write, that is all the better. Once the time is complete, I ask which was their favorite. Most of the time, the class is split down the middle. 

After that, I bring up EBSCO and ProQuest on the same screen. I point out how both interfaces have that three search box interface. I mention the boolean operator drop downs. They are shown how to refine the searches with the peer-reviewed/scholarly article check boxes and how to refine the searches by timeframe. 

By showing them the common elements in each database, they are learning (hopefully) to look for familiar interfaces. In much the same way you or I would look for a left facing arrow to go back, I am hoping they are learning to use the drop down menu in either database to refine their search with boolean operators.

Ask the Masses: Evaluation Classes

For this week's Ask the Masses, I want to ask you about your favorite lesson.

What is that one information literacy session that you just can't wait to deliver? Why is it your favorite? Do you get to teach it often?

I really look forward to reading some of these answers.

Evaluations via Blind Textual Analysis

It's evaluation time in lots of my classes. As I'm sure many librarians would agree, this is one of my favorite units to teach. I like to take it one step further than just giving students ideas on how to evaluate sources.

First Steps
I find that I need to provide at least some framework for students to evaluate sources. I typically will share with them several criteria. Many in our field have snazzy names for these criteria. (I'm looking at you, CRAAP test.) I take a somewhat simplified approach. I simply ask students to critically think about a source; ask themselves if this source good enough to earn a place in your paper?

Here are the slides, in which I offer some framework to evaluate sources:

Providing Source Material 

Once students have this very basic framework, I like to introduce them to raw source material. Here are three quotes from various sources, which I have used in class. When presenting these, I have a different student read each paragraph. Can you spot where each are from?

Source One: 

State schools, also known as public schools or government schools, generally refer to primary or secondary schools mandated for or offered to all children by the government, whether national, regional, or local, provided by an institution of civil government, and paid for, in whole or in part, by public funding from taxation. The term may also refer to institutions of post-secondary education funded, in whole or in part, and overseen by government.

Source Two:

Public schools in the United States have become predominantly liberal and atheistic government institutions that employ 3 million people and spend $411.5 billion annually at a cost of $10,770 per student. Liberals censor classroom prayer, the Ten Commandments, sharing of faith in classrooms during school hours, and teaching Bible-based morality. Mandatory homosexual indoctrination is common as early as elementary school in more liberal states. The failures of underperforming public schools are paradigm of socialism, along with landfills and the Canadian healthcare system. 

Source Three:

Since the mid-1800s, most Americans have had access to free public education at the elementary and secondary school levels. The availability of universal schooling is based on the notion that all children have a right to a basic education. However, concerns about the quality of public education in recent years have led to significant changes in the nation's public school system. Some people consider these changes a long-overdue remedy to a failing system. Others worry that the changes will undermine the nation's commitment to providing equal educational opportunity to all Americans.

My favorite part of having students read these three paragraphs comes after they finish the second one. I ask them to raise their hands if they went to public school. Normally 3/4's if not more raise their hands. Then, I ask how their "mandatory homosexual indoctrination" went. Sure that's a comical moment, but it opens the door to a discussion of face validity and how a simple critical reading can prevent a students from using a bad source.

The first quote came from a wikipedia and is actually my choice. The second came from Conservapedia. The third quote is from a subject encyclopedia in Credo Reference.  Many students tend to like the third quote best.

Next term, I want to use a source from a left-leaning organization to reduce bias. Rational Wiki seems to be a good place to find that type of information.  

Ask the Masses: What journals do you read?

This week's post was about Google Reader and its untimely retirement.  In the post, I spoke about having the opportunity to weed my RSS feeds. This got me thinking. Are there any open access library journals I am missing? What do other Iowa librarians reader in the way of scholarly journals?

For the sake of discussion, this is what I subscribe to:

• Library Technology Reports may not be open access, but it's available in Academic Search Elite which the state provides access.
• Communications in Information Literacy (Open Access)
• Evidence Based Library and Information Practice (Open Access)
• Library Leadership & Management (Open Access)
• Library Hi Tech (Academic Search Elite)

I know there must be more out there worth reading.

Goodnight, Sweet Prince (Google Reader Post)

March 13, 2013 was a sad day for me. On that fateful day Google announced they were retiring my favorite Google App, the sweet prince, Google Reader. I actually went through the stages of grief.

Denial: Google was joking, right? How could they close Google Reader?
Anger: You're kidding me! They can't close Google Reader! I use that thing everyday!
Bargaining: Maybe if I a sign enough petitions, Google will decide to keep my favorite service up and running. 100,000 might even get Obama to comment on this tragedy.
Depression: How am I going to learn about all my library and canine related news? Am I going to be required to visit each website, separately, like an animal? What is this? 1995?
Acceptance: Fine, I guess I should start to see what alternatives are out there...

That only took about 2 months, trials of many of the alternatives and changing my daily behavior. I think I'm almost there, so let me share what I've learned.

Background
For those who do not know, Google Reader was an RSS aggregator. It was a magical place, where you could store and read all your RSS feeds, regardless of the orignal source. Want to have stories from the New York Times mixed with PhD comics on a single page? RSS aggregation is how you do that.

Many of our academic databases and catalogs provide RSS feeds. These feeds could be for search results, new items, most frequently cited items, journal subscriptions and many others. One of my favorite ways to use this feature was to add journal level feeds to a folder called "Library -- Academic Stuff." (That's a proper name, if I've ever heard one.) I would have a folder populated with articles from Library Hi-Tech, Library Trends, Library Technology Reports, Communications in Information Literacy... It was a great way to keep track of library literature. (That includes your favorite blog, ilove-instruction.) Especially since most of these are not published daily, you won't get bombarded with articles. For the record, most of those are from our EBSCO and ProQuest subscriptions.  If I am off campus, the link would direct me to our proxy server and then onto the article. I am able to view the title and the abstract from my RSS reader.

What I needed from an RSS
I use RSS all the time. Be it on my iPhone/iPad, work laptop or home laptop, this is a tool that has a huge impact on my life. Loading up my feeds is my 21st century equivalent of reading the paper with coffee. My requirements were simple -- or so I thought.

• Be cloud based and have an iOS app. This will help me keep all my feeds in sync and I would not need to read the same article twice
• Don't be ugly
• Keep in sync between the app and cloud interfaces
• Have the same keyboard shortcuts
• List view
• Free and/or clearly marked advertisements 

Here are some Google Reader alternatives and my impressions

NetVibes -- This one is slightly different than the others on this list. Instead of being an RSS aggregator, it pitches itself as a dashboard of information. You can load your Facebook timeline, Twitter feed, as well as RSS feeds from various websites. The web interface is pretty smooth and neat. I especially liked how the developers had a sense of humor with feeds with post dates in the future. It says, "Doc are you telling me you built a time machine?"

On the negative side, it does not have an iOS app. It does have a web interface, but that will not show me a badge notification for unread feeds. For me and how I want to use RSS, that was a deal killer. If they develop an app down the road, I will be looking at them again. The keyboard shortcuts are close, but not exactly the same. (I like to view one long list of feeds and use the spacebar to move down the list.)

Pulse -- This was another promising app. It is very visually appealing. It uses the magazine look to present articles. It also lets you use your social media accounts as sources of feeds. You are able to quickly post the story to your LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter account. It is also very easy to email the article to friends.

This one also did not flip the bill for me. The organization side felt off. I wanted to view one single aggregated feed from all my sources. Pulse wants to break down each source and display the articles attached to the source. When using RSS, I want to be able to create my own newspaper with sources pulled into one single place. It also does not display badge notifications or unread counts on the app or web interface.

Digg Reader -- Digg Reader is promising and I look forward to seeing what they can do with a bit more time. It is simple and clean. My spacebar keyboard shortcut is the same. One feature I really appreciate is their popular articles section. This is an algorithm that looks at your feeds and pulls out the most popular articles. It's great for when you only have a few minutes and want to see what's new. It is visually clean and straight forward. Their servers are super fast. 

What was I disappointed to see? Two things: I cannot hide previously read items from the all-items feed and badge notifications do not seem to work on the iOS app or web interface. Given that the team had 90 days and 5 people to create this service, I'm hopeful they will catch up and add these features. I'll be willing to revisit this one in a few months. 

The Old Reader -- I really want to support The Old Reader. They are an indie team that created their service about a year ago. At the time, Google had change Google Reader to incorporate more Google+ and less Google Reader. The kind folks at The Old Reader set about to recreate some Google Reader goodness. I think they have done an excellent job. The look is pretty close to Google Reader, circa 2011. Its keyboard shortcuts are right on. Surprisingly, they announced a partnership with Feeddler, my RSS app of choice on iOS devices. 

The downside is that their servers are slow. I would wait a decent amount of time for feeds to load. Also – I found myself wanted to explore new methods of viewing RSS feeds. It does not have any sort of tile view for articles. You only have title view.

Feedly -- This one seems to be everyones favorite, with good reason. It's clean, straightforward, servers are fast enough, and offers multiple ways to view your feeds. They have a tile and title view. The app I've found that works with Feedly is fantastic. Newsify has really struck a cord with me. It reminds me of a newspaper, which is what I'm finding more desirable than just a title list. (This is not to say I don't want a title view. Each skin has a time and purpose.)

Negatives, there are a few. When I first looked at Feedly it wasn't exactly cloud based. They required you to install a browser plugin. Very recently, they corrected that error. Had they not, I would not consider using the service. I also find the interface a bit bare. It just seems like a gratuitous use of white space. Newsify helps to fix this issue on iOS devices.

Where are we now? 

So, I've evaluated lots of RSS aggregators. The five mentioned above are the top contenders in my mind. Each one has strengths and negatives. It will be up to each one of us to find the one that fulfills our needs best. I am using a combination go Digg Reader, The Old Reader and Feedly w/ Newsify. It's a pain to switch between the three, but I have not found my RSS home yet. 

One good thing is that I was able to reevaluate my sources. Gone are the numerous tech blog websites. I've replaced them with Ars Technica and NPR's All Tech Considered. I've removed a few dead library blogs and replaced them with academic journals. I look forward to being more well read. 

My final score in Google Reader:

Ask The Masses: Credit Instruction

Julius Asks:

Does anyone else have a credit library course? I'm very interested in learning how many of these courses each librarian is able to teach. We've been discussing how many credit courses are too many for a librarian. I have dreams of growing my program to have several 8-week, 1-credit courses each term. The terms are 16 weeks, so I should be able to squeeze them into the schedule.

Alternatively, how many one-shots does each librarian teach at your school?

Credit, Embedded or One-Shot?

One of my favorite topics to write about in library school was information literacy. I used to love talking about the various intricacies of why credit library instruction was far superior to that of one-shots. At the time, I was a graduate teaching assistant and helped teach a 4-4-3 load of an undergraduate, three-credit course for one academic year. That experience helped shaped how I view a librarian's teaching, student learning and academic culture. 

For-Credit Instruction

The for-credit course I helped teach was a full university course. It was 16-weeks, involved long assignments and multiple choice quizzes, but not a paper. The students were assigned a proper grade on the A-F scale, corresponding to their % of points earned. Each section had about 30-students, with one section being specifically for student-athletes. (More on the student-athletes in a later post.) 

It was required by the Mass Communication and Communications departments. That tended to drive decent enrollment numbers, as well as giving them vital skills for their majors. Despite being required by each major, there was no direct collaboration between the Library and Information Science professor and other departments. I tended to view this as a stake for academic freedom and a full acceptance of the librarian as a professor. 

The general outline for the course was as follows: 

• Orientation / Learning Management System

• The Research Process

• Critical Thinking Part 1

• Critical Thinking Part 2

• Citing Information Sources Part 1

• Citing Information Sources Part 2

• The Internet, Virtual Libraries and Directories

• Search Engines: General

• Search Engines: Google, Bing and Wolfram/Alpha

• Library Classification Systems and Catalogs

• Periodical Databases Part 1

• Periodical Databases Part 2

• Specialized Web Databases

• Ethics in Information and Copyright

• Finals Week

I should also note this course was delivered online for two of the four sections, each semester. The last time I helped run the course was in 2008. 

That's how I was taught to teach information literacy. 

Fast Forward to Being Tasked with Teaching Information Literacy on my Own

When I made my way to Iowa, I was tasked with teaching information literacy. Up to that point, my institution had no formal instruction program. (Truthfully, we still don't.) There was a single dreaded one-shot in our freshmen experience course, but nothing beyond that. One-shots were given once the faculty member requested a librarian.  

At the time of my appointment, there was some excitement about the library. My colleagues had just finished an iPad pilot, which was successful. I had started off meeting with faculty to determine how best to integrate information literacy in their courses. I was lucky and managed to have 16 one-shots in my first term.

First Experiment with For-Credit Instruction

Some of my faculty colleagues had been open to discussing a for-credit library course. They encouraged me to use J-Term to experiment and see if it would go through. My proposed course was approved by the faculty senate in October and would be on the books in J-Term. For the rest of my first semester, I worked to drill down that 3-credit, 16-week course mentioned above into a 1-credit, 2 week course. I managed to do it, but poorly. 

The outline for the new course was as follows: 

• Orientation / Library Website

• Research Process, Research Question Development 

• Introduction to Information, Information Timeline, Scholarly Communication

• Critical Thinking, Source Evaluation

• Advanced Searching, Keywords, Subjects

• Sources on the Open Web, Government Data, Search Engines

• Working Session -- Students needed to complete an information hunt

• Periodical Databases

• Citing Information Sources

• Working Session -- Students worked on citations in class

• Gross format of APA, Numbers, Headings

• Annotated Bibliography 

• Working Session -- Students worked on Annotated Bibliographies in class

• Ethics in Information 

The first term two students enrolled. I was able to still run the course, since it was an

experiment for the library. From the evaluations, the students seemed to enjoy the

course, but felt there should have been a paper. Their comments also said it felt

disjointed from their other courses. I’d have to agree. 

A New Approach 

The following Spring term, I was approached by an education faculty member. She heard about my J-Term course and that I was able to teach APA style.  When she expressed desire for me to come into her course, I asked if we could try this embedded librarianship thing I heard about. It seemed like a nice meeting between for-credit and one-shot instruction. She agreed and gave me 5, 50-minute sessions in her course. I would be able to give assignments, which would count for ten-points on their paper. 

That outline was as follows: 

• Research Questions / Keyword Development

• Sources on the web, government data, Periodical Databases

• Evaluation of sources

• APA Style

• APA Paper formatting 

This, we quickly learned was too short of a time frame to cover all that material in-depth.  Today, it has grown into 8-sessions, with a separate syllabus, but still part of the course. 

The more refined outline is as follows:

• Research Question Development 

• Searching for Information

• Web Sources 

• Academic Databases 

• Evaluation of information 

• APA Citations

• APA paper formatting & working session 

• APA formatting working session 

From student feedback, the students seem to love that partnership. Anecdotally from the faculty, their grades on their papers have improved, more sources are being consulted and cited properly. This is a partnership we both feel has worked very well. 

Another J-Term

Come this last J-Term, I learned my one-credit course was on the schedule and had an enrollment of over 12 students. (Great enrollment for a J-Term course at my institution, especially considering it is not a requirement.) When I ran that course, I used the same 8-sessions outline I used in the education embedded sessions and included more time to work in class. I also required a 5-page paper, with at least 7 sources. As the instructor, I feel the students learned a great deal. The grades had a normal distribution (okay, may skewed towards the left a little bit) and were as expected.

Finally a One-Credit Course that Worked

This last spring, I was asked to work with a nursing faculty to reconceptualize her four-credit introductory to the BSN program course. The course ran 8-weeks and I would have one-credit's worth of time to teach them the same material I was teaching in the education collaboration. There was one catch, it was fully online and I could not require synchronous meetings. 

I ended up recording my lectures for the course and posted them in the LMS. I also posted them to our website. You can check them out here: http://library.briarcliff.edu/nurs310l

A few days ago, I found out the nursing faculty submitted my syllabus and codified the course into the nursing curriculum. 

Where to Go From Here?

So I’ve had some successes and failures with instruction in my first two years. I count my first experience with for-credit instruction to be one of my first year’s biggest failures. However, it did turn into a great success, with the nursing department taking the bones of the course and using it in their curriculum. My hope for the future is to have one more department sign on to either an embedded series or 1-credit course. From there, I feel I can make the case to require this 1-credit course for more, if not all, majors. 

Questions for You

So, you, kind iLove reader, does your school have for-credit instruction?  Do you like doing embedded sessions? How about one-shots? 

Ask-the-Masses: Conferences

Cara Asks: 
I'm planning on attending ILA/ACRL in Indianola tomorrow and am interested in hearing what others are most looking forward to about the conference. If you're not attending, what are the things you most value about conferences in general (either in the presentations, keynotes, or outside of sessions)? What types/formats of presentations do you find most valuable?

Educational Apps

50 billion apps. Apple announced a few days ago that it is nearing the 50 billionth download of an iOS app. That's 166 or more iOS downloads per man, woman and child in the United States -- including many of your students and faculty. This leads me to wonder, how have others interlaced mobile technologies and information literacy instruction.

Here is how I've done attempted to do it:

Some Intuitional History 
In 2010, my library started purchasing iPads to test and circulate. A year later, my institution started issuing iPads to Freshmen students. A year prior, the library started testing iPads for circulation. These two factors, allowed the library position itself as on the cutting edge of this new technological wave. While I was new to the university in 2011, I had used Apple products exclusively for a few years prior.

My colleagues on the teaching faculty side of things were hungry for ways to include these devices into their daily instruction. Our working theory seems to be that the students will be looking at these devices anyway, so why not bring them into our instruction.

Two Apps I Have Used

Poll Everywhere may not be exclusively an iOS app, but I have found it extremly useful to get students to begin thinking about their mobile device as more than a tool to communicate with others in their social circle -- that it may actually have a place in the classroom.

Poll Everywhere is very similar to the traditional clickers. For the uninitiated, clickers allow instructors to ask questions to the room and receive feedback. Poll Everywhere allows you to embed some code into a powerpoint side and display the results in realtime. It opens to the door to some interesting pedagogy, such as asking conceptional-style questions and following that up with discussion. Given the nature of Poll Everywhere, I think some of the pedagogy on clickers may be generalizable. 

GoodReader is a $5 App, which my university provides for students at no cost. It is a simple PDF reading tool with advanced annotating features. Students can highlight, underline, attach sticky notes and draw freehand on PDFs. This little app ties into your Dropbox account, so you do not need to import them into yet another app. It's to use, even if it is not freely provided at your institution. 

It has been really helpful in the classroom. While teaching students how to interact with actual articles, I have students look at specific portions of an article and pull out the main concepts, search-terms that could be used in additional database searches and take note of interesting facts. Best of all, it prevents dozens of students from printing off copies of articles to notate them! Go Green!

So, do you use any apps or mobile technology in your sessions?