Playing with Flickr

I'm going to try to add images today to this post, as part of a new exercise for my instructional design class. I uploaded to Flickr my public domain bilbiofile images.

Spring 2009 Focus of the UMassClass Blog

This blog, originally created in the Fall of 2008 for INSDSGN 619, will change its focus for the Spring 2009 term. While I am enrolled in INSDSGN 605, it will be dedicated to "Library 2.0". It will explore the technologies and service models that academic librarians can use to improve services for all of our customers. However, I am particularly interested in any ideas that will help me reach our ever-growing population of distance education students.

Here is the result of my informal and unscientific discussion board introduction poll....

6 out of 22 of my classmates in 605 responded to the informal poll for a response rate of 27%.

5 out of the 22 have never used Univ. of Mass. at Boston's library, but 1 has (and she is not a librarian!)

To be honest, if I wasn't an academic librarian, I probably wouldn't be aware of the university's online library resources and would not have had reason, after 24 credits, to use them.

The UMB library doesn't really seem to have a presence in the Blackboard course and hasn't really marketed its collection and services to me. This is just an observation and not a criticism, though . I am in the same boat. I don't have a presence in the Blackboard shell at my college, and I have done very little to market the library directly to the students. All of my efforts have been focused towards the online faculty, but with little success.

But I think this has to change, at least in the college that I work. We have purchased many digital materials, primarily for our online students. They are paying for these resources but do not to use them. Probably, in many cases, my students do not even know about what is available.....

So, if any of my classmates want to post, please share any ideas about how the library should reach us, market to us, and serve us....

Cheers,
Lynee

Waiting for Spring

We participated in the Great Weekend Backyard Bird Count February 13-16 and counted:

1. a pair of cardinals
2. a pair of morning doves
3. 3 tufted titmouse (titmice?)
4. 1 chickadee
5. 1 black vulture
6. 60 starlings
7. a dozen black-eyed junkos
8. 8 pine warblers (even though Audubon says it is too early to have pine warblers now)
9. a redbellied woodpecker and another smaller woodpecker, species undetermined

We also counted 3 acrobatic overfed squirrel geniuses who have managed to steal every suet cake for the past 3 months, despite Dan's increasinlgy elaborate suet security systems.

I can't wait until my backyard thaws out!

Visual Literacy Book Recommendations?

I am not a visual learner by nature but would like to improve my graphic design skills and create presentations that will appeal to visual learners. I have just been using public domain clip art and photographs in my Powerpoint presentations lately, which is more than I did two years ago, but know that there is room for improvement. I would like to become more sophisticated with graphical representation. I am planning on reading a few books by Edward R. Tufte over break --- Envisioning Information and Beautiful Evidence. Anyone out there have any other titles to suggest? Thanks in advance!

Audio quality in tutorials

I am happy to have finally finished my Moodle course, but know I need to go back re-record all the audiopresentations I recorded in Jing. I absolutely love Jing, it is such an easy, user-friendly product, but was unable to get it to work with my mic/headset! The only mic that would work with it was the mic that was embedded within my laptop, which has absolutely horrible sound.

When I used Captivate last summer, I had the exact opposite experience.... my laptop mic wouldn't work, so I had to purchase a headset at Radioshack to record my narration.

Captivate is a better program, since it will allow me to edit out my pauses and "ums and ahs", but it is much more difficult to publish, edit and and post Captivate files within Moodle.

I am still interested in Jing and will train my coworkers to use it next week. The learning curve is much faster for Jing and I think they will be more likely to use it to create fast follow-up screencasts for their face to face classes.

I just need to improve that sound quality....

The Media Engineer at work suggested that I try ordering "Snowball" microphones for the staff PCs. He says they are not too expensive ($100 each) and have excellent quality. I am going to try to see if I can get approval to buy them. I think improved sound quality will really enhance the class.

Copyright & Permissions

I've been really struggling at work lately with copyright & fair use. Library administration takes a very conservative view towards fair use and want the faculty to secure permissions from copyright holders before using materials in the classroom. Although the library is willing to do all the research and make contact with the copyright holders, and pay any royalties from our own budget, many professors resent waiting for this process.

I had some interesting and surprising results last week when seeking permissions for two faculty members.

Each person wanted to go to Blockbusters and rent a DVD to show to their classes. Professor A wanted to show "The Motorcycle Diaries", the Hollywood film about Che Guevara, to a communications class. Professor Z wanted to show "Street Fight", a documentary about the Newark NJ mayor election race, to his political science class. The library's policy is to discourage anyone from showing a rental or personal copy to a class. Instead, I offer to purchase the film for the professor and add it to the library collection.

Whenever I purchase the film, I have to also ask permission to have it shown in a college classroom. Usually, I expect to pay for this privilege from the library's budget.

To my great surprise, I bought "Motorcycle Diaries" from Barnes & Noble for $15.00 and was able to get permissions from Universal for a classroom only showing --- free of charge.

But "Street Fight" was a different story. I could buy the film for $25.00, directly from the filmmaker, Marshall Curry. But the restriction on Curry's website was that the film was for home use only. Purchases for "Educational Use" were directed to bullfrogfilms.com, which charged the library $295.00 for the same film!

Blogging & Gardner Intrapersonal intelligence

I've been spending most of my classwork time playing with other Web 2.0 toys & am enjoying learning Moodle, creating my first wiki and reading and responding to the bulletin board discussions. Although I am sad that we have been divided into two groups -- I think it is really interesting to read the posts of all classmates. So far, I haven't been able to attend either of the Wimba sessions for this course but have everything off of my schedule November 5th, so I am looking forward to finally hearing my classmates' voices.

Now for class content... I am thinking about Howard Gardner this week and musing over how to teach lessons that allow various learners to use their "natural" intelligences. Exciting new educational technology might challenge traditional pedagogy and allow online educators to put some of Gardner's ideas into practice.

I wrote a bit about Interpersonal intelligence in my post to the discussion board this week. I think that discussion boards, wikis, and meeting software like Wimba are superb tools for allowing Gardner's "interpersonally intelligent" learner to engage the content in a way that is productive for them.

But blogs seem to feel more like the personal diary/ journal where the author writes traditionally private reflections. Although I realize that blogs can be easily made "public", the writing style of most blogs that I've read (outside of this class) are personal and sometimes confessional. The material is similar to what I would find in a journal instead of a class discussion.

I think that a blog might be a good tool for the "intrapersonally intelligent" learner to wrestle with new content in an online class.

The intrapersonally intelligent learners, according to Gardner, are:
self-reflecting, know their strengths and limitations and are very aware of their own moods, motivations and intentions.

I think that the blog is the perfect online tool for these types of learners to reflect on their coursework....