One would think I was already done with my blog coverage of ACRL, but the truth is I had to turn all my attention to work and the upcoming Washington Medical Librarians Association (WMLA) conference I'm program chair for next week! After this entry I still have one more ACRL entry mulling on the back burner that integrates thoughts and experiences from the two keynotes given by Sherman Alexie and Ira Glass.
The last session I attended at ACRL was The Right Tool for the Job: Picking the Best Method for Information Literacy Assessment. This was nothing fancy nor glitzy compared to other session options going on at the time, but provided a good introduction and overview of how and when knowledge tests, integrated assessments & rubrics are appropriate assessment measures to use as part of library instruction.
Knowledge tests focus on cognitive domain (recall, understanding, knowledge, analytical)
Use knowledge tests to assess at the cognitive level, not for behaviors or attitudes, or opinions.
Integrated assessments involve collaborating with professors to include information literacy assessments within the course assignment in meaningful, authentic way
Audience response to this is that annotated bibliographies have worked very well for students as an integrated assessment tool
Rubrics describe learning in 2 dimensions (parts/criteria and levels of performance)
Benefits of rubrics include focus on deep learning and higher order thinking skills, and a way to provide direct feedback
These assessment methods cover nearly any type of instruction and gave me some food for thought regarding how I can develop better ones for the online courses I teach to my colleagues that provide all of us with valuable information as part of the learning experience. I'm not satisfied to rest in the knowledge that the continuing education courses I teach are free; they are investments of my students' time and I strive to make it the best possible and productive experience for them.
That's how many words of notes I took over the duration of the American Evaluation Association 2008 conference here in Denver, not including full session & paper titles (let alone presenter names) in the mad typing rampage.
I'm tired and I want to go home now, but not before a nice breakfast with my aunt before I catch a plane tomorrow morning.
Lots of great information was shared today (social network analysis, relevant cultural information, distance education evaluation practices that make sense compared to what I endured as a grad student, etc.) I've identified the future need for me to see about modifications in Google Docs to make it easier to skip directly to relevant information, but now is not the time.
It's a reliable rule of thumb since my graduate school trips to Texas in 2006 that I go a bit insane on the third night away from my family. This conference is no exception to the rule.
My favorite line of the conference today is the discussion of the B-HAG, which stands for Big, Hairy Audacious Goal. I love this and think I'll informally begin every program or class project I have in mind with a serious B-HAG brainstorming session before going any further with it. Today I also rescued a presenter from having to verbally describe a website and its functionality because his wireless connection decided to fail. I have a camera phone pic of most of the 30 participants in the room gazing at my laptop but am having issues uploading it. I'll include it in the Google Docs when I can.
Despite third night insanity, I've polished up most of my notes from today (6 sessions) as well as yesterday's and the day before's. Tomorrow should go very well with my scheduled Sanity Break involving shopping and a long lunch!
The most frequent searches that unsuccessfully lead people to my blog involve my old Quizno's/EBM post with 'I fear change, I will keep my bushes.'
It was the title statement by the president of the American Evaluation Association during a plenary today that made me think about organization structures. Those in hierarchies both know and execute the flow of authoritative power because it is a controlled factor that also carries an easy amount of blame on 'the system.' I use it myself to describe how things are easily lost in the massive bureaucracies we juggle.
These flows of power don't work the same way in a horizontal organization structure, yet the latter seem to be where most social networking and collaboration occurs. Sharing is not only easy, it thrives here with substantially decreased turnaround expectations compared to the hierarchy. Why is David Rothman apologizing for what really isn't a delay? In my current conference (which is rather un-Web 2.0), the onus is on us to contact presenters via email for copies of presentations. Is part of social networking an acceleration on turnaround time and the expectation that we as creators of knowledge resources will always & immediately share our material online? I'm not certain.
In the nature of sharing, (I saw others with laptops today, yay!) today's conference notes are here containing mostly unedited raw material that I'll turn into at least one lengthy blog post in the future and possibly two. I'm too pooped to put all 5 proper session titles, all the presenter names & affiliations and will edit them later. I need sleep because I have 6 sessions on tap for tomorrow!
Lately there has been plenty of coverage in the library section of the blogosphere of trendy library conferences.
Then there's me, here at the American Evaluation Association (AEA) conference in Denver, Colorado, where the plenary speaker features a Pushmi-pullyu (she had an uncited one, mine is from the Llama Rescue) in the Powerpoint.
I am distinctive here not because I'm a librarian (although I've yet to run into another one besides my colleague roommate) but because I'm becoming aware of a rather odd factor: with the exception of presenters, no one else is running around with a laptop to take notes. This is particularly odd (to me) in the session sponsored by the graduate student & new evaluator interest group.
If you're involved in library evaluation and assessment you'd probably be interested in some of the sessions. My notes from today are up here. If I can locate outlets I'll hopefully be able to cover each day but there are none alongside walls... maybe in the very back?
There is a very high acronym usage and specialized jargon level I'm completely unfamiliar with here since I've had no prior training in evaluation/assessment beyond logic models. I did manage to explain to someone from the National Institute of Health (NIH) exactly how the National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NN/LM) fits in with the National Library of Medicine (NLM) & talked with the presenter of a poster about the assessment of community foundation grants (including consumer health) who had no idea NN/LM existed & seemed rather excited by it.
On Monday I attended a conference with my new laptop intending to test out Google Docs for notes because I don't feel like activating Office 2007 on it quite yet, if ever. We had to switch from a classroom to a computer lab midway through the conference, and I was suddenly delighted with my decision: no having to connect my laptop (don't you hate juggling limited desk space with an existing computer?) to seamlessly continue with my notes!
The conference was entitled Putting Assessment into Practice: A Library Instruction Workshop that was very useful to me for my evaluation role at work. While my assessment focus (without the hatchets) is not exactly along the lines of the academic librarians that made up the majority of the conference, it was refreshing to voice some of what goes on in my brain and find that no one else has easy answers or solutions to what I'm running up against either. I received some terrific ideas regarding concise pre-assessment measures as well as evaluation factors midway through a class that I think (hope) will lead to better online instruction for the classes I teach.
While I was formatting my Google Docs notes to post as a website, I accidentally misfired them straight to my blog and it published without title, proper formatting or warning. Oops. I removed them immediately and I don't think it hit RSS feeds. If it did, I apologize for that bit of randomness. If you're interested in library assessment, I encourage you to read my notes the way they are intended and check out the resources. I'm probably not going to flesh them out more than the outline but am happy to elaborate if you have questions. Kudos to the planning team for a great session!
Assessment and evaluation of programs is a major component of my rather non-traditional librarian job of a whopping 3 months. I can't say I'm any good at it yet but I'm optimistic, relatively good at picking up things quickly and running with them, and surrounded by phenomenal resources on an everyday basis.
At the same time, I think every one of you can relate to this...
The conference I crashed on Monday (sitting on the floor in the back of the room without a conference badge, let alone a single ribbon from it) was the Library Assessment Conference. We had kinda-but-not-really been invited to attend sessions of interest to us as long as we didn't eat the food or attend their social events. Fair enough. I scanned the schedule to see what was possibly useful to me from my job perspective and found something I couldn't miss:
Plenary Session I: The Most Important Challenge for Library Assessment Three visionary library leaders each present what they see as the most important challenge for library assessment in the future. The session promises to be provocative and stimulating, but never boring.
I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting with a buildup like that, but I can assure you it wasn't along the lines of the provocative future Andrew Zolli had at MLA 08 in Chicago.
First up, with the best-designed Powerpoint for clarity in a large room, was Susan Gibbons, Vice Provost of the River Campus Libraries at the University of Rochester. She challenged our field's obsession for focus on quantitative data (suggesting maybe The Count from Sesame Street was partially to blame) and instead to consider what are we counting, why, and what the numbers actually tell us. Reference queries are down: is the Internet to blame? On the surface it's easy to say yes, but their deeper look found other barriers. Users did not want to leave their spots at the popular library computers (they did another study that found students walking 2-3 miles a day, thus why they didn't always want to haul laptops with them) to ask a reference librarian a question. They had students photograph what they always carried with them; cell phones appeared in every picture, yet both their own & 41% of the Association of Research Library (ARL) websites didn't have a phone number on the front page.
Next up was Rick Luce, with an overwhelmingly detailed dark blue background/white text with yellow headers Powerpoint I couldn't read most of the time, who is Vice Provost and Director of Libraries at Emory University. He whipped through his presentation with amazing speed about the $100 million investment approved for his aggressive strategic plan that wasn't based on ARL statistics and emphasized staff understanding for the need for systems-wide improvement. He suggested studying the criteria for the Malcom Baldridge National Quality Award winners, to get beyond assessment as a "happiness meter" (level 1) or just asking what's important (level 2) and considering 'How do we rate against the best in the industry?" (level 3). He ended with a charge of avoiding measures not focusing on strategy, a lack of accountability, a lack of discipline, and an emphasis on no action without a plan, and no plan without data. Whew!
Last but not least was Betsy Wilson, with another blue background/white text/yellow headers Powerpoint but she used minimal text with clear pictures for a better effect, Dean of Libraries at the University of Washington. She focused on 'accelerating relevance', of looking to the past to think about the future with a clear vision in mind. What got everyone's fingers tapping on laptops or scrawling on notepads was when she asked us to consider something I'll highlight and get back to later:
What will the scholar of 2050 want us to preserve? Blogs? Mashups? Wikis? How can we stem the data deluge? How can we make quality data convenient?
She continued with two main points of how assessment can help listen, look, connect & replenish; and that we are not the first to wrestle with the relevance of the library of the future. President Suzzallo at the University of Washington was canned by the Governor over the campus library's vision and construction, but then the voters sacked the Governor in the 1932 election. (source)
My brain merged obsession with front page library phone numbers (can you tell from yesterday's post?), level 3 thinking about (perceived) 'best in the industry' (can't you just Google the information and get it?), and what 2050 would want us to keep about today's information torrent.
For the last one I wasn't thinking along the lines of blogs (plenty of backup opportunities there) but the vast stream of both data and ephemera in various forums of social networking and instant messaging. What is useful for 2050 about now? Is it pointless to write a traditional journal article about these media when it can and will morph into something else within 6 months & have a shorter half life still in the future? Or is this part of what we need to document about the data flow in society now?
These communication methods are a part of everyday life for most students and what many of our library users are used to while many librarians are not. I believe in the use of wisely applied assessment measures, but not in using them as a crutch to keep from trying out new things without reams of data first and/or fear of the unknown. Get the mammoth when it's in sight! If we spend much time looking for our ribbons instead of encouraging users to use their cell phones to call us or efficiently respond to their Meebo widget queries, they'll never even know about the fine quality cheese to go with the bagels and croissants.
