WELCOME
BACK
ISSUESACRL/EBSS
Instruction for Educators Committee
ACRL/DLS
Discussion Group
ACRL/IS
Continuing Education Committee
ACRL/IS
Education for Library Instructors Committee
ACRL/IS
Emerging Technologies Committee
ACRL/IS
Management of Instruction Services Committee
ACRL/IS
Policy Committee
ACRL/IS
Teaching Methods Committee
ACRL/LPSS,
Library Instruction Discussion Group
ACRL/STS
General Discussion Group
Dane Ward reported on the progress of the committee's forthcoming publication, Connections: Ideas for Librarian and Faculty Collaboration. Some chapters have already been completed, with others begun. ALA will publish the work, probably in 2000. Connections will examine formally organized programs of collaboration as well as informally created efforts among members of the campus community. The work is essentially a practical guidebook to help librarians and faculty members develop working relationships. Several ideas for future projects were also discussed at the meeting. Approximately 15 people attended.
Three speakers addressed a list of preset questions, such as how many distance students their institution served, the average age of the distance student, what degree areas are offered to distance students. They then described some aspect of the individual services each library provided. The Q&A portion moved into more specific areas of inquiry. A couple of examples with relevance to library instruction were: how do you achieve the warm fuzzy feeling that on-campus students get when interacting with a person, as opposed to the impersonal computer? One idea was to have a picture of the librarian/staff on the web site. Another idea was to create a liaison with faculty so that the faculty member would direct the student to a particular librarian. How do you keep your links current? There were two software programs mentioned: Big Brother for Macs and URL Minder for PCs. A free web site called websitegarage.com was also mentioned. Approximately 35 attended.
One of the charges of this committee is to promote continuing education opportunities for library instructors. To that end, the discussion centered around developing an annual report on trends and issues in continuing education workshops and conferences and placing them on their web site. The intention is for there to be a single source location that gives more detail than is given in the general descriptions located in journal calendar listings. The desired effect is to increase attendance at state and chapter levels by individuals who may live close enough to attend but are not associated with the organizing body. Currently, information on some of these opportunities is available at their unofficial web site, which is maintained (http://www. ship.edu/~dcook/conted.html). The web page has information about workshops and postgraduate courses offered by library schools. This is a shared interest area with the IS Education for Library Instructors Committee (ELI), chaired by Mary Popp.
January 30, 1999, 2:00pm - 4:00pm
Chair/Convener: Mary Popp
The committee made a recommendation to make revisions to their publication, "Learning to Teach". The revisions will include a new statement of purpose, a new format based on the purpose, an updated discussion of technology, an added curriculum design for information literacy, assessment of learning outcomes, review of the multicultural instruction and its sources, and an added web version of "Learning to Teach" materials. The meeting continued with updates of progress made on the committee's "Strategic Options for Professional Education" white paper, a joint project of the Education for Library Instructors and Continuing Education Task Force. The draft of the paper has been put onto the web, and committee members were asked to proofread it. The final draft of the white paper will be available for a final review by the Executive Board of IS by March 19, 1999 and then presented at the ALA Education Summit. Approximately 8 people attended the meeting.
The committee has set up conferencing software for its use in developing its programs for the coming months and into next year. The committee is actively involved with the Internet Education Project and has been looking into the cost of webcasting a six-hour preconference in one-hour segments. Of interest to LIRT members may be the decision by the committee to develop a web page White Paper on what is being used in terms of technology for instruction, how it works, who can help with its use, who has used what and how. It was decided to develop a front-end piece for the web page describing the project and then have a link to the working pages. In addition, the members discussed linking to related topics in listserv archives, e.g. BI-L and surveying the membership of IS to help focus on overlooked areas. One member also brought up that the Committee for Institutional Cooperation (CIC) is interested in collecting similar information.
The committee resumed a brainstorming discussion titled "Bright Ideas: The Role of Instruction in Changing Organizations." A bibliography was provided for each committee member. It was announced that the "Learning to Teach" resource list and tips sheet is now available on the IS web site (http://www.lib.utexas.edu/is/publications/learntoteach.html). The committee then discussed its long-range activity related to the evaluation of management of instruction services. Committee members have already conducted preliminary literature searches for articles on the assessment of instruction managers. Finally, a database project that will post employment opportunities for instruction librarians was proposed. Approximately 13 people attended the meeting.
The Policy Committee proposed changes to the Instruction Section Bylaws which were then approved by the Executive Advisory Committee. The committee was also given responsibility for revising the preconference and conference planning manual. The purpose of this manual is to provide guidance for IS program planners. The committee also discussed the issue of virtual committees and assigned individuals to investigate whether any other division, roundtable, or section was conducting meetings in this format. As one of its future projects, the committee will have the responsibility for making recommendations and revisions to the resource checklist for the IS committee chairs. Approximately 10 people attended the meeting.
Half of the meeting was a brainstorming session and half was dedicated to business. The topic of the brainstorming session was "One Shot, Two Shot, Three Shots, More: Promoting Learning through Multiple Instruction Sessions." Discussion centered around several areas: integrating www instruction; graduate vs. undergraduate instruction; stretching the one-shot to more; drop-in sessions; www-based courses; structuring the content of multiple sessions; teaching techniques for multiple session, and strategizing to get a credit course. Some of the challenges to expanding the number of instruction sessions include: instructors are time-territorial; teaching assistants are constantly changing; faculty are unaware of the multiplicity of resources; classes are composed of students with different learning styles; student do not know what they do no know; and the staff-intensive nature of all this work.
Advice offered? Get into a class for five minutes and then attempt to increase the time; let instructors know up front that you will need more than one session; use multiple quizzes online; question/test the class before you meet using e-mail; make sure your library tutorials are part of a campus-wide www orientation program and continue to incorporate the print resources.
The committee then proceeded to discuss the status of their current projects: 1) a subcommittee is gathering information on the various classroom control software available. A listing, which will appear on the committee's web site, will be non-evaluative and will reference library locations that use the software; 2) an annotated bibliography of research guide textbooks that can be used for library credit courses; 3) making necessary revisions to the list of web tutorials that are listed on the committee's web site. All projects are on target for July 1999 completion. Approximately 35 attended.
ACRL/IS Teaching Methods Committee (2nd
Meeting)
February 1, 1999, 9:30am - 11:00am
Chair/Convener: Nancy Dewald
The meeting began with a brief presentation by Julia Nims of LOEX, followed by a Q&A session. Nims mentioned the upcoming LOEX conference in Houston (see http://www.emich.edu/~lshirato/loex.html), and her desire to work with ACRL/IS to collect and link to more web-based instructional materials. Materials desired in this format are tutorials, virtual tours, and bibliographies. Additionally, she mentioned that LOEX's newsletter should be online by the end of 1999 and will feature an instructional web site of the month. The committee next discussed plans to update its own online collection of web tutorials. The group will also work on criteria for evaluating web tutorials, and then list web sites that they feel are exemplars of particular criteria (e.g. use of graphics, ease of use, etc.) A last instruction-related issue was a brainstorming session for the annual conference. The group wants to put on a discussion for either ALA 1999 or ALA 2000. The main topic mentioned was implementing/accommodating different learning styles into web-based tutorials and teaching resources.
The topic under discussion for the law and political science group was "Instruction of Traditional Print Materials in a World of Electronic Resources". Everything on the Internet? Not in this discussion. Some librarians incorporate print resources to illustrate the structure of a reference source, such as an index. We are reminded, however, that political science resources now date very quickly. Weeding and evaluating of resources remain an issue. Students need to be able to distinguish between the Internet and the library. Also librarians need to be extremely pro-active in giving vendors feedback (especially LEXIS-NEXIS for this group).
In teaching, the advice given was that we should be interactive, incorporate active learning styles, and be aware of different learning styles (and computer skills) in the class. Other advice included using two librarians for interactive classes, knowing the instructor's goals, using work sheets and annotated handouts in your class, and being sure to evaluate the sessions. In outreach to faculty, tips included getting the faculty to attend the library sessions, meeting with instructors apart from the sessions, meeting with faculty in their offices for instruction tutorials, and realizing that not all faculty are equally equipped to discuss these issues. Approximately 50 people attended.
Presenters discussed the use of web-based instructional tools and ongoing faculty collaborations. The first presentation described the co-teaching of a human genetics course at UT-Knoxville. The librarian attended all class sessions and gave five presentations introducing various bioinformatics resources. A listserv was established to facilitate communication among students and instructors. For more information on this project, watch for an article in an upcoming issue of Research Strategies. Penn State librarians discussed and demonstrated their life science finding guides. They also have two step-by-step tutorials on how to do research and subject specific "wayfinding" guides at their web site (http://www.libraries.psu.edu/crsweb/lifesci/lifepage.htm). Tips they gave were: don't overextend yourself; stay basic with design, especially graphics; don't force users to proceed linearly through your tutorial; support your community not the entire web community. A presentation about the development of an electronic syllabus for an evolutionary biology class at the University of Buffalo was next. This was followed by another presentation from the same institution about a poster group project in a physiology course. Online tutorials were developed to aid the user in producing effective posters (http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/units/sel/stoss/bio328.html and http://ublib.buffalo.edu/libraries/projects/cases/posters.html). Though this project was quite time consuming, the results were quite impressive. Approximately 50 people attended.