unlike - marthalib

Very much unlike!! - Laura H.

Thank you all. I was beginning to think I was crazy for thinking this was crazy. - Catherine Pellegrino

Aside from the "developed by a vendor" part...I gotta say, I'm gonna play devil's advocate here. What makes _EVERY_ academic library research methodology a special snowflake that needs it's own tutorial? Why can't we produce a generic "Intro to Research" that would fulfill, say...80% of the student need? - Jason Griffey

Upon what is the reaction against #vendor_created based? - awd

Intro to Research idea I like. I dont see why you couldnt cover sci/socsci/hum in a semester if it's a true intro course. Issue with broadboxing it comes in at the point of what aggregators and link resolvers everyone's using, which can change the experience tremendously, unless you want them to go db by db. - ωαřмaiden BrokerPokerface

Aaron: I would worry about bias towards product, etc. Might just be the journalist in me, but I like some separation between content and money in the traditional journalistic sense. My thinking on that is changing, so maybe I'm just being old fashioned...but that's where it's rooted. - Jason Griffey

OK, I was on the desk for an hour and just caught up with all this. Here's my argument against the model as proposed: 1) Contextless "introduction to research" course: I'm very much of the opinion that these don't work. To my knowledge, nobody has done a proper study of outcomes of standalone IL courses vs. curriculum-integrated instruction, probably because such a study would be wildly difficult to manage, but anecdotal evidence from a lot of IL librarians that I've spoken with suggests that "library orientation," (which, come on, that's what this is) devoid of any disciplinary context or relationship to a student's other coursework, and ESPECIALLY in a student's first semester on campus, produces very little transferable knowledge or skills. Bottom line: you can't put students through an IL "Star-Off Machine" and say, "okay, they're Information Literate now and we never have to worry about this again." - Catherine Pellegrino

2) Reinventing the wheel for our Special Snowflake campus: Something flew through my browser recently about why teachers reinvent the wheel; I need to go back and find it, but I think the gist is: in order to teach something, we have to internalize it to a degree that we CAN'T just teach someone else's lesson plan. Or if we do, we modify it so extensively that by the time we're done, we might as well have reinvented it anyway. Edit: Steve beat me to one of the points I was going to make: nobody gets on faculty members' case for reinventing the wheel for each course they teach. Also, yes, my campus, my library, my class is a Special Snowflake and so is yours. If we're NOT tailoring our instruction for the specific requirements of every class we meet, every professor we work with, every assignment our students have, we're not doing our jobs. - Catherine Pellegrino

Gee, how about "Prof In a Box" to teach the basics of the history of China? - Steveo Librareo

3) Purchased from a vendor: What Griffey said about bias toward product. Also, this came out of the context of the conversation where the idea was proposed: a librarian, new to a campus with apparently very little to no IL instruction, wished that she could just "buy something" to get her students up to a baseline level of knowledge and skills. To me, this just the wrongest way to go about this: it has to start with the faculty, with relationships with the faculty, with working with them to get the students the skills that they need to do well on the assignments the faculty are giving. So many librarians go at this as "Hey faculty, Information Literacy is a good thing!" Wrong, wrong, wrong. We should go at it as, "hey faculty, are your students doing as well as you'd like on their research assignments? No? We can help you with that." - Catherine Pellegrino

I'm also gonna say this: WE ARE ALL SPECIAL SNOWFLAKES. Library work should make people feel like special snowflakes, that their particular research and study and questions MATTER and are not all identical. JE SUIS LE FLOCON DE NEIGE. - Steveo Librareo

@Steve - I was thinking about this as a product to augment course material, not replace an actual prof. Also - educators are receiving grants (basic intro) to create just those courses (like your in-a-box China history) in BB and others CMS products that can be part of the curriculum for a number of years and taught by adjuncts who are far cheaper than full faculty. Welcome to the world of online degrees. - ωαřмaiden BrokerPokerface

Colleen, I'm obviously biased by the institution where I work. But if profs said "why don't they learn your subject from a box," I'd be inclined to turn the answer around on them. - Steveo Librareo

Steve - I dont disagree with you. I think for courses it's an awful model, but I graduated from a teeny private liberal arts place where we were all showered with attention and individualized challenges by our profs. But I do see how in the context of a basic research skills class having such a program - which could then be augmented by the assignments, group work, and lecture of a college-level course - could be useful, instead of every librarian (or instructor) having to build something similar from scratch. Still serious problems, as pointed out above by Catherine, but I do understand the impetus. How many different very basic "find an article in Ebsco" or "how to use boolean search logic" tutorials are out there? Enormously inefficient when you consider it, imo. - ωαřмaiden BrokerPokerface

Colleen has my point, exactly. I'm certainly not saying that we do away with instruction...far from it! It's just that the status of library instruction sessions right now, especially basic research sessions, seems _crazy_ to me. Every professor instructs differently in the History of China, but good lord, at least there are common texts on it. We don't even have the beginning of commonality of content. - Jason Griffey

Double-like the comment by Joan. Exactly. If we had standardized tools for the basic stuff, we could actually spend MORE time doing the "special snowflake" type of instruction, one on one with students. Instead of every library creating their own EBSCO tutorial. - Jason Griffey

Joan, it's funny you say that: at our campus it's just the opposite. We have no entry-point for baseline IL instruction (COMP 101 or the equivalent), so we often see students for the first time when they're juniors or seniors. It's a huge problem, and as far as I can tell it's unique to our campus. - Catherine Pellegrino

OK, so getting coffee gave me enough time to think about what a *good* "InfoLit in a Box" would look like. And I think it would look like LibGuides and be called "Library Skillz in a Box." The content wouldn't be the same everywhere, but the toolkit would. It would come with a dozen ready-made (and ready-to-customize) modules, such as "Intro to JSTOR," "How to Read a Call Number," and "When to Ask For Help." - Steveo Librareo

I am against commonality and standardization. I am for sharing and talking. - Steveo Librareo

Catherine, in some cases, we also don't get students until their Junior year because it's optional whether students get a library session in EN 101/102 and some programs don't have any research methods course until Junior year (some don't have one period!). I agree with Griffey that there are a lot of things we shouldn't need to make "our own" at each individual institution (like EBSCO tutorials), but I am a huge believer in info lit instruction that is designed for and tied to a specific course & assignment, because that's the only way that I've seen students actually absorb what they're learning since they can see an immediate relevance. - Meredith

I completely agree with what Steve wrote while I was typing -- standardization = no, sharing = yes. - Meredith

I have a blog post in mind that I promise to write, assuming it all doesn't blow up in my face in the class I teach at 2 today. The gist--the best thing we can do in a library session is talk to students, ask questions that we don't know the answers to, and listen to what the students tell us. - Steveo Librareo

Mer, I'd argue that's what everyone in this thread is after. I have no interest AT ALL in teaching students which buttons to push. But that's what people end up doing on their "here's how to search Gale" video tutorials. What I'm saying is that we need to do less of that, and more contextual instruction. Absolutely what Steve is saying: listen to the students, ask questions, be available. If the way we get to that is to standardize the basics, that's what I'm after. - Jason Griffey

So....could we put together a series of Camtasia or other tutorials on the LSW website with various people's handouts as a starting place for people headed into 101 classes? Start with Ebsco/Gale and make them editable pdfs for customization? - Hedgehog

I'd suggest wiki.thelsw.org if anyone wants to do that. I know that Iris had talked of something similar in the past, so you might want to contact her. Also, if any of you are MediaWiki Literate, and want to get our wiki looking more presentable, lemme know and we'll make sure you have full access. - Steveo Librareo

What a thread! (And probably not done yet.) I'd love to see this discussion written up for later use, pretty much as is--maybe even in LLN. Thoughtful, diverse, possibly leading somewhere: Great stuff. (LSW & FriendFeed at their best.) - Walt Crawford

So if people are already doing this, why aren't they being used? Or are they being used? - Steveo Librareo

relevance, adaptability, availability issues--my guess...the usual big three :-p - Hedgehog

Right. So yeah, that's kinda where I am with InfoLit in a Box. Also, "X in a Box" is in trouble regardless after the SNL skit. - Steveo Librareo

I've looked at ANTS (http://ants.wetpaint.com/) It's the right idea, but the actual implementation is a bit rough around the edges. It's a good site, but is exactly the sort of thing that librarians might put together, and I mean that in both the best and worst way. - Jason Griffey

There are, to my knowledge, no less than three similar collections of IL tutorials on the web: ANTS; MERLOT (http://www.merlot.org), which isn't limited to library/IL subjects; and the ACRL Instruction Section's PRIMO (http://www.ala.org/apps...). - Catherine Pellegrino

There was once also a library instruction wiki (with the tagline "stop reinventing the wheel"), but it seems to have disappeared. I'm pretty much with Catherine here--I think it's basically impossible to do your own teaching with other people's materials unless you modify them yourself enough that you have them internally. Not all "inefficiencies" are things we need to root out. - laura x

http://www.libsuccess.org/index... - laura x

Joan: that's what the PR in PRIMO stands for: Peer Reviewed Instructional Materials Online. They're still not so great. And I *have* used the NCSU peer-review tutorial in classes where it was relevant. See, that's the thing: it WORKED in those classes and it's GOOD. Most of the stuff out there doesn't work in my classes and, frankly, isn't all that great to begin with. - Catherine Pellegrino

If I had to sit through a "how to search databases" class I would hate libraries. Discussing what the tools lead you to - that's a little more interesting and complicated. - barbara fister

I think sharing videos would be good (especially licensed and in a format to allow tweaking). But tweaking is vital. And contextless just ensures unmotivated students. Such a class could theoretically be made fun despite that, I guess. But purchased from a vendor -- oh $deity$, I've snored through way too many vendor seminars to ever dream of foisting them on my poor students. - Deborah Fitchett

SO, I didn't read "purchased from a vendor" as from someplace like ProQuest - I was thinking more like http://www.milesmultimedia.com/ - that said, I'm all for using the database tutorials that vendors put out to link as a "how to search" type of thing. I don't expect database vendors to provide information literacy instruction though. Now, I think it would be awesome to find a way to pull together some standard tutorials in formats that allow them to be easily modified to include library specific information - that means they're fairly generic originally, but the content is high quality. This would require a significant time commitment. I wonder, though, if it would be something that might be reasonable to consider developing, say, an IMLS grant proposal for - I do think it would require a number of libraries to commit to it. - ellbeecee

I couldn't really join in yesterday when this discussion was happening, but I had a lot to say (yeah, I know, don't look so shocked): http://pegasuslibrarian.com/2010... - lris

+++++Iris - barbara fister

I'm surprised no one has brought up active learning - most of the tutorials I've seen are videos or handouts and not very interactive. What about learning by doing, not just learning by listening to someone talk? I think tutorials generally show how to do something correctly, but I think one of the most vital parts of the research process is screwing up. I feel like tutorials mask that. - Laura H.

++LauraH. One of the tutorials that turned me off PRIMO starts with, like, six pages of "how to navigate this tutorial" and then sternly warns the student that s/he needs to have set aside at least an hour to do the tutorial. - Catherine Pellegrino

Oh, and also ++lris, but I already said that elsewhere. - Catherine Pellegrino

Laura - if you look at the e-training & development literature, there is quite a bit of material on how to develop active e-learning approaches with tutorials. Clark & Mayer's 2008 "e-Learning and the Science of Instruction: Proven Guidelines for Consumers and Designers of Multimedia Learning" (Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer) and Silberman's 2006 "Active Training: A Handbook of Techniques, Designs, Case Examples, and Tips" (3rd ed) are two very handy texts for anyone thinking about delivering e-learning content, either as supplemental to a course or for pure e-delivery. What I found fascinating is that everything we (as both librarians & educators outside of the library) tend to do - adding flashy video and audio to make things "interesting" actually distract from the real learning. Most of the tutorials I've seen don't adhere to much of what we know about creating effective learning tools at all - I don't know if this is because learning those best practices is tedious, because we don't know any better, or just because we all like shiny, pretty things... - ωαřмaiden BrokerPokerface

(I report this as I just finished a few weeks of a "Methods & Techniques of T&D" course that has pretty much upended what I thought I knew about designing tutorialstuffs. I'll be keeping those textbooks, very handy.) - ωαřмaiden BrokerPokerface

Colleen, thanks...those texts sound very helpful! - Laura H.

We are limited in the amount of face to face teaching we now do - quite honestly, we don't have the staff to do it any more - so our focus is on tutorials, but ones that do have interactivity with them, and not just "click the arrow to go to the next page". One of the things I'm learning from my class this semester (intro to instructional design in the university's EdTech program) is about focusing on the development as much as if not more than the delivery. I think part of this comes from a lot of us going into libraries and starting to teach without any background in education. We're having to rethink this in lots of libraries now, and I think long term it will be good for us to learn how to develop instruction - because otherwise, how do even consider assessing it if we didn't know what we planned to do in the first place? - ellbeecee

Joan, we are focusing on tutorials, course guides and online classes in lieu of face to face instruction sessions. At this point we have...I think 11 librarians on our instructional services team, which is responsible for all library instruction (disciplinary and gen-ed) and nearly 36000 students, IIRC. It's a very interesting challenge, but honestly, there's no other real choice for us. - ellbeecee

I don't think that face-to-face is inherently better than online. I do think a quality learning module (tutorials are part of them, but not all that makes up the module) can be as effective as a face to face session - and more so for some students. But they do take more time up front, partly because you have to learn the instructional design skills as well as the software. This is something that we're just moving into and it is difficult. But hard choices are what they are, and this is where we've landed. - ellbeecee

Joan, you're right that instruction isn't the only way to reach students, and that if it were we'd even be sunk here, where we have 2000 students and 8 instruction librarians. For me, a good use of tutorials would be incredibly modular. For example, I could have links to tiny 1-5 minute "how to" segments on my libguides in addition to the step-by-step help I already put there. But I would still want to get in and teach as many students in as many classes as possible because of the relationship-building aspect. And in general, even the repetitive "here's how you work with the MLA International Bibliography's crazy descriptor organization" pieces are at their best when I do them as a conversation with the students in front of me, constantly checking to see if things made sense or if I need to think up a new analogy or if students have had success doing things differently (and when they have, we all learn). So yes, I think you're absolutely right. But no, I hate the idea of a librarian in a box for my institution. "How to" is such a vanishingly small part of what I try to accomplish in my classes. - lris

Sure. Absolutely. That's part of why I've been wanting to start that wiki. But that's not "information literacy in a box." That might be "bits and pieces of BI in a box." But I'm starting to suspect that "instruction" means rather different things to a lot of us. I almost never teach more than one database, even to freshman comp classes, and I often don't teach the catalog unless I know they're going to have to find books. So when I see "info lit in a box" I guess I don't have the same "that would save me from a lot of repetitive, generic teaching" reaction that some people might have if their institutions rely on that kind of instruction. - lris

I'm looking for something like: "that would save me from a lot of repetitive, generic teaching"-in-a-box... the contents of which would fit well on a or linked from wiki :) - awd