Librarian Twitterers and other news

Useful post by Phil Bradley with a 100 librarian twittering types in the UK. I don’t think it’s ranked in any order (worryingly I’m near the top or the bottom depending on how you read the list!).

http://tweepml.org/?t=1051

In other news the build up to the start of term (and in my case job switch) continues. Quite a few of the information librarians are already knees deep in induction work, I’m lucky enough that my few (last) sessions are only in week 1 of term (w/b 28th Sept).

Tweeting in a pedagogical kinda of way

I see that Leicester’s Beyond Distance Research Alliance (BDRA) is thinking about exploring twitter for pedagogical and learning activities.  Excellent, this is really good news.  Let’s hope that those of us twitter veterans here already can support them and help welcome them into the community.  As we’ve explored and discussed on this blog (and elsewhere) more than a few times, twitter has been a great tool for us.

Ranking open access with twitter

Spotted over on Gerry McKiernan’s blog, a website that ranks arXiv papers by their popularity on Twitter.  I think this is a really interesting idea, and one I’d love to use for the LRA; but I suspect that a) Not that many of our papers are being discussed and b) Not many people who are using our papers are on twitter anyway.

It’s really an order of magnitude thing, the LRA has 4,000ish items arXiv has over 536,000 – we’re not even 1% of their size, and doubtless traffic also.  That said this kind of qualitative real time metric is a bit different to the usual quantitative ones that we seem to be relying on for most repository measurement. 

That said, I know we’ve got to consider that it’s not everyone who is reading these papers is talking about them, and taken on their own these metrics hold only a certain value.  But then, isn’t that the case with every metric?

TAN: Web 2.0 & Information Literacy

Several of us from the library attended the Teaching Assessment Network presentation yesterday by Sarah Whittaker and Alan Cann.

The slides with an audio commentary for this session can be found in a previous post.

The session mainly consisted of a face to face and simultaneous twitter discussion about using Web 2.0 technologies in teaching, particularly with regards to information literacy skills.

I don’t have a particular problem twittering while listening/discussing issues face to face. However,  it wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea and some people had problems hearing the face verbal discussion due to the tapping of keyboards and/or concentrating on the online discussion due to the amount of tangential “twittering”.

Some of the interesting points I picked up in the room and online were:

• Web 2.0 tools used included a customised google search engine, wikis, and a pageflakes page for relevant journal links and RSS feeds. All bought together through the Blackboard VLE page for the course.
• As the students saw each other daily anyway there was very little interaction online.
• The custom search and the journal pages were very popular with the students.
• The tutor saw an improvement in the quality of resources used.
• suggests it’s best to integrate appropriate Web 2.0 info literacy tools within student courses.
• Academis staff were offered library sessions on RSS and social bookmarking but take up was low – they didn’t come because they didn’t know how it would be useful?
• The library needs to expand on our Web 2.0 knowledge and the support we offer – need web 2.0 evangelists?
• More emphasis on evaluation – less on searching?
• Issues to think about teaching: advanced google searching, specialist image/audio search engines, wikipedia, youtube as reference tool, RSS, blogs/blog searching, citing new types of resources and copyright/creative commons.

Online Seminar: Web 2.0 and Information Literacy

During 2008 Alan Cann and I ran a UoL TEF funded project Using Web 2.0 to Cultivate Information Literacy via Construction of Personal Learning Environments.  On Wednesday 14th January 2009 between 12.30-2pm (GMT) we will be presenting a live TAN session in which we will outline the project and its main outcomes. Most of the session will be a discussion of how information literacy can be developed across the University.

If you would like to attend this seminar, please email the UoL Staff Development Centre on  staffdev@le.ac.uk

Additionally, we will be conducting a live Twitter session at this event. If you would like join as a remote participant, the slides for the session are:

TAN Facebook session

On Monday 27 October Dr Clare Madge and Dr Jane Wellens presented their findings from the TEF funded project: Facebook and the University of Leicester Student Experience. Selina and myself went along to this well attended session.

The team had examined how new students used Facebook before and during the early days of their time at University. Amongst other things they asked students what they thought about Facebook and if they considered it relevant to their studies or academic work. Their was discussion about how staff are using Facebook, for example, whether staff contact students using Facebook, whether they think it has use as a communication tool or has other academic purposes.

I don’t have a copy of the slides with their findings, but from memory they found that large numbers (sorry I don’t know if the majority of not) of students had already got Facebook accounts before beginning University and had already made connections with others coming to Leicester well before arriving here in person. This was a new trend. Overall the students thought that Facebook was a place for socialising rather than for academic work. Some thought it would be a useful place to get notices (such as lecture cancelled). Selina – your memory is probably better than mine, so feel free to chip in here.

A facinating sideline was the use of Twitter in the session. A live discussion paralleling the face-to-face took place where you can still read the debate that took place. The debate was even picked up by trendspotters and temporarily took discussion on McCain and Halloween of the top slots. Some ‘outsiders’ even pitched in.

Using Twitter this way gave people a platform to have parallel discussions and put out their ideas about the topics being discussed. Unfortunately quite a few people (including me) found it hard to concentrate on all these threads at once, and I think the face-to-face discussion probably suffered as a result. Still, an interesting session.

I look forward to seeing the final results of the project. Popular themes from the discussion were:

• should students be given official University guidance on online identity and risk of self exposure on Facebook?
• the potential for Facebook for learning, teaching and support.
• are non English language students indirectly excluded from Facebook? Does its ubiquitous presence alienate them?
• whether staff should be Facebook friends with students.

It’s a time of experimentation but many are warying of interfereing in students social space (which could kill the fun / dynamism of the space). All a bit creepytreehouse.

Of course that doesn’t apply to our Facebook page as we are not intruding on anyone’s space, people are free to join or not. The existence of the now famous Leicester University Library Toilets Appreciation Society Facebook group is a fine example of grass roots feedback to the library. We have to know it is there of course to get the feedback. A less welcome version of the same mechanism is the case of bullying of a member of library staff at the University of Kent .

OK enough of my ramblings, any thoughts?

Small Worlds hands on

The power of social networking in a professional environment was self-evident even before yesterday – I wasn’t down to help out with Alan’s session, but whilst we’d been chatting over Twitter the night before he’d invited me to come along.  Glad he did, as it was certainly one of the more satisfying bits of student teaching I’ve done in a while; helped by the excellent student teacher ratio which must have been close to 4:1.  That was certainly better than the RefWorks class I had the other week; but that’s another story entirely.

Yesterday’s session was a follow up to one Alan had led about online social networking and was the hands on explore for yourself resources like Delicious , Twitter and the Small Worlds Wiki for about 20-25 students.  For a good chunk of the session the students were registering on Small Worlds and creating their profiles, and then they were off to explore the various social tools -in most cases it seems without stopping to read the instructions and help on the Small Worlds site. 

Not that I can blame them, that’s exactly what I do – refreshing to meet so many people with a similer learning style to myself!  I spent the time during the session, as Alan put it, “chatting up” the students.  Alan, like my MiL uses chatting up in the context of talking to them, social networking in vivo rather than in silico if you will.  They were a great bunch of students and it was refreshing to see them pretty quickly get to grasp with not just the tools, but how they could use them in their studies and research. Very rewarding, and repeated today with Selina in residence.