Comments Requested: Proposed Library School Accreditation Standards

Proposed revised ALA accreditation standards have been issued for library schools. Deans at 25 iSchools have already posted a response. Other comments are welcome via a blog--see the message below.

From: Karen O'Brien
Sent: Friday, May 29, 2009 9:55 AM
Subject: ALA Standards & Recommendations of ALA Task Force on Library Education

The ALA Committee on Accreditation (COA) invites comment from your members and constituents via blog on the Standards for Accreditation of Master's Programs in Library and Information Studies (2008) and in particular on the recommendations of the Library Education Task Force in their final report issued January 13, 2009 to the ALA Executive Board for referral to COA.  

COA works in deliberate systematic five-year cycles, collecting and analyzing comment and issuing draft revisions as part of its charge "to develop and formulate standards of education for library and information studies for the approval of Council" (ALA Handbook of Organization). The Committee chose a blogging approach to comment collection in order to provide an open ongoing forum for all stakeholders in the accreditation process.

Best wishes,
Karen L. O'Brien
Director, Office for Accreditation
American Library Association
50 East Huron Street
Chicago, IL 60611-2795
Ph 312-280-2434
Fx 312-280-2433
Homepage http://www.ala.org/accreditation
e-newsletter Prism http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/accreditation/prp/prism/prism_current.cfm

LibGuide on Teaching Critical Thinking & ILI

I've created a freely available LibGuide, called "Teach Information Literacy & Critical Thinking," with teaching tips, exercises and ideas. Librarians in many libraries of all types have worked very hard for decades to help learners improve their information literacy skills. However, there are few librarians compared to the numbers of our learners. In order to leverage our limited time, one approach is to work with instructors at all levels to help them incorporate information literacy instruction into their own curricula and assignments. This guide is designed to help instructors do just that. Additional teaching ideas and tips, comments and links are all welcome on the site.

SCIL (Southern California Instruction Librarians) Summer Retreat

SCIL (formerly the California Clearinghouse on Library Instruction, South) is an Interest Group of the the California ACRL Chapter, CARL. SCIL will be holding a summer retreat on June 19th at Occidental College, with roundtable discussions on a variety of information literacy instruction topics. Details are now available.

Digital Literacy Executive Order - California State

Kenley Neufeld, Library Director, Santa Barbara City College, tweeted today on California Governor, Arnold Schwatzenegger's Executive Order, highly significant for LILi and information literacy instruction efforts.

Invitation: 9th Mellon Seminar in Digital Humanities

Anyone interested is invited to attend the concluding symposium of the Mellon Seminars in Digital Humanities, featuring talks and panels by faculty and graduate students from UCLA and elsewhere. See the website for more information: http://www.digitalhumanities.ucla.edu/

These Seminars are hosted by Todd Presner (Germanic Languages and Comparative Literature, UCLA) and Jeffrey Schnapp (Stanford University, Stanford Humanities Laboratory, and Mellon Visiting Professor of Digital Humanities, UCLA). They invite you to an afternoon of thought-provoking discussion.

Presenters: (See schedule below)
Date: Monday, June 1, 2009
Time: 12 noon – 5 pm SLT/PDT (U.S. Pacific Time)
Locations:
Real Life (RL): UCLA Visualization Portal (5628 Math Sciences Bldg.)
Second Life (SL): Entropia, the Digital Library Federation’s SL
island—RSVP needed

Second Life basic accounts are free: http://secondlife.com

NOTE to SL attendees: Please RSVP to Esther Grassian
estherg@library.ucla.edu to reserve a space and receive the SLURL (SL
url), as well as instructions for viewing the live video feed and
adjusting the audio in SL.

SCHEDULE:
· 12:00-12:45: Lunch and introductory comments about Digital Humanities and
the Mellon Seminar by Jeffrey Schnapp and Todd Presner, including a presentation of the “Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0”

· 12:45-1:10: Brian Stefans (with Mark McGurl as respondent): “Poetry in the
Age of New Media”

· 1:10-1:25: Maite Zubiaurre: “Connecting the Dots: Spanish Cyberfeminism, Digital Art, and Domestic Violence”

· 1:25-1:40: Xarene Eskandar: “Digital Humanities Pedagogy and Practice: A Case Study in Media-Space-Narrative”

· 1:45-2:45: “Digital Cultural Mapping” featuring lightning talks by: Phil Ethington, Jan Reiff, Chris Johanson, Willeke Wendrich, Elaine Sullivan, Barbara Hui (respondents: Todd Presner and Diane Favro)

· 2:45-3:15: “Mobile Media” featuring lightning talks by: Scott Ruston, David Shepard, Eric Chuk, Antero Garcia, Jennifer Porst, and Christie Nittrouer

· 3:15-3:30: Break

· 3:30-4:30: Keynote by N. Katherine Hayles: “How we Think: The Transforming Power of Digital Humanities”

· 4:30-5:00: Answering the Question: What is(n’t) Digital Humanities? (a group conversation); Wrap-up, next steps,mapping the future...

LILi Meeting: Fr 5/29/09, 11am-1pm, Occidental College

All are welcome to attend the next LILi meeting on Friday, May 29th, from 11 am to 1 pm, at Occidental College. See below for directions, parking and the agenda.

LILi Meeting
May 29, 2009
11 am - 1 pm
Occidental College

Directions & Parking Information
Links to campus maps and driving direction are provided at
http://www.oxy.edu/x5492.xml
The library is building # 5 and we're meeting in the Jeffers Room.

You can park for free and without permit in Visitor Parking (#43 on the campus map) or receive a free parking permit for General spaces issued by Campus Safety (#12L on the campus map). See: http://www.oxy.edu/x4918.xml You may also park on the streets surrounding the campus, provided you observe any posted restrictions.

Agenda

1. Announcements

2. Future meetings
b. Phone conference call meeting: Friday July 24th, 11:30am-1:00pm
c. Next meeting: some time in December at UCLA. We will meet in a computer lab and those who are in Second Life will help everyone else present get an avatar and get started with orientation.

3. Review Google Docs Draft wording for grant letters of inquiry to SONY, RKG Foundation and Wells Fargo for $33,000 to fund a formal ILI survey

4. Survey Outcomes: Possible IL IQ self-test for all types of libraries, perhaps based on the 2003 “Information Literacy IQ (Institutional Quotient) Test,” by Cerise Oberman and Betsy Wilson http://tinyurl.com/o86zn9

5. LILi website as a Google site

6. Other

College Students' Advice to Libraries

This is Part 4 of the OCLC Report on college students' perceptions of Libraries.
The title is: "College Students' Perceptions of Libraries and Information Resources." The countries included are: Australia, Canada, India, Singapore, United Kingdom and the United States. "Responses from U.S. 14- to 17-year-old participants have also been included to provide contrast and comparison with the college students, as these young people are potential college attendees."

Source: http://www.oclc.org/reports/perceptionscollege.htm

Creative 404 Error Pages

For a little light and interesting reading...
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/01/29/404-error-pages-one-more-time/

Google Books: full-text vs. (or +) metadata searching

Peter Brantley (Internet Archive) just posted the following message on the DLF (Digital Library Federation) Announce list about a long, but fascinating debate on this topic:

"I blogged a back and forth on GBS between paul duguid/ucb, danny sullivan, tim oreilly, and don waters on the social science research council web site -

- http://bit.ly/Xy4vW

enjoy."

More Links: Twitter as a Teaching/Learning Tool

Bryan Alexander posted a number of links on this topic to the NMC (New Media Consortium) Technology Advisory Board list:

"Two uses of Twitter in class:
http://let.blog.nitle.org/2009/04/30/twittering-and-teaching-from-the-upper-midwest/

Another classroom use:
http://let.blog.nitle.org/2009/02/14/teaching-with-twitter-one-sample-assignment/

Several cases :
http://universitybusiness.com/viewarticle.aspx?articleid=1199&p=1#0

*21* ways to use Twitter in class:
http://let.blog.nitle.org/2009/04/24/twitter-in-the-classroom-21-ways-and-tips/

How about a giant list of academics using Twitter?
http://karlynmorissette.karlyn.me/2009/01/master-higher-ed-twitter-list/

Twitter is being used to share information outside the academy. Check out the first uses here:
http://let.blog.nitle.org/2009/05/01/social-media-h1n1-and-digital-literacy/

Or this use for disaster information:
http://let.blog.nitle.org/2009/03/27/rural-emergency-and-social-networking/"

Bryan.Alexander@nitle.org

More re Twitter as a Teaching/Learning Tool

Jared Bendis followed up on his posting on the NMC (New Media Consortium) Technology Advisory Board list re TweetMyPaper:

"A question of privacy has come up and while you can't delete or edit you can hide and unhide. Which would allow something terrible to go offline or allow you to reveal the project only when completed.

When I was building it I kept thinking of a conversation I had with Reuben about repercussions (he told me a story about the accidental flooding of a sim and how they had to fix it instead of leaving it as a natural disaster). With the exception of the occasional public performance how often are we faced with the 'get it right the first time' skill that could serve us well.

This is just an exercise in writing without a net."

--
Jared E Bendis
Creative Director of New Media - Case Western Reserve University
http://www.jaredjared.com | http://fc.case.edu/newmedia

Twitter as a Teaching/Learning Tool

A recent thread on the NMC (New Media Consortium)Technology Advisory Board list bubbled up a number of ideas and links re this topic. On May 1st, Jared Bendis posted the following:

Subject: Re: twitter as an effective tool

This semester I did an exercise with my New Media Literacy students
using a Twitter application I wrote called TweetMyPaper.

The premise of the application is Word Processing meets Text Messaging
where the students had to write their papers 'one tweet at a time'
without the possibility of deleting or editing.

Students had to face the contradiction that in school they are taught
to edit and revise and be very careful to craft the perfect paper
while real life interpersonal communication has them that it's ok to
just shout out their ideas line by line.

They had to use the tool for two of their assignments - in one they
had to describe their perfect virtual world (in at least 30 tweets)
and in the other they had to describe how they would utilize an AI
teddy bear (in at least 35 tweets).

Not being able to edit forced the students to pay more attention to
their words and they found themselves proofing their composition line
by line in a way that they normally tend not to do when word
processing - the general idea being that they will go back and edit
(even though they often don't). As a teacher I found their typos and
missing periods endearing and a sign that they weren't cheating.

The linearity of the tool also causes the students to tell their
papers more like stories - weaving them as they went (they were not
allowed to outline or write them first in another program).

Lastly they were told that the work was going to be public and to
remember that they were not writing but authoring and to keep in mind
that anyone could see.

You are welcome to see their papers or use the tool yourself (or in
your classes) at: http://www.TweetMyPaper.com

Jared E Bendis
Creative Director of New Media - Case Western Reserve University
http://www.jaredjared.com | http://fc.case.edu/newmedia
Office: 216-368-4399 | Cell: 216-288-6349

Invitation: Repeat of SL DLF Library Tours: Harvard & UCLA

Anyone interested is invited to a repeat of the second Digital Library Federation (DLF) Member Libraries' discussion and tours of their Second Life libraries.

Date: Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Time: 10 am - 11 am SLT/PDT
Topic: Discussion & tours in Second Life of the Harvard University Library, by
Carrie Kent (Carrie Pennell), and the UCLA Library, by Esther Grassian
(Alexandria Knight)

-How we got our small libraries started in SL
-Initial challenges
-Current state
-A look to the future

Basic Second Life accounts are free: http://secondlife.com/

NOTE: Space is limited, so please RSVP for slurl (Second Life url): estherg@library.ucla.edu