A Day in the Life

On 25 January there was a round of "A Day in the Life Project 2010" where librarians share what they do in a day. In the past I have wondered how anyone had the time to document this, let alone whether it would interest anyone!

Now that the term has sort of calmed down I thought I would do it today!

I am a Business Librarian at the University of Bedfordshire in Luton, UK ("where the airport is...!"

This morning began well with the bus on time ; no professional articles to have to read on the journey (I always keep some by just in case I need a relaxing snooze on the way) ; and I could read about the 1920s and how Hugh Walpole went to the whole Bayreuth Wagner Festival for 3 shillings.

I have been teaching (sorry - facilitating student learning) almost solidly for the past 2 weeks so there's been a lot of e-mails, blogs etc to catch upon this week. This will be the day I will do it. Just 10 items in my delicious store marked "follow-up". This led me to register for Hootsuite. This might help me to schedule my tweeting and Facebooking. Then I was trying out mypictr, a tool for chopping pictures down to size. Next came changing my privacy settings on Facebook. As this seemed a good idea and it didnt take long I blogged about this on our Staff blog too. Don't usually spend much time on Facebook and I cant stand those games where you say where you have been and films you hanent seen and so on.

Answering student e-mails followed and ordering a book. Coffee time. Mainly spent talking about the Royal family and remembering how the Queen had kept Margaret Thatcher standing for 40 minutes when she was annoyed about the Grenada situation.

Back at the desk another book request had arrived. My colleagues know that book ordering is not my favourite occupation. Intransigent ordering systems can cause Father Jack impersonations (of Father Ted TV fame). Time to catch up with my blogging. This means looking at my Favoutites on Twitter which I have mainly captured from Tweetdeck on my iPhone while waiting for the bus etc. It's a marvellous facility (Tweetdeck, not the bus). The best of these go into delicious (I am godwinpeter on delicious) and I blog about a few of them. Will all this be done by lunch for I expect to help with a voluntary researching training session at 2.00. Will this be a mixture of first second and Masters' students, like the sessions I helped with yesterday?

Arranged to do a Desktop session for new Business School lecturer on Thursday. Next week will mean 7 sessions for new Business Masters students next week which I do as part of their Communications in Business unit. I shall give a short intro, using the Cephalonian method, then help them to learn how to evaluate material, using the CRAP test. They then do an assignment where they write an essay based on some sources (some good, some less good) which they also have to reference.

It's lunch time and the teaching for today has been cancelled - room double booked. I can catch up with the blogs. As I munch the Marks and Spencer sandwiches I glance through blogs by Elyssa Kroski, Meredith Farkas (how does she write such long posts - I do admire her frankness so much -bet she can touch type - wish I'd learnt..) Then I read that the ACRL Instruction Section (IS) Ilene F. Rockman Publication of the Year Award has gone to an article entitled "Information Literacy and Reflective Pedagogical Praxis."As it says this "expands upon dialogues within Composition and Rhetoric to examine information literacy pedagogy.” Gosh, that sounds heavy I say to myself (or words to that effect) -wonder what praxis is??
Should have looked it up on Kngine, new search engine I've come across : Phil Bradlkey doesnt rate it so I put it on the backburner. (like the praxis article).

Keep glancing at my internal e-mails : hoped to take Thursday off to sort out choir music for Easter, but have 2 appointments now. Only using 9% of my e-mail space - following a purge last week where I pressed the wrong button and erased loads. Remarkable how little we really need from the past - it's just a comfort blanket most of the time.

Keep finding stuff to pass on to other staff - like the LibX extension for Firefox, EBSCO Mobile version, the Library Minute series from Arizona State (how dare they get the same idea as our own Just a Minute Library videos!)
The 39 Social Media Tools I'll use today -really good article : great! I am using a few of them but there so many more ideas to follow up.

I'm sure there are other things I've missed (I learnt many years ago that it is not possible to document all our thoughts/actions).
Wonder how weird this will sound in 20 years time! Twenty years ago I still had a typist and we used paper to communicate. Forty years ago when I was at University there was no public photocopying!We used to make notes....wow

Pics are of me in expansive mood ; our Social Learning Centre ; our LRC in the summer ; a pod in our Social Learning Centre where we sometimes teach groups.

Web 2.0 integration in Information Literacy instruction

Sheila Webber has just drawn attention to this article :
Luo, L. (2010) "Web 2.0 Integration in Information Literacy Instruction: An Overview" Journal of academic librarianship, 36 (1), 32-40. "Survey and semi-structured interviews were conducted in this study to examine the adoption of the Web 2.0 technology in information literacy instruction. Findings suggest that librarians use Web 2.0 tools in three different levels, and overall it has a positive impact on teaching and learning" The 3 levels were: using them themselves, using them to deliver material, and a more interactive level.
Sounds really interesting : another one for me to get on interlibrary loan!

Chopping up YouTube videos

Phil Bradley drew attention to this via Twitter.
It's a simple tool that allows you to select a video from YouTube and then chop out the section you want to use. Link can then be sent to Facebook, Twitter, Delicious for sharing, or you could embed it on a web page or as part of a Powerpoint.
For example the "What is Information Literacy" from Otis College has some good general stuff, but you would not want to use all the video as it is specific to Otis. http://www.tubechop.com/chop/yeopJX5jJV8


Pic is my ideal break : coffee and cinnamon roll.

Blogging toward Information Literacy

It's great to see case studies using Web 2.0 to teach information literacy : it's what this blog was set up for and updates the book!

Blogging toward information literacy : engaging students and facilitating peer learning, by C.Chan and D.Cmor (Reference Services Review, 2009, 37(1) 395-407) is a very interesting account of using blogs to develop information literacy with a group of 88 students on a first year politics course at Hong Kong Baptist University. The authors are quite cautious about the applicability elsewhere - too cautious I reckon because there are some really good ideas here. Students are required to post answers to weekly library research questions posted on the blog. The intention was that they learned from each other's posts.They used Blogger. Over the term 8 different resaerch questions wee used and each student was required to attempt one. (they are listed in the article).76 out of 88 posted on the blog, because they were told this was compulsory as part of the course. Only 20% said they only posted once. Only 16% said they visited it 5 or more times. In the assessment of usefulness 94% said they found it very useful or somewhat useful. It's a well structured article and I think others could try out the structure and perhaps improve on the results.

Pic is of part of our new Social Learning Space at our Putteridge Bury site.