Refworks Guide for Workshops

This is the Refworks Guide for workshops:

RefworksforBeginners

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Library Resources for Music / Adnoddau Llyfrgell ar Gyfer Cerdd

This biliingual (English / Welsh) powerpoint presentation briefly outlines some printed and electronic library resources for music students:

Library Resources for Music Students / Adnoddau Llyfrgell i Myfyrwyr Cerdd

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SENRGY Library Resources & Literature Reviews Presentation

This is the presentation for SENRGY postgraduates (forestry, land conservation, countryside management, etc) on library resources and literature reviews.

Library Resources and Literature Reviews for SENRGY Students

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The teaching term

This term I have been mostly teaching. As a result, everything else I was doing, such as experimenting with Web 2.0 tools and writing it up for a library scoping study, planning book displays, and various other things, have slightly fallen behind as I am so busy both preparing and teaching sessions.

I only started in this job in January, and was originally assistant to John Wright who was doing most of the teaching (I did a lot more one to one enquiries earlier in the year than group sessions, although I did talk to a few groups); but since John left this summer, and the autumn term began at University, it’s been incredibly busy!

Initially there were all the library induction presentions (very general, and we shared a presentation for that which I just had to adapt). The biggest challenge there was imparting information about the library to large groups of new students in Freshers Week (the first week of term) who were already completely overwhelmed by too much information, so we tended to keep these sessions pretty general.

Since Freshers Week, I have been out across the university presenting to a range of subjects and people. I went to a small island just off the Anglesey mainland to talk to Marine Biology postgraduates about resources for their subject; talked to 50 geography first years about information literacy and how to evaluate information quality (using two journal articles for comparison, one from a tabloid, one from a scholarly journal); and spoke to English first years about library resources. This week I’m talking to SENRGY postgraduates (mostly forestry and countryside management) about library resources and also literature reviews, lecturing 120 business undergraduates about Refworks (electronic referencing software) and speaking to a group of music undergraduates about their library resources. It takes a fair bit of preparation at the moment, as I have to get an overview of their subject, investigate their resources, write the sessions, and deliver them.

Oh, and in tandem with all this, I’ve also been running two hour hands on workshops (mostly for postgraduates) on Refworks, information searching skills, and e-resources at Bangor library; all of which also needed preparing and delivering; plus doing my usual one to one enquiries, enquiry desk sessions, responding to email enquiries, huge amounts of Refworks support, and all the other random things which come up.

It’s been a busy time! On the good side however, I now have lots of useful materials prepared, which just need sending to translation to be translated into Welsh (I speak and write Welsh fairly well but they have to be done properly) and then can be put up on the website. Even better, I have met lots of nice students, and hopefully helped them begin their year at college with some idea of where to hunt for information. I have also had the chance to get across some basic points such as: the library does not buy all journals in databases, and bibliographic databases like Web of Science and CSA are lists of abstracts and do NOT contain full text articles. It’s also great for me to get feedback from the students on their experiences using library resources, and find out what kind of support they need from the librarians.

It’s fascinating, having noticed via Twitter that several speakers at e-learning conferences this year were questioning the role of libraries and libraries, to notice that actually, contrary to some assumptions out there, librarians are more in demand than ever in this age of electronic information, and I’ve been in and out of this line of work for around 16 years now, so have a long term view on this. But that’s the subject of another long blog post or rant one of these days…why librarians are needed more than ever!

In the meantime, I’m starting to think that by the time the baby is born, it’s going to be an expert on library databases and search skills, as they can apparently hear things by this stage!

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Information Hunting in a Range of Sources: Handout

This is the handout for Friday afternoon’s working on information hunting.
I am putting handouts on my blog to try and cut down on printing costs.

InfoSearchingRangeSources

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E-Databases for Library Staff: Handout

This is the handout for Friday’s teaching session on e-databases for library staff.

EdatabasesforLibraryStaff

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November Information Skills Workshops

To register on these sessions email Penny Dowdney: p.j.dowdney@bangor.ac.uk with 1) your name, 2) your email address, 3) your level (1^st year, postgraduate, lecturer, etc), and 4) your subject area.

Please note that workshops book up quickly, but I will try and run extra workshops if demand is high!

Thu 12th Nov: Refworks for Beginners: BOOKING ESSENTIAL

Room 035, Deiniol Library, Bangor University

A two hour workshop for beginners, and people who have begun using Refworks but would like some more guidance.

Refworks is an internet based reference manager bought by the university library, which allows you to save your references to books, journals, articles and so forth online; access references from university and home; and use the references to print out reading lists or create bibliographies at the end of essays. Refworks can be used free of charge by university members for as long as they are at the university and afterwards. This workshop will show you how to register with Refworks, set up folders for references, save references to Refworks from different sources (books, electronic journals, etc), download the Write-N-Cite plug-in, access your references from Microsoft Word, and insert references into an essay and create a bibliography.

Thu 19th Nov: E-resources@Bangor: BOOKING ESSENTIAL

Room 035, Deiniol Library, Bangor University

A two hour workshop.

The Bangor University Libraries subscribe to a range of electronic resources, and this session will give you an overview of some of the things we get, and how to search them effectively. The workshop will look at online newspaper archives, electronic journal databases, which contain a range of full text journals; and at some of the bibliographic databases, which search a number of sources and list a range of useful articles (but do not contain full text articles).

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LILAC Conference: Day 2: Patricia Ianuzzi Keynote

Patricia Ianuzzi is a librarian from Las Vegas, and I enjoyed her keynote, which featured references to online gaming and to Las Vegas casinos!

She began by giving an overview of information literacy and reports in the US, which I found very useful. These are some of the references she gave:

The Spellings Commission on the Future of Higher Education

The 1998 Boyer Report, focusing on undergraduates and research

A book by Derek Bok called Our Underachieving Colleges

LEAP (Liberal Education and America’s Promise)

NSSE (National Survey of Student Engagement)

Project DEEP (Documenting Effective Educational Practices)

This opening section of the presentation was very useful, as it gave the wider context of the need to train students in information literacy skills, both for education and the workplace. Patricia went on to say that she didn’t care what terms we used, information literacy, digital literacy, or whatever, as long as we achieved the learning outcomes needed.

She then moved on to speaking about Marc Prensky’s essay, Engage me or enrage me, which is the source of the much quoted idea that young people are digital natives, who have grown up with computers and mobiles and video games, are comfortable and adept with digital media, and expect to be entertained, and older people are digital immigrants, who are not as digitally literate, and have different educational expectations. Although this concept obviously has some good points, in general the reality is a lot more complex than that, there are many older people who are amazingly digitally literate and lots of younger people who use digital technologies very little or without much expertise.

In an digression from the subject, I have to add that I started reading Prensky’s follow up essay, Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, Part II and was horrified to find some of the ideas in it were based on ferrets having their brains rewired, poor things. I hope the ferrets take over the world and rewire the scientists’ brains, that’ll teach them.

Anyway, back to the keynote writeup. Despite not agreeing that all youngsters are computer whizz kids, and all oldies are digital dinosaurs, I do actually find all the research on making education entertaining very interesting. On the one hand, I think it’s important to remember that learning things in itself can actually be interesting for many people, I enjoy learning, and I don’t always need some interactive dancing rabbits to help me concentrate on reading a piece of text…however, on the other hand, I’m not a fan of boring people into stupors if it can possibly be avoided (or worse still, being bored into a stupor), and agree that making learning more interactive and fun can help keep people’s attention and interest.

That brings us neatly back to Patricia Ianuzzi who agreed with Prensky that students of today need engaging learning materials, and showed us a short video of three students talking about online gaming. Not only was the video interesting, but it made a nice break from talking and presentation slides, therefore neatly illustrating her point. We saw screen shots of the games, showing varied environments, innovative graphics, vast armies, aliens, visuals, explosions, and so on, and the students talked about game playing, and how often they played, and how they enjoyed playing competitively against other people.

At the end of the video, Patricia asked the audience what engaged the players, and the answers we gave included: immersion, interactivity, control, customization and visuals. She asked us, can we create learning resources which engage users using similar principles?

In Las Vegas, Patricia explained, casinos are drawing on video gaming to make their slot machines more engaging and enticing, with the key concept being PDI (player driven innovation). She showed images of game machines with embedded multimedia enhancements, and photos of interactive video game versions of popular casino games such as roulette and poker.

I found this keynote presentation interesting and engaging.

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LILAC Conference: Day 1: Other Sessions

Jenny Evans & Ruth Harrison (Imperial College, London): 2. 0 much to do: how, when and why should library staff find out about web 2.0, and what does it mean for information literacy?

The session was about an idea called 23 Things, which was a list put together by a public library in America to encourage their staff to try out different web 2.0 technologies (e.g. blogs, Flickr, wikis, YouTube, etc), and described Imperial College Library’s version of 23 Things which was called Learning 2.0, and ran for ten weeks.

We were in a computer room for the session, which was ideal, as we were able to look at the website, and explore some of the links, including being given password access to look at some of the blogs the Imperial library staff had created during the programme. The extent of entries on the blogs varied enormously, some people having only done one or two posts, and others still blogging now.

There were positive outcomes from Learning 2.0: just under a quarter of library staff took part, surveys done before and after the course showed that people’s knowledge improved; and since completing the course, there are more blogs and wikis at the library, podcasts have been adopted, and there is a library twitter profile.

Overall, it sounds like a good technique to follow to get library staff on board, en mass, trying new web 2.0 technologies, especially if having completed the course, people can opt to use blogs and twitter and so forth if they choose, and not if they don’t, as not everyone is comfortable sharing their professional thoughts online in a web 2.0 style.

Moira Bent & Elizabeth Stockdale (Newcastle University): Integrating information literacy as a habit of learning – assessing the impact of a golden thread of IL in the curriculum

This was an interesting session about teaching information literacy as part of the student’s curriculum (one of the central ongoing debates in information literacy is whether to teach it separately, or as part of students’ courses, so that they can immediately see the relevance to their studies). Moira is a librarian, and Liz is an Environmental Science lecturer, and they worked together on integrating information literacy teaching into Liz’s course.

Moira listed the pros and cons of teaching information literacy within a course (relevant, can work with academic staff, make it subject specific, etc; BUT, means library staff not in control, co-working can be difficult, time consuming, etc) and the pros and cons of teaching information literacy as standalone sessions (easier to make it specific, students can work at own pace, raises library profile, etc, BUT, keeps focus too specific instead of broad, doesn’t make it relevant to subject studied, etc).

Liz was a great advocate for information literacy. She had observed that students were finishing university without necessarily developing the information skills they needed, as there was an unspoken assumption that students would just develop these skills whilst doing their studies, whereas she could see that they actually needed more specific training. She emphasised the need to assess any information literacy skills they learnt, otherwise students would just not make the time to do it, e.g. Liz marks some essays on information literacy skills used as well as essay content.

Interestingly I have spoken to staff at the university where I work who are concerned about some of their students’ information hunting skills, the lack of breadth in their reference lists, and issues with plagiarism and referencing, so I’m very much aware that all this issues are certainly noticed as much by lecturers as by library staff, and think that integration is definitely a good idea, as long as there is time to do it!

Evening Event: Caerphilly Castle

In the evening, I went to the social networking event, which was a coach ride to nearby Caerphilly Castle, which was beautiful, with dinner and drinks in a reception room at the (mostly ruined) castle, plus live music, medieval or classical I think. I love castles, but didn’t go exploring due to the bad combination of conference shoes and free wine. I was lucky enough to talk to some very nice people, including a librarian from the Brit School of performing arts  (I’d love to work in a performing arts library!), some students who had places at the conference, a nice psychologist from Leeds and my friend Melissa Highton from Oxford.

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