Month: October 2009

Educause‘s applied research branch ECAR just released their 2009 Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology. This is a survey of over 30,000 undergraduates at over 100 institutions. The study has been done annually since 2004 so longitudinal comparisons are possible. Scanning the Key Findings and Road Map, I found the following information most interesting:

  – 94.6% use the library website, with a median frequency of use weekly – to me this means that even with the tremendous amount of competition available from other information providers, the library is still relevant for students

– 2/3 disagree or strongly disagree with the statement, “I can skip classes when course materials are available online” – this relates to a discussion going on in 559 about whether students would bother attending clases if podcasts or iTunes of lectures were available

– there is a preference for a hybrid model –  a moderate amount of technology in courses, but  face-to-face instruction is still desired and,

– in answer to  open ened questions some students wrote explicitly about a preference for “real books and people” 

Technology offers us all sorts of possibilities and can’t be ignored, but we shouldn’t forget the human touch.

The idea of  Blog Action Day is to get as many bloggers focussed on one topic at the same time to generate excitement and publicity. This year’s topic is climate change. Using social media for positive change is so appealing. The ability of the medium to generate buzz and foster conversation shouldn’t be underestimated.

I had never heard of Blog Action Day until today. Yesterday I decided to test out Metcalfe’s Law and almost doubled the amount of people and organizations I was following on Twitter. As a result I am receiving much more information, most of it quite useful. I have also acquired new followers so my own tweets will be sent out to a larger audience.

This morning I received a tweet about Blog Action Day and was intrigued enough to follow up. Over 9,000 blogs from all over the world are registered to participate and some great videos are posted on the main site.  I have commemorated the day myself by posting some titles about climate change and about blogging from my institution’s library on our internal electronic announcement system.  And I’m writing this post.  Are you going to participate?

I have to stop this, but I can’t help thinking…

• If your professional and personal identity are that different, which one is the real you?
• What’s to stop you from impersonating yourself online?

It’s so nice when you’re taking two courses and the topics your concentrating on happen to overlap. Collaboration is so relevant to libraries it was bound to happen.

My other course is a Directed Studies on The Learning Commons in the Academic Library. Learning Commons are great examples of how an academic library can collaborate. A Commons is most often located in the library and can include some non-traditional library resources and services such as production hardware and software (Photoshop, iMovie, etc) for project creation, collaborative study space, peer tutoring, seminars and writing centres. A well planned Commons will be customized to the institution’s students and services will be tailored to meet their needs. Every Commons will be a bit different.  However it is almost guaranteed that every Commons will require the library to partner with other departments – like IT services, academic departments, student employment services to name a few – in order to deliver optimum services.

However this partnering or collaboration is new to many libraries (and probably many other campus departments) who are used to operating in their own silos. For librarians in particular, the collaborative effort of a Learning Commons signals the loss of the traditional library and perhaps even their professional identity.  An article by Susan Beatty (2008)  cites Donald Robert Beagle (2006) as desribing the Learning Commons “as transformative change for the library, where the commons is organized in collaboration with learning initiatives sponsored by other academic units and, in effect, the library disappears.” If you’re not ready for change, this can be a scary thought…

On professional versus personal identities online….

• Is who we are professionally that different than who we are in our personal life?
• Do we need to maintain separate identities with strict boundaries for each?
• Did the separation of personal and professional arise as a result of industrialization? Did we become fractured people when we started maintaining a separate work life and home life?
• Will social networking bring us full circle and mesh our separate identities into one?
• Am I losing my mind?

The phrase in the Albrechtslund article I found most intriguing was “construction of identity.” You can represent yourself as a close approximation of who you really are, or you can be who you always wanted to be. This does afford you some power, at the cost of privacy.

It also allows you to manage your reputation. In The Perils of Sharing, Andreas Kluth acknowledges how quickly you can lose control of your online reputation but maintains it is important to have an online presence in order “to inject your own perspective.” He also advocates for a new etiquette which will make people more sensitive to sharing information about others.

And the fact is, if you don’t construct your identity, someone may just assume it as their own, as happened to chef Michael Smith this week.