Personal Learning Environment

This post encourages the support of personal learning environments over structured work focusing on the end result, in order to also promote the use of library services during the research process.

What is a personal learning environment?

Image of ‘looking into’ research. Taken from http://pixabay.com/en/research-find-loupe-search-390297/. [Creative Commons licensed].

Personal learning environments enable more active interaction by engaging learners through several methods rather than adhering to the structured norm that is given by educators. It also increases motivation as it is what specifically interests the learner. This may draw more people into specifically looking into doing additional research and utilizing library services in which they can do further research on their topic area.

Benefits of a PLE:

The following lists the main benefits of PLEs, though additional benefits can be found here.

  • helps with creating learning environments that are tailored to the learners
  • focuses on encouraging innovation
  • emphasizes the value of the learning process than the finished product

Problems in the Real World Application:

One of the issues that I have noticed with personal learning environments does not simply arise from the educator’s responsibility but also because of the lack of responsiveness to new ways of doing assignments. There have been instances in which professors have tried to create a more flexible research assignment that did not require specific guidelines.

student

Image of confused student. Taken from https://www.flickr.com/photos/83633410@N07/7658298768/. [Creative Commons licensed].

In one of my undergraduate classes, a professor had given us free reign over choosing any topic of interest to on a research paper based on the field of Psychology. There were example topics given as well as a word count limit and that was set for the assignment. However, the students in the class did not respond well to the assignment as they had been very used to having a set structure that was determined through a particular rubric. Although they were given the chance to explore their own interests, they were left confused and unmotivated to continue on with their work. This type of behaviour shows how the norms have made it difficult for even students to respond positively to a personal learning environment catered towards their interests. Another interesting note was a paper that was written which highlighted the concern over a lack of structure. It seemed to be that it deterred students from being successful in academia.

Questions: What other ways can educators try to use personal learning environments for helping others learn? What can be done to help students become more receptive to person learning environments if they are not used to it?

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Analytics

Altmetrics and Web Analytics

Altmetrics is defined as being an alternative to the typical way of measuring the amount of impact that journals or authors have had in academia. It is an interesting parallel to looking at web analytics as they can both be used to validate the content that is published online. Web analytics uses the web data in order to measure whether the website is easily used and whether there are ways in order to improve its usability. Both methods serve to demonstrate the amount of impact that the creator has had in giving information to the targeted population.

Web Analytics:

analytics-282739_640

Web analytics. Taken from http://pixabay.com/en/analytics-red-people-tracking-282739/. [Creative Commons licensed].

With web analytics, those who are in charge of organizing and creating a website can use the information in order to improve its content and the navigation around the website. For example, web developers can find information about pages that are viewed the most and the least in order to determine which web pages hold important information to the users. Moreover, there are statistics that show information on the number of new or returning website visitors. This can help web developers determine what web pages are useful for those who are coming back to a website as well as information that might be important to new visitors.

Useful web analytics tools for social media:

Some of the popular web analytics tools include the following:

Question: Have you heard of any others that have been very useful for analyzing data on social media?

Altmetrics:

altmetrics

Altmetrics and related words. Taken from https://www.flickr.com/photos/ajc1/6795008004/. [Creative Commons licensed].

On the other hand, altmetrics is typically used for journals and authors that are mentioned in social media. If a paper is mentioned within a social media platform, this will increase the score associated with the paper. Moreover, the type of source (e.g. a newspaper article compared to a tweet) will give more points as well. Different authors will also give a certain number of points according to how often it is posting (e.g. a professor sharing a link with other professors will be worth more points than a journal sending out the link). The total score is then calculated based off of these three points.

Questions: Have you seen any instances of altmetrics used? What was their usefulness? What were the limitations?

Therefore, analytics can be a useful tool in order to validate the work that has been completed – whether it is the impact it has had in academia or the impact that has been generated on websites.

Read about more information on common challenges that people are facing when using social media for community outreach after completing an analysis of your own work.

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Issues Faced with Social Media & Outreach

Recently, I’ve been reading several articles on the benefits and pitfalls of using social media as a form of community outreach. It seems to be an intuitive notion that social media should help with reaching patrons outside of the library, as it is very popular amongst people of all ages.  However, some literature that I’ve read touched on many issues that needed to be addressed before actually using social media in a professional way. Some of the concerns are highlighted below:

Do I even want to follow a library?

One of the biggest issues that librarians are faced with when it comes to using social media is that they feel as though their work is all for nothing (Chu & Du 2012; Connell 2009). There isn’t much of a response from the patrons, and this may cause motivation to decrease amongst librarians who are using social media. Dickson and Holley (2010) found that social media pages tended to have several new users “liking” their main page, but most users did not retain interest and did not continue to interact with the posts.

followlibrary

Image indicating the first step to following a page on Facebook. Taken from http://www.privateschoolreview.com/articles/201 [Creative Commons licensed].

Stop spamming me…

Another issue that librarians have encountered was that they would try to promote events or services and end up posting too many messages. Connell (2009) found that patrons tended to get frustrated with receiving too many messages or postings on a page that they were following. They would end up defriending or stop following the library’s page.

stop spam

“Stop Spam” Sign taken from http://pixabay.com/en/road-sign-attention-shield-stop-464655/ [Creative Commons licensed].

Where’s my privacy?

Sometimes, librarians might be seen as part of an academic institution and people do not want their personal information being linked to what they believe to be an authoritative figure. Then, there are instances where librarians try to “friend” students as their way of reaching out to them. This might give off the incorrect impression that librarians are trying to invade students’ privacy (Connell 2009).

privacy

Image showing privacy being taken away and erased as taken from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Facebook-_The_privacy_saga_continues_(4638981545).jpg [Wikimedia licensed].

Questions: What can be done about these issues? What are your thoughts on this topic? Have you ever seen anything implemented in order to help resolve these problems?

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Reaching Out Via Social Media

Community Outreach?

Is social media used in order to promote library services and resources? It might seem as though it would be a good place to start with advocating events and available subject guides since social media has taken up the time of several adolescents and adults. Scrolling down the newsfeed, retweeting other people’s tweets.. These are all things that have become more normative and embedded as a part of several people’s lives. But are there a lot of libraries who actually put it to use?

The Main/”Basic” Types:

As I was doing a quick overview of the impact of social media in academic libraries for a potential research paper, I came across some interesting readings. It seems to be that several forms of social media have been used in the past in order to help with engaging users. Libraries have used Facebook, MySpace and Twitter (or at least most of the studies looked at these three types) and also blogs, YouTube videos and Wikis. I found this particularly interesting and was curious as to what they were used for.

Vancouver Public Library

An example of the Vancouver Public Library Facebook page.


What is it used for?

Primarily, Facebook and things of the like are used for virtual reference services and promoting events that are going on in the library. It’s a simple way of interacting with patrons by answering questions and responding to any comments that they leave (Dickson & Holley 2010). However, it’s interesting that there are blogs, YouTube videos and Wikis used as well. Its purpose is to give additional detailed information to patrons as they can easily be linked from a Facebook page, for example, to the blog, video or Wiki (Vuvovich, Gordon, Mitchell & Ennis 2013). An example of a blog that I found in relation to UBC was the Digitizer’s Blog hosted by the UBC Library Digitization Center. A YouTube video that I came across was a tutorial created by UBC on research guides.

This is an example of a YouTube video that UBC Library provides.

This is an example of a YouTube video that UBC Library provides.

Questions: It seems like Facebook and Twitter are very popular amongst the most commonly used social media platforms. Have you seen any other social media platforms being used by libraries? How much have patrons interacted with it and has it been successful?

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Current & Past Use of Social Media

In the past, I’ve spent a lot of time using social media. I think that probably the form of social media that I’ve been on the most was Facebook and I did use Twitter for quite a while as well. Facebook was always the easiest way for me to reach my friends, especially the ones who had moved to the other side of the world. It made things a lot more personable in a sense, since I could tag them in posts and I could take a look at the pictures they were posting so I felt as though I was involved in their lives. Quite honestly, as of recently, I’ve become a bigger Facebook addict and find myself regularly checking the news feed for any interesting updates.

In terms of Twitter, I didn’t use it much on my end (in terms of tweeting anything myself) but I did follow a lot of people. Since I used to play a lot of video games, I was interested in watching pro players’ game play and to a certain extent, what they were doing with their time as a sort of mini ‘celebrity’. By staying informed through their tweets, I was able to keep track of the times they were playing. So, I didn’t use Twitter for the interpersonal interaction; rather, it was simply a means of keeping in touch with the on-line community with the games that I played.

I haven’t used HootSuite or Netvibes but would be interested in using it for class!

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