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Insights + ideas + opportunities for new librarians in Canada and beyond… |
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Faking the Grade, produced by the CBC’s Doc Zone, is “an examination of what has been described as an epidemic of cheating in North American colleges, universities and high schools.” It’s an interesting and telling snapshot of the pressures students face and a resulting prevalence of cheating and plagiarism. Unfortunately, the documentary gives no real attention to ways instructors strive to combat these problems… which is something librarians can help with. Take a look at:
Happy 2013! *dusts off blog* Some days are dark, drab and draining, especially when sitting at a desk all day long in the dead of winter in Edmonton, Alberta. Then something comes along to spark some interest and excitement. I’ve had many of these moments of late and plan to share them here in the coming weeks and months in an effort to resuscitate my little piece of the Internet. For now, feast your eyes upon projects created in the… As described on the site, “LABRARY is an experimental Pop-Up space put together by Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) students from the the Library Test Kitchen, with the help of the Harvard Library and the Library Lab.” I stumbled upon the Labrary today after a co-worker pointed out a recent Twitter account devoted to documenting students sleeping in our midst. Practical solution idea from the Library Test Kitchen seminar class: A Neo-Carrel Sleeping Chair! Click here to subscribe to Academica’s Top 10 and receive regular emails profiling current topics in higher education in Canada from Ken Steele. It’s totally worth it! Ken spoke at Red Deer College a few weeks and it was a great opportunity to hear about many “out of the box” initiatives being undertaken by North American universities and colleges to benefit student recruitment, retention and learning overall. Take a look at his presentation slides on “The Future-Ready Campus” here from a recent leadership conference at UWO. One of the most read posts on this blog is from February 2010 entitled Adventures in Poster Making. At the time, I had just made a poster for the OLA Super Conference. I had started out with no idea what I was doing so I felt it was important to share what I had learned. And experience pays off; my second time around creating a poster was easy peasy (mostly).  Click to view Step 1: Last fall, I sent a proposal to present on a Human Library event I had planned during the lightning strike session at WILU and it was accepted. (A lightning strike is a conference session where presenters deliver short, successive presentations. At WILU, presenters had 15 minutes each, and posters were encouraged to complement the talks.) Step 2: Co-librarian Sona and I held the Human Learning Library event. (To learn more, visit the Human Learning Library website.) Step 3: We created the poster using Microsoft Publisher. We kept the file in a shared Dropbox folder so we could both easily contribute to it, and made sure it was set up to be the same size as the corrugated display board the conference was providing (48″ x 36″). Step 4: Once content was added, we deliberated over colour and layout until compromise was reached. Step 5: We proofread it, saved it as a PDF file, and sent it off to the Document Centre at Red Deer College. Step 6: 2 days and $50 later we had a poster that we rolled up and took to the conference.
 Click on the image to buy a button from Cafe Press. Ottawa is choke-full of librarians right now, with the Canadian Library Association Conference ending tomorrow and the ABC Copyright Conference happening Monday and Tuesday. It’s a good time for the profession to be congregating in the political/national capital given recent cuts to Library and Archives Canada (LAC), along with Access Copyright and Bill C-11 making the news as oppositions to both arise (more than usual). There’s meaningful dialogue and strategizing taking place, I am sure, along with a bit of ruckus (read: Librarians Silenced at CLA Conference). If you’re not there getting in on the action and feeling left out, however, here are some other ways to ensure some political engagement with the profession for the greater good:
* ETA: 25 000 signatures were reached the evening of June 3, 2012. Something totally worth hitting the “Like” button on Facebook is the ALA JobLIST page. It is full of valuable insights and information about hunting for the perfect job. Recent links posted to the page include:
 Sona and I presenting on the Human Learning Library. Image credit: wilu2012's photostream on Flickr A small Canadian conference focused on library instruction has proven its worth once again. A few highlights from WILU 2012…
As for my own conference session on teaching students about open access and developing “open literacy” skills, the slides are available here. The other day I was browsing through Library Journal’s “Movers and Shakers 2012” (Vol. 137 No. 5). Among the featured information professionals was Emerging Technologies Librarian Stephen X. Flynn who has created a site for job seekers: It’s an open repository of samples of cover letters for a variety of professions to help inspire those among us who, like myself, get frustrated trying to craft the perfect sentences to grab the attention of hiring committees. Great idea!  Scan this code with your phone or visit http://rdc.libguides.com/goingmobile Saturday my co-worker Anne Marie Watson and I are presenting at the Alberta Library Conference in Jasper, Alberta. The topic of our discussion is affordable ways to integrate mobile technologies into library services, including text reference, QR codes, and mobile-friendly websites and apps. In other words, it will be about ways to go where library users are these days… on their cell phones, anywhere, anytime… Our presentation slides and more information about technologies and resources are available on a Going Mobile LibGuide I created to complement the session. ETA: Session attendees had lots of interest in scanning QR codes at the conclusion of our session:  Photo by amjwatson via Twitter I noticed an interesting post about citation pop up on the RDC Library Facebook wall today. Apparently, MLA has created a standard format for citing tweets. Learn more here. APA has this covered as well (explained here). Of broader interest, “social scholarship” is a really interesting concept that embraces the act of scholars using Web 2.0 to both conduct research and share their research findings with others. For more information about this, take a look at Social Scholarship on the Rise, a blog post by Laura Cohen written back in 2007. This post had a big impact on me while I was in library school learning about both information literacy and social software; I even wrote a paper on it that I have saved… somewhere. In any case, back then I thought, “How great would it be to hold a session on this topic for graduate students and faculty researchers?” And I still feel that way. (Makes mental note, and public blog declaration, to make this happen.) |
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