New ACRL Student Retention Discussion Group!

So a very exciting thing to me about my position is that I have an area of focus. I am an Instructional Services Librarian, but within that, I have designated areas to take the lead on. Student retention is a hot topic on campus (and seems to be a focus for many campuses and now academic libraries lately), and so I am working with a colleague on my team to get the library more involved in campus retention efforts. We are hoping to develop more collaborative relationships with non-disciplinary units on campus to aid in student success and retention. And this is not just for retaining the low-performing students, but also keeping the high-performing students from going elsewhere (for example, looking at the Honors College).

From my focus, I have established a new ACRL Student Retention Discussion Group with Jaime Hammond, who is a Reference and Outreach Librarian at Naugatuck Valley Community College. A number of other instruction and outreach librarians I have met are just starting to figure out how to approach this, and there seems to be consensus that library contributions to student retention efforts might be a tricky thing to measure and assess. So hopefully this discussion group will serve as a useful resource to those of us working in these areas.

Check out a recent blog post by Steven Bell, ACRL Vice-President / President-Elect, about retention and our new discussion group on ACRL Insider to learn more about "the student swirl" in graduation and also more about how ACRL Discussion Groups work.

Hope you will join us! The conversations will be ongoing via Connect, but we also have a set meeting time at ALA Annual in Anaheim, Saturday 6/23 from 4:00-5:30pm PST.

Here was the official announcement that went out:

Student retention is a hot topic in academia, but how do libraries fit into the discussion? Join the newest ACRL Discussion Group on ALA Connect at http://connect.ala.org/node/173037 to be part of the conversation! 

What: ACRL Student Retention Discussion Group 

Why: to discuss methods, best practices, and assessment for developing case-by-case and programmatic efforts related to student retention 

How: on ALA Connect (http://connect.ala.org/node/173037) or meet at ALA Annual

Please contact the conveners with any questions: 

Nicole Pagowsky, Instructional Services Librarian, University of Arizona Libraries pagowskyn@u.library.arizona.edu 

Jaime Hammond, Reference and Outreach Librarian, Naugatuck Valley Community College jhammond@nvcc.commnet.edu

SOPA on a ropa

I initially wrote this blog post on 1/21/12 during #alamw12 but didn't get a chance to post it. With the boycotting of Elsevier, I thought it would be a good time to pull this back out:

There has been a lot of talk about SOPA and PIPA leading up to the conference, and now during. One of my conference roommates, Lauren Bradley, pointed out this Tweet that is pretty hilarious:

http://twitter.com/#!/danwho/status/160800863298916353

Clearly, there is some inner turmoil in dealing with these vendors professionally, and having good relationships with them for our libraries and in general, yet if they are supporting something you (or I, I do) oppose such as SOPA, then what is our professional obligation versus personal ethics? This last Wednesday was a blackout day in solidarity of protest for SOPA. ALA made commentary via the website, and librarian projects such as Radical Reference and In the Library with the Lead Pipe went black for the day. I even blacked out Librarian Wardrobe.

Now that we’re physically at the conference, though (or, those of us who are here), what can we do to not have the cognitive dissonance of being so vocal on the internet battleground, but feeling politely silent at the conference? For starters, Andy Woodworth at Agnostic Maybe made an *amazing* color-coded guide to the exhibit hall. Amazing, really! So you know which vendors to complain to and/or avoid. I’d say this extends to the parties, too. I had RSVP’d to the Elsevier Dessert Reception but now decided I’m not going to go. Some of the ALA Think Tankers are going to go and protest while there. I guess it goes either way it’s kind of like if you don’t go and they see there are significantly fewer people there then maybe they’ll realize our collective voice is pretty strong. At the same time, if we don’t go to these things and actually verbalize our opposition, what will actually come of it? They could just think we aren’t showing up because of unrelated reasons. 

So what vendors have you spoken to, who support SOPA? What are you doing to fight against this crap? Do you think going to the party and protesting or not going by silent protest is more effective?

Reflections on Code Academy and Code Year so far

I've started Code Academy and as of last night, completed Week 1. This is a free program with weekly, online lessons to learn how to code (Javascript). Librarians have started using the hashtag, #codeyear to communicate with each other on their progress (and you can sign up for the lessons at the Code Year site). There has been a push in Libraryland for librarians to learn coding so we can be more self-sufficient in developing digital services and products, as well as just communicating better with IT professionals. There is even a newly-established ALA Connect group for librarians to discuss and help each other with the weekly lessons.

My impressions so far of Code Academy are mixed. Of course, no doubt, this is a great thing. It's free, it's accessible, and it's an intro-level program that is incredibly interactive. It can be hard to teach yourself these types of skills, so opening up the playing field is huge.

It's also nice that the lessons are given in increments, so you get Week 1 for a week, and then are sent Week 2 the next week. You can do more if there is more content up on the site, but it at least makes it more digestible. The leveling up and getting badges is another thing I like. It could be a little bit of gamification, but since these lessons have been made more social through Code Academy and also through the library community, it adds a little more fun to it. I've taken a particular interest as well as to how the Mozilla Open Badges project will relate to library instruction (or could relate), so experiencing a badge-generating program is useful to me and I'm seeing how it could potentially work with students. Although the Mozilla Open Badges project is for open access education, I still think it could be a beneficial concept to try in university and other formal academic settings as well.

Back to Code Academy, there are also some things that I am finding problematic. When considering good pedagogy, detailed feedback contributes to effective learning. Code Academy does not really give any feedback. You put your code in and run it, and then you are right or wrong. There is a little bit of info that pops up when you do enter wrong code, but it's not often enough to help you figure out where you went wrong. The hints are great at the beginning of the lessons, but get more obtuse and mysterious as you progress. I think it can be a good method that they are giving sort of a sandbox atmosphere to try out coding without being bogged down with theory and memorizing definitions (and where you don't have to be afraid of failure, which is a quality of a good game BTW) but at the same time, not really understanding the logic behind how some of the code works makes it very hard to understand why your answer does not work. I was glad to have other librarians who understand coding logic explain why my answer for Week 1, Lesson 8.2 was incorrect, so I was able to progress and finish the week.

Overall, I really do think Code Academy is great, and I'm going to continue on with the lessons. It can be difficult to weave detailed feedback in to an automatic, teach yourself-type program, but at the same time, it is essential for people who are just starting out. I think this article by Tech Crunch, "Will we need teachers or algorithms" (interesting read also for emerging trends in education) rings true here to a degree. Human or AI-driven though, if you can't figure out what you did wrong in a meaningful way, you can't learn from your mistakes and progress.

Research as conversation: Critical thinking and affect

http://creativecommons.org/weblog/page/10

For a quick lunchbreak post...

I was catching up on recent On the Media podcasts and a particular segment on publishing, scientific journals, and retractions really caught my eye... well, ear.

Brooke Gladstone was interviewing Ivan Oranksy about issues surrounding retractions and their effect on the scientific community and its publications ("Ivan Oransky is a doctor, the executive director of Reuters Health and founder, along with Adam Marcus, of Retraction Watch, a blog that scours scientific journals for retractions and investigates the stories behind them"). I thought this would be interesting for information literacy purposes, and what I especially thought was of particular significance was:

BROOKE GLADSTONE:
[LAUGHS] Having covered the medical research business so closely and of these retractions, what do you think about the state of scientific journals and the way that scientists communicate with each other before all of that stuff gets communicated to the rest of us?
IVAN ORANSKY:
When you look at a paper, there's a kind of finality to it. It’s, look, here it is. It's something you can almost frame and put on your wall or, in this case, on your CV.
If you were to say, look, here's what we found so far, and let us open up the data for you, let us show it to you, which would have probably prevented some really high profile cases from going as far as they did, if you treat that as a process and say this is how science works, nothing is final, we’re just getting there.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
So papers are artificial endings to a process that doesn’t end.
IVAN ORANSKY:
Absolutely. When you actually look at the process of how science works, there aren't that many eureka moments. And when you learn the most is when you’ve actually made a mistake or tried something that didn't work. And if we start using that narrative and don't have to end it

This really drives home the concept that research is a conversation and can teach students that publications, while they should have some authority, are not always 100% accurate nor final. Other researchers will respond and the conversation will continue. This helps students learn that they should always have a critical eye, and not only that, but it helps them better understand how to write a research paper themselves: that it should be their ideas responding to the research they read, and not just a summary or a personal opinion piece with nothing to substantiate that opinion. Explaining research as a conversation (and as non-linear) can also tie in to Kuhlthau's Information Search Process [PDF] (which I also wrote about here, examining if the ISP is still relevant today through participating in the Sheffield iSchool Journal Club). Students seeing that researchers make mistakes -- and even they have struggles and can get frustrated -- can make the research process seem more human and relatable.