E-book for the classroom, of the classroom and by the classroom

Today I had my mental model* of the e-book completely shook up.

I went to a brown bag presentation here on the UIUC campus called “Encounters with E-Texts“.  Catherine Prendergast from the Undergraduate Rhetoric Program talked about the adoption of an in-house developed e-textbook for the freshman composition classes.  Here’s the description that went out to campus listservs: “Cathy Prendergast discusses the process of adopting an e-text from preliminary research and implementation to student evaluation and feedback. Join us for a peek between the pages of teaching with e- textbooks.”

My notes below from the brown bag might not be entirely accurate, so please keep a look out for the video of the talk which will be up on the brown bag website eventually. [ Update: video is available here ]

The Undergraduate Rhetoric Program:

• 4,000 students per year
• 65 Teaching Assistants (graduate students)
• 27 Adjunct Instructors
• new paper textbooks every 3 years, roughly
• students usually have to pay about $130 for the paper textbooks

Prendergast devoted a year and collaborated with several campus departments to develop a UIUC-centric textbook that would work better for the Rhetoric Program, be accessible, be cheaper for the students, be more flexible and allow more creativity.

Now, when I first saw the brief description for this brown bag, I imagine the kind of e-books I’m used to reading on my iPhone:  basic epub files that I downloaded from Feedbooks.com or Project Gutenberg, mostly fiction that doesn’t have any fancy formatting, looks pretty much just like a paper book.

The e-textbook for the Rhetoric Program, however, is a different animal altogether.  The keywords here are *flexible* and *interactive*.  I don’t mean the old-fashioned “ooo, we have hyperlinks” interactive.  Prendergast and her colleagues went out to professors in other disciplines at UIUC and interviewed them about citation styles, research methods and other writing issues, then incorporated these interviews as videos into the textbook.

But the most surprising part to me was how customizable the instructors wanted this text to be.  The Rhetoric Department includes several different classes, each taught by several different instructors.  They wanted to be able to rearrange the chapters for each class (the students purchase a log-in to the book, which then identifies them to a specific section and instructor).  Plus, the instructors can leave different “notes” throughout the text, which look like small thumbtacks off to the margin with prompts like “Think about such-and-such questions while reading this section.” or “Be prepared to discuss your reaction to this part in class.” Even though all the classes are using the same e-textbook, each instructor can tailor the experience for their students from within the text itself – setting up links to other sections of the book, inserting exercises, incorporating media.  What they envision this being in the end is a textbook and an LMS (like Blackboard, Compass) all rolled into one.

At first, the Rhetoric Department went with a vendor to distribute this e-textbook, which turned out to be a miserable experience.  But – very wisely – the department kept the copyright (and receives the royalties!  which will be funding better equipment in classrooms to view these e-texts).  So now they are in collaboration with another unit on campus to get the e-textbook made the way they originally wanted.  They hope to have it ready for the fall semester of 2010.  I’m very excited to see how it turns out.  More than anything, I’m blown away by how different the e-textbook could be from the traditional paper textbook I grew up with.  Although there are some aspects of the e-textbooks that I don’t like (won’t go into those details here though), I do see this move toward fluid, non-linear textbooks as a step toward some amazing learning tools.  This has completely changed my thoughts on what the textbook might look like 10 years from now.

———————–

* For a great discussion of mental models and looking at our assumptions, see the TED Talks “Weird, or just different?” and “What we think we know”.

A couple more days in the life of a library student

Wednesday was relatively quiet.  Everything I needed to do, I could do in the Center and there were no meetings scheduled.  I started the morning with some troubleshooting on the Google Calendars we were setting up for the office.  I had already created a Google account for the office and set up the calendars under that account, then made it “shared” with my own Google account and everyone else in the office.  I filled in more of the events that we had already discussed and left many of them as “all day” with lots of question marks in the titles since we still have a lot of details to confirm.

I worked through lunch proofreading a grant proposal for more library training.  Usually, when I get something to proofread, I also pretty it up.  In this case, there were a lot of tables full of budget figures in the proposal so I added very small touches like lightly shading the header rows, giving a thicker border above the “Total” rows and things like that, making the tables a bit easier to read.

I spent the last couple hours converting more of our webpages to the content management system that the entire library is switching to.  The office I work in is just one small unit of many, many departments within the University Library, thus we get pulled into the big, overarching decisions with everyone else.

After I left the Center, I spent a couple hours working on LibGuides stuff.  I added my notes from Tuesday’s training session to my outline and searched for video tutorials that I could add to our training guides.

Thursday was full of experimentation, which is something I truly love… most of the time.  I synced Thunderbird with the office Google Calendars (via Lightning and Provider) and installed a couple extensions in order to get a customized print-out of the schedules we needed for the programs in the Fall.  It was quickly apparent that tweaking this work-around would require a little more time than I could give it right then, so I moved on to other projects.

One of our international librarians has spent the past year with us and she is leaving soon to go back to Pakistan.  I have learned *so* much from her and had such a wonderful time getting to know her.  She stopped by my desk and we had a good talk about file management practices… or the lack thereof.  We both bemoaned the messy, duplicated, frustrating nature of shared network drives.  Every place I’ve worked at for the past 10 years has had such a feature yet not a single one of them has used them well.  People still email drafts back and forth to each other, which are then saved on desktops or in personal folders of the network drive and pretty soon there are a dozen different versions of the same document.  We talked about the search limitations and clunky interface involved in trying to find the right file in the right folder.  Mused on the potential of tagging for file systems. But even information professionals don’t know what exactly to do with their information.  Alas.

In the afternoon I had a one-on-one LibGuide training session, which went really well.  We focussed on the “Books from the Catalog” box and created RSS feeds from UIUC’s New Titles page as well.  I realized I need to add a blurb to the handout about the difference between “copying” a box and “linking” a box.

Friday hit me with the revelation that the IFLA conference is only three weeks away!  We got the schedule for our GSLIS booth coverage at IFLA in Quebec — I’ll be one of the volunteers.  I’m also going as part of the Mortenson Center crew to present a poster there, which was one of the projects I worked on today.  The Center has a pretty clever approach to conference posters — they create slides in PowerPoint (like a lot of people do) BUT! they make several slides instead of one big slide.  They get these slides printed out as 11 x 17 laminated mini-posters, which lay in the bottom of a carry-on very conveniently and without the need to be rolled up.  At the conference, they arrange the mini-posters however they’ll fit with the poster board provided, sometimes they leave a couple slides off.  It’s all very flexible, easy to pack, easy to set up and take down.  So I’ve been formatting the slides for this year’s poster, adding images from our archive and getting it ready for our last proofing next week before it’s sent to the printers.

I also worked on an excel spreadsheet for our program participants; the spreadsheet will link to several mail merge documents in Word for things like name badges, contact lists, introductions for speakers and so on.  We’ve never done this before with this program.  In years past, the list of participants was simply repeated from one Word document to another, with various information added and left off and reformatted and so on.  In an effort to make our documents more centralized and efficient, we’re trying out the mail merge approach this year.  Hopefully it works smoothly.

The day ended with the beginning of another project – I started proofreading a publication that will be coming out this fall on international library leadership institutes, which sorta started here.  This publication is also the basis for our IFLA poster and – lucky me – it’s actually a very interesting read!

And now it’s Saturday.  I’m at home.  I’m going to have a couple chocolate chip cookies and work on home projects rather than work projects for a while.   🙂

A (couple) day(s) in the life of a library student

I am a late-comer to the “Day in the Life of a Librarian” theme running through Librariana lately, and I’m not yet officially a librarian but a library student.  Nevertheless,  there were a few reasons I wanted to chime in:

1. For all the folks who don’t know why we go to school for this.
2. For all the folks in library school who have really boring library student jobs — have hope!
3. For all the folks interested in “library stuff” but not necessarily the idea of working in a “library”… have hope!

I have two of the best jobs a library student like me could ever want.  For starters, I work for an office (the Mortenson Center) that handles international library programs — helping librarians from all over the world learn from each other, increase their professional skills, and pass the knowledge along to their colleagues at home.  I cannot begin to tell you how much I love this job.  I never sit at a “service desk” or catalog items or do anything traditionally library-like, yet I’m working with librarians every day from all walks of life.   My other job is working with the university library’s LibGuides team – lots of training, pushing technology to see how much it can do, and idea recycling (search and share).

So… this week in my life:

Monday started at a storage unit.  The Mortenson Center hosts visiting librarians from other countries each year for a couple months to several months.  The librarians usually stay in campus residences, which means they need some basic house things while they’re here.  We keep a few things for them in an un-air-conditioned, dusty, crowded storage unit.  And Monday was one of the hottest, most humid days of the year.  Three of us worked in there for a few hours, mostly throwing away old, worn-out things.  I had to leave before my poor co-workers so I could finish up a training outline for a meeting that afternoon.

The training is for LibGuides, and we want to focus on demonstrating how LibGuides allows for a more dynamic, interactive apporach to the tired old static subject guide.  To that end, I’ve been collecting good examples from other institutions.

The rest of the day was spent in a frenzy of preparation for several meetings on Tuesday.

Tuesday was a frenzy.  I started out early at the Center finishing some demonstration pieces for a presentation on Web 2.0 tools for the office.  Then I dashed off to give the LibGuides training.  I love training librarians!  They ask wonderful questions, they think about things from lots of amazing angles, and they’re friendly to boot.  I came away from the session with several notes for things to add to the next session.  Sometimes giving a training session like that reminds me of Eddie Izzard’s stand-up comedy — the way he pretends to write notes to himself about jokes that don’t work.  Each training session shows me what needs to be fine-tuned for the next one.  I really do write notes to myself.

I went straight from that to a scheduling meeting for this Fall’s international librarian program.  We’re going to have a BIG group this year and with travel costs going up, we’re trying to make every penny stretch.  Details, details, details!  Truly well-organized events are all about the details, as my bosses say.  Five of us sit around a table for two hours with calendars and lists spread out in front of us, like a 5,000 piece jigsaw puzzle.  We have to line up everything just right — the speakers, the room reservations, the catering, the transportation, the hand outs, the paperwork, the fees, and so on.  Fortunately, we have an incredible little family of staff in the office and everyone attacks their part of the puzzle with gusto.  Probably a big reason I love my job is the fact that I work with wonderful people.

Once the scheduling stuff was done, I gave a very brief overview of some online tools we could use for productivity in the office.  I focused on free tools that would allow for plenty of collaboration and – of course – Google products were the stars of the show.  I did a quick look at Google Reader’s “share” tools and showed how we could have a folder just for all the search alerts on our office name — from Blog Search, News, and the Web.  From there I brought up Google Docs and had an example of a presentation we’d been working on already uploaded.  I also went through Gmail’s filters and labels, but had to rush through it so I don’t know if that was actually helpful at all.  The presentation ended with Google Calendar, which is the most intriguing and controversial tool for our office.  On one hand, half the staff have to use Oracle because the rest of the library uses Oracle.  On the other hand, we will eventually want our visitors to be able to access events on the calendar and they will not have Oracle accounts, nor do the temporary staff in the office (such as a student like me).  Another benefit of Google Calendar is the “Discuss” function, which would allow us to leave comments on a particular event as the various elements are confirmed (room, meals, speaker).  This would give us a mini-history on the event that all of us could see and keep track of.

The conclustion was to start using Google Calendar for the program events.  The staff using Oracle will continue using Oracle for their own meetings and individual schedules, but will check on the Google Calendar to see how the program events are shaping up.

Wednesday and Thursday to follow.

To see some other interesting library people do their thing (in addition to the wiki) check out:

Jenica: http://rogersurbanek.wordpress.com/2008/07/21/a-day-in-the-life/

Lauren:  http://laurenpressley.com/library/?p=559

Karin: http://www.nirak.net/2008/07/14/day-in-the-live-post-1/

That sums it up

I was looking for a good dose of humor this morning, so I turned right away to Piled Higher and Deeper.  I found two comics that really express everything I could want to say about…

1. Life

and 2. Politics

Glad that’s over with

My first year of graduate school is over!!  Gaah!  As you can see from the activity on this blog, I haven’t really had any time to myself for a few weeks now.  So as is my style, a few bullets:

– I’ve sort of reconciled myself with the whole idea of my dad going to Iraq.  We’ve talked quite a bit more on the phone in the last couple weeks than we usually do in two months.  We’ve reached the deal-with-this-through-humor stage, and I’m teasing him about getting Prince Harry’s autograph while he’s over there.  I think what helped the most was looking ahead to his homecoming in August and we’re already planning on a nice little family reunion, so we all have something to look forward to.  Something as simple as a goal or a plan can be wonderful therapy.

– I haven’t read blogs or RSS feeds in almost a month, so my apologies to all my friends who posted earth-shattering news on their blogs and haven’t heard from me.  This weekend = catch up.

– With classes over, I’ve done two things this week that I never thought I would do …

– First, I have wholeheartedly listened to and enjoyed some country music.  My lovely girlfriend checked out the video “Shut up and sing” about the Dixie Chicks, which was a great film, and afterward we listened to “Not ready to make nice” in various YouTube editions from the video to the Grammys.  It was such a perfect song for the whole situation with my dad — and so fitting in light of where the song came from.  Mind you, I’m not angry at my dad at all. I’m still worried sick about him.  As I said in the last post, I’m dumbfounded that our government has let all this happen.  But anyways…

– Second, I signed up on Facebook.  Two reasons went into this – for starters, I’m taking a class in the Fall on Social Networks, specfically the online kind (as opposed to the theory) so I figured I should know something more than just blogs and Flickr.  Secondly, I’ve met some great people in a class this term who use Facebook a lot, so much so that it comes up in conversation regularly.  Some of these people are graduating and it appears that Facebook will be the best way of keeping in touch.  Why was I resisting?  Well, I used to work with a couple people who were giving MySpace a try, and it seemed like the whole idea was a great big meat-market-singles-bar type thing.  And the bar was primarily inhabited by teenagers, to boot.  So I wasn’t interested.  Facebook, at least, seems a little better organized and, I don’t know, grown-up maybe.  We’ll see.

– It’s summer!  Such glorious long sunlight hours!  I’m trying to enjoy it as much as I can now, because I know I’ll be miserable in about a month when the heavy, heat-laden, humid air returns and suffocates us all.  Hopefully this year won’t be so bad since we’re not coming straight from Oregon.

– I have lots of thoughts about library-related matters, but that will have to be a separate post.  Although this term was crazy busy, it was also extremely rich in information and ideas. More to come. For now, I leave you with a cheeky fun music video that I lifted from Unexpected Librarian:

Eyes bigger than my calendar

One of the biggest lessons I’m learning in grad school is time management … or, better put, how the absence of time management can really mess up every aspect of your life.  Smiles.

Maybe every student has a semester that they didn’t do quite right … I think this is mine.  I tried to pack in too many classes and too many jobs and here I am, barely half way through the semester, feeling like I’ve already run the marathon only to find this is just the turn-around point.

But just like a marathon (from what marathon-runners have told me), there’s a strange kind of high in there somewhere, too.  Less than two months ago I was in Prague at a library conference.  Today a whole gaggle of us are going to East St. Louis to survey community centers in low-income neighborhoods for computer labs.  How cool is that?   A few days ago I went to a lecture called “Visions of Time” given by a Princeton chronologist who, as if in irony, used faded black and white photocopied transparencies on a projector for his presentation.  I realized that was the first projector I’ve seen in use for, oh, six years at least.  It was like watching someone type on a typewriter.  It put things in perspective for me during this crazy term of back-to-back scheduling.  As fun as it’s been, next year I’m only taking 12 credits a term, tops.

Hopefully you’ll see some photos here soon of this weekend’s trip.  Updates to come.

meta-me

I’ve mentioned my interests in metafiction and metadata. Today I get to spend eight hours learning about a metalanguage. I think I’m in love. I’ve been waiting/looking for a link between my information science pursuits and my linguistic passions; what do I find but the idea of languages describing languages. Yes, I realize that sounds redundant, but it’s not what you might think. A metalanguage is the very thing that brings out meaning from any text – imagine a novel, even a short 200-pager, without any descriptors like “chapter x” or “introduction” – imagine all 200 pages running together without any indication of where the text starts and the forwards end. Better yet, imagine reading a play without any indication of scene breaks, acts, or any information but the dialogue itself. Strip away all the stage directions and you would have an example of content without structure, or – a language without its metalanguage. (Note: I’m the first to admit that I’m new to this stuff, so if anyone has a better example or a correction, please fire away in the comments.)

What’s it all about?

I’ve run across two very different approaches/perspectives/interpretations of the Web 2.0 trends in the last few weeks.  First, there was the famous text animation video from Kansas State U, which has already been blogged to death, receiving its fair share of praise and criticism.

Then I somehow did a time warp to the past – say, six months ago – while researching Web 2.0’s effect on information users and their privacy (or lack thereof).   On a new-to-me search engine, I ran across Dani B.’s blog, specifically her post from July 2006.

Now, both of these examples are fairly optimistic about Web 2.0, but it seems to me that the applications of that optimism are worlds apart.  I’d have to admit that I would toss my chips in with Dani on those rare moments when I leave cynicism aside.  I really appreciated her specific, all-too-real connection.  What good is all this information if we don’t use it to communicate with each other?   Is Dani’s example an isolated incident?  Sure.  But it speaks to a potential that the video above only skirts around.  Dani’s post is also the first time I’ve heard Web 2.0 associated with something visceral, corporeal, and possibly fatal.

Conference Last Day

We have our last sessions today and I’ll be flying home tomorrow.  It’s been so wonderful to see all the different topics addressed by all these different countries, and yet we have such strong similarities in how we all look at libraries.  I mentioned in an earlier post that the librarian stereotype was the subject of a few different presentations – and they were the same image … spinster in glasses with a bun.  Other popular topics here:  social software or social websites, competitive intelligence, and library curriculum.  That last one has been especially interesting because Europe is in the midst of looking to standardize university degrees across the EU, which is proving to be quite a challenge.  Should it be 1, 2, or 3 years?  What are the core issues?  Do students have to have a library background before the master’s? 

And then there’s the fact that the whole conference, posters, proceedings and all, was entirely in English.  I understand the need for a lingua franca, but at the same time I feel rather strongly about providing as much information as multilingually as possible.  Especially here… we must have at least a dozen languages respresented at this conference, yet we’re all muddling through in English.  Maybe I just see it as an opportunity for Americans to continue being lazy in their language skills.  Those who know me already know I think that tendency will bite us in the but one day.   But anyway… I’m going in search of a lovely Czech baguette before heading back into conference sessions.  :-p

Conference Day Two

Things are chaos all around, missing speakers, missing room (?), and people waiting.  And yet it all moves on in spite of itself.  It’s just a flurry of activity overall with excited, nervous people running to and fro.  Of course, I want to see three different speakers scheduled all at the same time.

And given the blessed wireless here on campus I just uploaded *real* photos to Flickr so check out the slideshow.  🙂