OCLS Conference - Day 2

Today's sessions...

Embedded Librarians: MLS Students as Apprentice Librarians in Online Courses -- Focus on relationship marketing and connecting customers and content. The lead researcher on this project has been at a few different universities and has experimented with this concept in different ways. This presentation was on MLS students being embedded into nursing courses. The MLS students are from Emporia and the Nursing program is at Central MO. A practicing librarian created tutorials for the "apprentice librarians" to use to become more comfortable with MeSH and the medical databases. They posted to a wiki to get feedback/input from all involved -- said it was successful. Was interesting to listen to the MLS student and her experience -- so much to learn and experience: creating a relationship with a nursing instructor at a different college, being embedded into a class they have little or no subject knowledge of, and being able to answer the student's questions. Quite an undertaking for a 1-credit optional class, but a great experience! Interestingly, last night at the Keynote Speaker I was seated next to the student who was presenting today. She seemed quite enthralled with the whole conference experience and she did a wonderful job presenting today!

Embedding General Education Competencies into an Online Information Literacy Course -- Debated about going to this one since it was another "embedded" topic, but the focus was much different. This is really about a stand-alone course taught by the librarians that incorporate 5 out of 6 gen ed competencies (Critical Thinking, Information Literacy, Critical Reading, Writing, Quantitative Reasoning). As they worked their way through their presentation, I recognized much of it was what I had been doing with the high schools I worked with last year on my CTL grant. They had a few different components since they were specifically targeting the gen eds vs. my focus on information literacy, but it was nice to see their model. Primary difference in why they originally created this -- overseas students! I guess that would definitely qualify as a distance student!

Beyond the Library's Walls: Using Library 2.0 Tools to Reach Out to All Users -- I just had to attend this session after spending all the time recently on the Web 2.0/Library 2.0 topics in 23 Things on a Stick! Got me thinking about how we could use wikis internally: keep track of our High School library contacts? tutors to connect on topics they are currently tutoring? Book reviews? Policies and procedures -- we are due to update the Collection Development Policy this May. They talked about blogging, too, which I know we've discussed -- could we use this tool as a way to have our New Titles list out there and then RSS feed that into our Webpage?? How about using NING in working with local high schools? Could this be a forum we create to work with them? Reminded me how much I need to get in and try Audacity. They talked about using del.icio.us with a class to create helpful resources and then adding it as a widget into a d2l course -- assuming there was access as an embedded librarian :)

Using Online Tutorials to Reduce Uncertainty In Information Seeking Behavior -- this was the only "research based" one (rather than more practical ideas) that I attended today. I liked her thought process about if there is high uncertainty, a more structured form of searching is best, whereas if there is low uncertainty, serendipitous searching is probably adequate. She didn't demonstrate any of the tutorials they are using, but did talk about things to think about when creating tutorials such as student skill level, training for librarians to create tutorials, student modem connection, download times, and tutorial design. Putting some tutorials into the Teacher Resources area of D2L would be a good idea..."Library Elements" is what they termed their information, I believe.

Visual Tutorials for Point of Need Instruction in Online Courses -- I generated a list of ideas to create tutorials for using Captivate, Camtasia, etc. -- in areas I hadn't considered before. As the RightNow administrator, I'm thinking there are some basic ones we could also load into AskJay! How cool to have a quick 1-2 minute tutorial about naming conventions and saving files to a drive and how to put it into the dropbox! As we move to EZProxy, a quick tutorial on that might also be a good idea. I'm wondering if we'd be able to embed some tutorials into our Course QuickStart guides as we get those created? Specifically thinking about nursing and how to get to CINAHL, etc.

Until tomorrow...