Teaching
Reference
Demographics
I’ve tried to leave this as a comment on Steven Bell’s post These Predictions Throw Caution To The Wind, but for some reason have been continually thwarted (my cocomment account knows I left them, but the site doesn’t seem to…). So here goes, cause this is driving me batty!
I suppose I am hyper aware because I have an ex who used to design these things, but I’m still shocked every time I encounter someone (or at least a professional) who doesn’t know about affiliate sites.
What Steven ripped apart was a blog post from an elearners.com affiliate (http://www.elearners.com/help/affiliates.asp) site that hasn’t even bothered to take down it’s “Hello World” post. This is some random person trying to make a quick buck, not a professional.
Both this site (http://associatedegree.org) and Learn-gasm – who has the top 100 blogs post going around currently (www.bachelorsdegreeonline.com) are sites designed solely to earn revenue through click-throughs.
When you use the drop downs to select types of degrees you are taken to elearners.com, which results in a “sale” for the directing site.
All of the links to request more information on any of the schools on either of those sites are affiliate links
e.g – https://search.collegedegrees.com/forms/university-of-phoenix/publisher/bachelorsdegreeonline
The “bachelorsdegreeonline” at the end is a tracking mechanism to allow collegedegrees.com to reward sites that send them visitors. Just like libraries can send people to Amazon and get a kickback. The difference is libraries are trying be helpful – these sites are not.
While all the schools linked to are legitimate schools, both are misleading sites since they only link to schools that offer an affiliate kickback. They also only link to forms to enter your contact information at third party sites, not to the actual school websites.
While the content of the top 100 blogs and 25 predictions lists is completely non-objectionable, the fact that librarians are taking these sites seriously is.
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ETA Section below
* apologies to Steven who did in fact know it was an affiliate site and was mocking how stupid the content is on these types of sites rather than mocking what he believed were someone’s sincere predictions (which is how I had originally read his post). Also thanks to Steven whose comment on the affiliate site people’s email tactics reminded me to add the comment below about SEO.
* a trackback to GeekDad because I’m not interested enough to sign up on their site to comment. I’m just going to give up if Wired.com is duped too. (edit – give up getting so frustrated that is)
* A comment on those Top X style posts (Top 100 School Librarian Blogs, Top Blogs for educators, etc. etc.) and why you shouldn’t link to them:
What the author is doing is trying to increase his traffic and SEO. He likely does some minimal investigation to determine what sites would have the biggest impact – so in that sense, the lists are probably somewhat representational of influential sites – like I said, the content isn’t the objectional part. He creates the page with the links to the 100 top whatever, then emails all of them to let them know they’re on the list. Every one of them that posts that they’ve made a top 100 list and links back to him increases his site’s page ranking. The more important your site is, the more it helps him, both in search engine algorithm terms (being linked to by someplace important counts for more than being linked to from less popular sites) and because it brings him more incoming traffic. Which also increases his site’s page ranking (and the chance of someone clicking through in a way that gets him paid).
To see this effect in action – search Google for “octopus.” Today the site asking you to help save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus is #3 for me. Then do a “link:http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/” search and you can see that there are tons of educational sites linking to it – they’re linking to it as an example of a bad website to use when teaching kids how to evaluate websites, but a direct result of that action is to increase the site’s page ranking.
As a complete aside, because I love this so much, the owners of that site (who also have a page devoted to the tin foil deflector beanie) noticed their increase in traffic and wrote this response.
Why is that bad?
At the very least you are helping bad information be more likely to appear near the top of search results. In the case of the tree octopus, it probably doesn’t really matter much, it’s a funny site and hopefully most people will realize that.
But, this particular little batch of sites that is currently targeting higher education – they are ones that are ostensibly trying to help people find colleges, choose degrees, etc., when in fact they are only linking to forms to enter your contact information for a small subset of online only colleges that offer affiliate linking programs.
Some of the more malicious sites are also using those forms to harvest contact information, plant tracking cookies, install malware, etc. I can’t decide from their privacy policy whether I think that this particular batch of sites are also harvesting the contact information and selling that off, but it certainly is something sites like this do.
And then there’s the part that got me all riled up in the first place: These affiliate sites are exactly the kind of site we should be using in our examples to students for evaluating information – on the surface they seem related to education, some have .org addresses, but when we start looking at them critically they fail every test easily – no about page (or at least nothing informative on it), unauthored posts, little to no original content. One of the main components of being a librarian is teaching people to think critically about information, so when we fail to do so ourselves I find it incredibly frustrating.
Another ETA – an example of some critical thinking.
A word on nuance:
A representative from eLearners.com contacted me about this post, legitimately taking umbrage at being lumped in to this group and let me know some of the helpful items they offer. I was not clear enough initially that my comments on affiliate sites were directed at the sites linking to eLearners, not eLearners itself. While eLearners is certainly a for-profit entity that does take advantage of the affiliate model, they also offer a wide variety of content – including scholarships – and are very clear that they are focusing on online colleges only (as opposed to associatedegree.org for example). Unlike the two sites mentioned above that are currently linkbaiting librarians, eLearners.com is clearly not just some guy trying to make a quick buck through minimal effort.
In later than usual today using up some banked hours from last week, but still do the tea/email opening routine.
Fill out my lunch preferences for the 2 day teaching retreat we’re planning.
Finished out the final version of my project proposal and its accompanying email and hit send. It’s a request to follow Char’s model and do a student technology and library use environmental scan. I’m crazy excited about the potential and terrified that it will die in committee.
With the big scary deadlines out of the way I finish compiling my Friday Link Round Up and then take to sorting through the piles on my desk (including professional journals that do the rounds among all our librarians then wind up on the shelf, processed order slips, gift books, and random notes) and consolidating notes into my master to do list. I have a lot of non-pressing emails built up in my inbox at this point too, so I expect those 3 things will fill up the rest of my day.
In, tea, email.
This morning I have a meeting with the rest of the Staff Development Team to finalize our FY10 goals, so I print out our draft and pull up a few other planning documents.
The deadline is coming up for our summer database trials so I check our wiki pages on those to make sure I’ve left comments on all of them. I had missed one, so I checked it out and added my comments.
Peek at my reader, which I’ve been neglecting in the current rush of activity. I’m glad I do because Char Booth is also doing this meme and has shared her assessment forms. Thanks Char! Also find that libraryman posted the pics he took at the OCLC Blog Salon. Thanks for telling me I had the 1 upside down guys!
Look into an old title that another librarian sent me and give her permission to weed it.
Meet with the Staff Development Team. Knock out the goal sheet, timeline, and assigning responsible parties in only an hour fifteen.
Check email. Reply with edits to questions for the Senior Library Assistant second round questions.
Do a bunch of my tasks from the meeting right away, including: creating a new page for the Head Librarian Orientation documents in the wiki, sending an email summarizing the desired scripts to be written, and emailing a bunch of other teams about goals that we think are their responsibility.
Lunch!
Go over the proposal document and draft the email that will accompany it.
Off to my reference desk shift.
Continue work on the proposal as well as the interview questions and join in on more back and forth about suggesting an Emerging Leaders project through ACRL.
Student questions at the desk today include:
Back in my office I finalize the proposal and accompanying email to go out tomorrow.
Get in, make tea, open email. One is about the ACRL OnPoint chat today. Forward that to the work librarian list and post it on my professional development blog.
I talk to my colleague about approaching our Head Librarians with our project proposal and then approach my Head Librarian with our project proposal. Sorry for the extra vaguery, but we haven’t talked about it with everyone we need to, so it’s not public yet.
Then I’m off to the desk, which I intermittently screw back together from yesterday’s move. An hour in to my desk shift I log in to my Meebo shift.
Also back to email. One is from Student Life about Welcomepalooza so I talk with the librarians on my campus about how to be involved. Also more planning of our 2 day teaching retreat. The phone guys come to activate a more convenient outlet for the new desk location.
I helped a student with a really interesting assignment on using iPhone technology to help people with mental disabilities. He had to rush to class so I got his email to follow up since we were having a really hard time finding anything that he didn’t already have.
My Head Librarian came and talked to me a bit about our hiring committee for a new Senior Library Assistant.
My colleague from another campus showed up and we headed over to our Instructional Design Specialist to talk about our grant proposal.
Lunch!
Send out info to the hiring committee about the second round of interviews. Get a really nice thank you email from the patron I was helping earlier.
Read a great FB note about Emerging Leaders from someone who found me through the day in the life meme and saw a gaming reference in my Twitter stream. I’m really a fan of FB for connecting with fellow librarians.
I work on wording an email as diplomatically as possible to an ALA committee I’m on about the type of project we might want to propose as an Emerging Leaders project. Not sure I succeeded on the diplomacy part, EL is still a sensative subject for me even years later.
Back to the desk.
Help a student with some citation issues, but since his teacher has his own format it’s more helping with understanding editing symbols.
Review potential interview questions for the second round interviews for our senior library assistant.
Show a student how to use call numbers to find a book, then later how to get a list of all the dvds at a particular campus (ours are very annoyingly nonbrowseable). Show another how to get to the registration site. Help explain the conflict notice another is getting and make sure she knows where the advisers are located. Try to explain to someone why encyclopedia.com isn’t awesome, but isn’t terrible. Find him the hardcopy of the book that his article came out of so he can cite that instead. Then show him how to use our finicky copier.
Send a copy of our planning report to the Instructional Design Specialist we’ll be working with on our project. He seemed excited about it which was very encouraging.
Get a compliment on our new arrangement of the reference desk. Discuss when to cite with a student.
I look over my notes from yesterdays all teams meeting and take care of various actionable items. I cringe at having used the term actionable items. Some of these include: making sure our new reference facilitator is wrapped in on the discussion we’ve been having about ordering the new APA manual, adding the fact that you just have to watch out for it to the Psychology fund’s scope notes, sending out a reminder email to campuses who haven’t replied about how many copies of the manual they want, adding all the upcoming emergency preparedness activities to the staff development fiscal year 2010 goal list, changing the terminology from “chair” to “leader,” numbering the goals/outcomes, adding a goal about the updated tech competencies and LibGuides training, changing “ongoing tasks” to “routine responsibilities,” email our web team with suggestions for the about page. Aren’t you just dying to be a librarian now?
Had a student ask me how to pronounce a word. Differentiate. Did, but also showed him m-w.com and the little speaker function. He really liked how it broke it into syllables and mentioned having his brother get the iPhone app.
Night librarian comes and I’m homeward bound.
Get in, make tea, start up computer. Email first. My computer wants to install updates which will annoyingly slow everything way down. I think we’re due for new computers next semester and I’m greatly looking forward to that. I fill out my monthly mileage report.
My office mate and I go take apart the reference desk and move the 3 sections in preparation for the copier guy coming to move the copier. We discover the reference desk computer has a really weird plug – a three prong with the round one and the two flat ones, but one flat one is horizontal and one is vertical (NEMA 5-20P). The hunt begins for an adapter/extension. We also call the campus manager’s office to get the area vacuumed. It was pretty gross under there.
I help my office mate set up for a class she’s about to teach. I pull out the Smart Board and open up our folding partitions, she gets the media cart and laptops.
Much of the rest of the day is spent trying to figure out what to do about the power adapter. I drive off to Home Depot and Lowes to no avail and we put in a request with IT. I also find out that the room I had scheduled for today’s meeting is now under construction and alert everyone to the new location.
We figure out a work around for the weird plug (which is basically not using it and using s regular surge protector instead) and get the reference desk mostly reassembled before I have to head out to the Team Kick Off Meeting. Apparently there’s a big accident and a major roadway is blocked off. I alert the other librarians and head out. Crazy day!!!
I had been getting all these emails about the Library Day in the Life Wiki being updated. I’m glad I finally clicked over in time to see we’re doing a second annual.
This morning was straight to the reference desk, on to Meebo for my IM shift, and checking email. I’m organizing a Team Kick Off meeting for all the team leaders, so I sent out a reminder about that, answered some questions about time and location, and checked in with one of our admins about providing snacks. I’m the co-chair of the Staff Development Team, hence my being in charge of organizing. Other teams include: Teaching, Access Services, Technology, Collection Development, etc. Our yearly goals are due soon and this meeting will be to discuss what all the different teams are planning, how we overlap and affect each other, where we can work together, etc.
I also checked in with a coworker on a project we’re trying to get off the ground, talked about the fall reference schedule for my campus with the other librarians here (we’re a 7 campus system and there are 3 librarians at my campus), figured out coverage for our Head Librarian’s vacation time next week, added some key dates from the academic calendar to my work calendar and synced that with my gcal.
The reference desk is pretty quiet this time of year. I helped someone with printing, loaned out a pen and some white out and smiled at people when they came up for tissues. I also helped someone find some knitting and crochet books. 
We’re also planning a 2 day teaching retreat. I spent some time looking at cheesy motivational phrases trying to pick out the least cheesy ones for the thank you gift everyone will get.
Lunch!
After lunch I worked on my team’s goals form for tomorrow’s meeting. We met Friday with our dean and went over a lot, so this takes a while. I also sent out more emails than you’d think would be necessary to determine who is responsible for ordering, what is involved in ordering, and how many copies we want of the new APA manual.
Then I was back on the desk for the rest of the afternoon. Monday and Wednesday are desk heavy days, Tuesday and Thursday are office heavy days.
I continued working on the goals form, incorporating my meeting notes, and working with a colleague via IM on a proposal. I also talked with our tech guy about the best way to arrange surge protectors to be able to leave out laptops without causing a tripping hazard, measured the area to order long enough cords, pulled a book to send to another campus, and investigated a possibly unattended child (who turned out to be attended after all).
I sent the draft goals to my co-chair for her comments and put the meeting notes into my team’s project in the wiki since there’s a lot on our to do list that doesn’t necessarily go on the goal sheet.
The night librarian came and I headed home.
New Resource
Food for thought
Just for fun
15th Annual New Reference Research Forum
RUSA RSS
The Research Forum is one of the most popular programs at ALA Annual, where attendees can learn about notable research projects in reference service areas such as user behavior, electronic services, and reference effectiveness. This year’s Forum features three presentations: Building a Model of Excellent Reference Service Based on WOREP (Wisconsin-Ohio Reference Evaluation Program) Data, the recipient of RUSA’s 15th Anniversary Reference Research Grant; “Teachable Instants” in Instant Message Reference: Taking the Opportunity or Taking a Pass?; and Measuring the Effectiveness of Online Tutorials: A Pragmatic Approach.
Speakers: Julie Gedeon, Kent State University; Carolyn Radcliff, Kent State University; Megan Oakleaf, School of Information Studies, Syracuse University; Amy VanScoy, North Carolina State University Libraries; Cindy Craig, Wichita State University Libraries; Curt Friehs, Kansas Public Library
What WOREP Results Say About Reference Service, Patron Success and Satisfaction
WOREP = Wisconsin-Ohio Reference Evaluation Program
This is a survey in which patron and staff both fill out survey after the transaction. They had a huge amount of data. There were over 100 participating libraries and years and years of participation (1984-2008).
They gave an overview of what methods they used. This part had a lot of statistical jargon that I didn’t know.
They had mostly positive results. Patrons felt they had personal attention and librarians were professional. Their final thoughts: play to your strengths – librarians ranked highly in personal attention and professionalism. Also, continue to do the things that are highly correlated to success: offering enough help, enough time, giving clear explanations, and “librarian appears knowledgeable.” They offered that they didn’t know what that last one meant, maybe everyone should wear glasses. I imagine it has more to do with confidence and skill.
Measuring the Effectiveness of Online Tutorials: A Pragmatic Approach
They started with some assumptions and refutations:
Some conclusions:
The Research:
The second part of the research was with lower level biology students who came in to the library for instruction with their class – a captive audience.
They looked at some principles in terms of html vs. streaming media tutorials. The principles were modality effect, dual coding theory, and constructivism. For those first two html does poorly since it is visual only while media has video and audio. For the third principle, html looks good because navigation allows for choice while video is linear with (minimal interactivity).
They made 2 tutorials – video and html. The information was the same, only the format was different. After watching the tutorial, students got a survey with an opportunity for feedback and a quiz. They found that confidence increased more with students who watched the video, but more importantly people who watched the video scored way better on the quiz questions. They hope to expand on it more in an upcoming article. They feel there need to be more studies on the effectiveness of different types of tutorials and that libraries should be creating more animation plus narration brief tutorials.
“Teachable Instants”: Taking the Opportunity or Taking a Pass
Megan Oakleaf and Amy Van Scoy
This was a particularly fantastic presentation with wonderful ideas and examples of things we should all be trying.
They took an academic and a teaching and learning focus. They looked at a few models of educational theory in particular.
Then they tried to create catchier titles that would be easier to apply:
Their methodology included coding 1 year of virtual reference transcripts. They looked at how often the above strategies were used.
62% had at least 1 of the strategies. Show don’t tell had the highest at 43%, but only 15% if they omit page pushes. The lowest was 2% – catch them being good. Also very low at 3% was “chunk it up.” They felt chunk it up was particularly important – showing that this is a process with steps.
Another interesting discovery was that they found a lot of students asking “how?” Students really wanted to be taught.
They had a handout with examples of chat transcripts. The last page was an example of a librarian who took a pass. It was clearly a librarian who wanted to be helpful, but missed an opportunity for instruction.
Conclusions:
meganoakleaf.info/teachwithtech.pdf – article
Their handouts will be on the research and statistics website.
There was a strong question and answer section at the end of the presentations. One audience member asked how long people took with the video vs. the html tutorials. He suggested that might have impact. He also suggested they use a task based exam at end rather than a knowledge quiz. I agree with this questioner. The html group might have breezed over it and not bothered, as opposed to when a student chooses to go to the tutorial because they want that information. The captive audience made it an artificial study IMO, since the students don’t have a self directed reason to be going through the tutorial.
An audience member suggested that librarians establish a rapport with students by talking their language.
An audience member said that his library has a student advisory board. They wanted all video tutorials. And just for one little skill. Ex: Find the x date issue of x magazine.
There was a suggestion that 3-5 minutes is appropriate for video length.
There was also a discussion about when to suggest the student come in to the library. You don’t know why they’re on chat. One person had whooping cough. They might be a distance education student, etc.
tumbld… shared from my reader…
