WAGUL Research Day

I'm on the planning committee of the WAGUL Research Day and tomorrow's the big day. WAGUL is the Western Australian University Library Group and they are funding the full day of workshops, guest speakers, lunch and teas provided. We have Wilna Macmillan coming across from Monash University Library in Melbourne to speak about research data management. It's going to be a very comprehensive program covering many aspects of research and university libraries.  UWA is hosting the event which is really a mini-conference.

This is the program:

WAGUL Research Day UWA June 27th 2012

9.00    Introduction

9.05    The Research Process - panel of researchers followed by small group work exploring the research process

10.30    Morning tea

11.00    Scholarly Communication – Publication and Peer Review Panel of journal editors followed by presentation on copyright and open access

12.00    Research funding

1.00    Lunch

2.00    Data management – presentation from Monash University followed by summary of WA university library initiatives

3.00    Research measurement – what it is and current WA university library initiatives

4.00    Putting it into practice

4.20    Wrap up and evaluation

Those of us on the committee will be having celebration drinks after!

Now a parody of the Old Spice library ad

Here's a fantastic parody of the Old Spice library ad done by the Multimedia Production Unit for Harold B. Lee Library on YouTube

Do you want to be a scholar? Then study at the Harold B. Lee Library. Do your research here, study here, and be a scholar!

Moira Bent's visit to Curtin University

A special event was organised at Curtin University Library, Perth last week.

Moira Bent, National Teaching Fellowship recipient was visiting from the U.K. Moira is a Science liaison librarian from Newcastle University and one of only 5 U.K. librarians who have received a National Teaching Fellowships. Her blog posts about the fellowship are here.

Having the fellowship has given Moira the opportunity and time to undertake research and publish in a number of areas which she spoke about:

• Facilitating research roles and opportunities for librarians. This is one area that Australian librarians can (and are already) be involved with in providing research support with the ERA and imperative to publish. (The Newcastle University library has a useful “Writing for publication brochure”
• Librarians framing information literacy as a set of learning attitude or behaviours, rather than just as a set of skills.

At the tea discussion she talked about librarians getting out to conferences in non-library areas. I totally agree. We need to collaborate with academic and teaching and learning colleagues.

There's lots more to explore here. These are links to the articles and activities Moira has been involved with.

Perceptions of Information Literacy in the Transition to Higher Education. NTF Final Report.

Providing effective library services for research (book)

Information Literacy in a researcher's learning life: the Seven Ages of Research (article)

Integrating information literacy as a habit of learning (article)

SCONUL Report on Library Services for International Students (report)

Remembering Ascilite 2009

Auckland really turned on some fabulous weather for Ascilite 2009, which was held over December 6-9 in the bright new University of Auckland, Faculty of Business, Owen G. Glen Building. Over 400 attended and for over 100 delegates, including me, it was their first Ascilite. The themes were Same places, different spaces: Blended Space, Virtual Space, Social Space, Mobile Space, Work Space.

There were many mentions of libraries and how they are re-inventing themselves in the digital age and the convergences are obvious. For libraries too, it is getting harder to engage students, and we face the same challenges as faculty and tertiary learning and teaching. One keynote speaker, James Clay, is also the Manager of the Library at his institution, Gloucestershire College. A few other NZ librarians attended, but no others from Australia as far as I could gather.

The full Ascilite Programme, with all the papers, posters are available online.

Some keynotes are online in various places:

Gráinne Conole, Pushing the boundaries into the unknown, trajectories of user behaviour in new frontiers. These slides are at SlideShare

For James Clay, The future of learning, see Cloudworks . James ran the Twitter backchannel during his keynote (see above), and had his tweets all automated. Pretty neat and folks in the UK were joining in!

The following are links to some of the conference papers that I found especially interesting:

Don't dilly dally on the way - driving towards digital information literacy. Kelly, O etal

Smartphones give you wings: Pedagogical affordances of mobile Web 2.0. Cochrane, T & etal. This paper won an award.

Introducing Jass Easterman: My Second Life learning space. Sue Gregory and Tynan, B

Our paper was: Adding value to first year student learning with embedded library pod/vodcasts. Julia Gross and Eva Dobozy:

Others have already written some great blog posts about Ascilite09. In particular, check out:

James Clay's blog

Col's blogroll

Learnerbytes

Some of the Twitter action post Ascilite 2009 is at Twapperkeeper and the Twitter search hash tag is #ascilite09

The Ascilite09 Conference Hub has some presentations and loads of other good info for delegates.

Also Cloudworks which was new to me and I love it! Go here for the Cloudworks Cloudscape for Ascilite 2009

Take away messages for me were:

• Digital literacy and information literacy, what relationship do they have and, where do library/searching skills fit. (Digital information literacies is one of the in EDUCAUSE 2009 challenges too).
• The potential of Web 2.0 tools to enhance the learning process. With Web 2.0 we need to walk the walk as well as talk the talk: you need to be doing web2.0 or you don’t get it.
• Is the LMS just another repository of courseware, or can the full potential be realised of it being a fully interactive, dynamic learning space?
• Second Life is not dead! Several papers had good applications for Second Life: There was an excellent paper from UNE on SL (see above) with ICT teacher education students really engaging them. Also applications in the medical area, language teaching, cultural awareness teaching, and in the NZ TAFE equivalent area with preparation for job interview skills.
• Use of mobile devices to access learning materials is not yet high. (Our teacher education students are still mainly using desktops/laptops to access the LMS material). This will change over time as smart phones become common within the next year or so in Australia.
• Question everything, don’t jump on the band wagon without interrogating: Nichols challenged the notion of “the wisdom of the crowd” comparing it to Groupthink. We have all been guilty of that at some stage.

I had a terrific time, met some great people, and came back inspired. Special thanks to the organisers and the Kiwis for the hospitality. And someone (?) for the awesome weather ;)

Ascilite here we come

I’m heading off to the Ascilite 2009 conference in Auckland in a few days. The Ascilite (Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education) conference is held every year and this will be only the second time that the conference has been held in Aotearoa New Zealand.

The themes for Ascilite Same places, different spaces December 6-9, 2009 are: Blended Space, Virtual Space, Social Space, Mobile Space, Work Space.

Keynotes are:

Scott Diener, who has led the development of the University of Auckland's simulation island in Second Life; Grainne Conole, a Professor of e-Learning at the Open University, UK; James Clay ILT & Learning Resources Manager at Gloucestershire College.

The full programme and all the papers went online last week. I really like the idea of putting papers up ahead of time so delegates can get a better idea of what is on offer. Most library conferences seem to do this after the event.

There is the Ascilite09 Conference Hub , a fabulous way to facilitate communication and interaction, before during and after the conference. There's lot of great stuff here for delegates including a Twitter stream which is starting to take off.

An Ascilite SlideShare account has also been set up, but nothing has been uploaded, yet.

You can follow Ascilite on Twitter. And if you are tweeting about the conference the hash tag is #ascilte09

This will be my first Ascilite conference, so should be a blast. I’ll be presenting a paper:
Julia Gross and Eva Dobozy: Adding value to first year student learning with embedded library pod/vodcasts PDF

The other thing about Ascilite is they publish the Australasian Journal of Educational Technology

Organisational change, herding cats

At the Teaching and Learning Forum, at Curtin University last week, January 29-30, 2009, Barbara Holland gave the first keynote address. Her point about organisational change and the difficulties in getting staff involved in change, related quite well to our efforts with the
Web 2.0 training. We were trying to get staff to complete the Learning 2.0 program and thought 50% completion would be ideal. Barbara felt 20% buy in was quite good, so maybe we were aiming too high.

Holland also showed this hilarious video about organisational change: "Herding cats"....