One of my favorite things is when teachers come to me and say, “This is what we’re studying, how can we integrate technology?” They know they want to use technology, they’re just not sure how to do it. It’s my job to help them come up with ideas, train them on any tech they need to learn, and help them teach the unit.

The iPod Touch syncs with Zimbra, our email/calendaring program. Users can schedule an appointment with the iTouch Calendar application and have it show up immediately on their desktop computers. Those users who prefer to use Micrsoft Outlook on their desktops can even sync Outlook, Google Calendars, and their iPod Touch.

Of course, along with the business uses comes the fun stuff, too: music, games, Facebook, Amazon, and many others. And it’s the fun stuff that I think has the greatest benefit for our library. When you give someone an iPod you give them a functional business device, a fashionable techno-gadget, and a cutting-edge piece of technology. People get excited to use these devices, they learn how to install software and sync their accounts, and their appreciation and comfort with technology grows. Personally, I think it’s one of the best technology investments we’ve made.

We quickly settled on a variation of the Flat Stanley Project, in which Kyle the Crocodile, the school’s mascot, would blog about his travels. It helped immensely that I travel quite a bit, so I volunteered to take Kyle with me whenever I leave town. We really wanted students (and teachers) to do more than simply read the blog — we wanted to create a participatory experience and have students comment on posts, ask questions, and even do some research about the places Kyle visits. We also planned to have teachers and students take Kyle on trips as well — as long as they agree to keep it educational, take pictures while they’re gone, and write about their experiences. 

What’s worked: 

• The students, parents, and teachers are avid readers of the blog. If we go more than a few days without a post, the students let us know! Everyone has enjoyed getting to see and learn about new places. 
• We quickly realized that we needed more than one crocodile, so Kyle now has three siblings, all with distinct personalities: Katie, a pink and purple ruffled crocodile (who is the daredevil of the bunch); Carlyle, a shaggy, soft super-sized croc who is a big fan of long naps; and Kirby, the youngest sibling. 
• Having identical twin crocodiles when possible — or at least easily replaceable animals. We’re a bit concerned about the longevity of a few in particular. 
• Everyone wants to take a crocodile on vacation. We’ve been able to accommodate most requests so far, but we need to formalize the process a bit. 
• Keeping it educational. So far, so good — but it’s taken effort. 
• Teaching the kids proper blogging ettiquette. Since we’re working with elementary school students, we need to require them to only use their first names when posting comments, and they’re not allowed to use any sort of email address to communicate with Kyle. 
• Having classes as a whole post comments, do research together. At school, Matt has encouraged teachers to use the blog as a jumping off point to do some real research. I make a point to ask lots of questions in my posts, and our other guest writers have followed suit. The ideal scenario is when students take the initiative to answer some of these questions. 

What still needs work (or didn’t work perfectly the first time around): 

• Getting the students to write — and not just read. We do get lots of great comments and questions from students, but not as many as we’d like. We’re trying to gently steer students away from their top three: “Did you have fun?” “What did you eat?” and “What was the weather like?”
• As a librarian, I feel the need to try to improve students’ research skills whenever possible. We’ve had some success, but I am confident we can do better. 
• Using Blogger as a hosting platform was not ideal. It was a great way to get the blog up and running in a few minutes, but there were lots of problems with the implementation, particularly within an elementary school setting. On the admin side, Blogger is clunky. It’s cumbersome to upload photos, which quickly grew tiresome. It doesn’t support tiered commenting. However, the biggest issue for using Blogger within an educational context — particularly for elementary school — is the “Next Blog” button that is automatically placed at the top of each blog. Clicking that button takes the user to a random blog that may not be appropriate for young students. (It is possible to disable that bar by editing a bit of CSS code.) Our solution has been to migrate to a Wordpress site that we host ourselves. All around, it is a vast improvement. 

The other item to note (although it is not at all a surprise), is that maintaining the blog is time consuming. The best workflow we’ve devised so far is to have guest “hosts” write their posts and provide us with either a PowerPoint file or a Word file that somehow indicates what sentences go with each photo. PowerPoint works well — one slide per photo, explanatory text underneath — but it takes a bit of time for us to copy, paste, and upload into WordPress. It’s definitely worth the time, but we’re hoping to streamline the process. 

Right now, Kirby is in Iraq being hosted by a U.S. soldier stationed there. Before that, he went to the dentist to learn about dental hygeine. That posting, plus his first post from Iraq, should be online soon. Katie is going to Costa Rica later this month, Carlyle just returned from New York City, and Kyle is headed to Boston soon. This experience is giving students an opportunity to learn about different places, cities, countries — places where most of them will never see first hand. And we’re doing it in a way that’s relatable for the students. 

On a personal level, I’ve enjoyed traveling with Kyle. It has forced me to reflect on my experiences traveling, and consider my experiences from an entirely new perspective. We have lots of big plans for the crocodiles for the upcoming year, and I can’t wait to learn about Kirby’s trip to Iraq. I may be more excited than the students! 

The blog: http://www.kylecrocodile.com

But then I have to explain that it’s not at all like Google. As most everyone knows, Google sends out “robots” or “spiders” to “crawl” the web, looking at every web page, document, and image they can find, then reporting back to headquarters where a super-sophisticated program indexes all the words on all the pages and figures out how to rank each page for quality and relevance.

Federated search systems sold by library vendors don’t work at all that way. They don’t do anything ahead of time. Instead, they wait for someone to type in a search, then they translate the search into the simplest terms they can and send the search out to a variety of different, discrete sources such as commercial databases, open access repositories, and library catalogs. Sometimes the results stream back in and sometimes they just trickle. Some sources don’t send back any results at all. It’s no wonder then that ranking the results in terms of relevance isn’t something these products even attempt.

So my question is this: Why can’t the database vendors, from whom we license so much content, allow us to crawl their data and index it ourselves? If we could index the data ahead of time, analyze it, and rank it for relevance, we would have something much more useful to show to library users. I’d love to be able to say, when explaining our federated search product, “It’s just like Google, but you always get high quality results vouched for by major publishing companies.”

Virus Warning

Even for responsible computer users, it’s impossible to keep your computer completely free of spyware and other malicious files. To ring in the new year, we’ve compiled our list of favorite free tools to clean your computers running Windows. 

Hands down, the best antivirus and antispyware software around is AVG. If you’re running Windows, you should be using AVG. It checks downloads, software installs, URLs, and email, among other things. In addition to the free version, AVG has licensed version which includes several additional preventative and cleaning tools. Free AVG: http://free.avg.com/

CCleaner is a “system optimization” tool, designed to quickly and efficiently remove spyware and Internet browsing history files from your machine. It works fast — it usually only takes a few seconds to run.  (Windows only. Freeware.) http://www.ccleaner.com/

SUPERAntiSpyware also has free and licensed versions of its software available for download. This tool does what it says: it hunts down and removes spyware installed on your machine. Full scans require a bit of a patience, but it is worth the wait. http://www.superantispyware.com/

New to my arsenal of clean-up tools is IObit.com’s Advanced SystemCare. The software is designed to clean and maintain your computer by checking for spyware, examining and fixing registry files, and removing junk files. System scans are very fast — for one machine with a nearly-full 60 GB hard drive, it took only a few minutes to scan and repair everything. http://www.iobit.com/

Of course, downloading and installing the software isn’t enough — the hard part is taking time on a regular basis to run these programs. 

What other tools do you recommend? How often do you run these tools? How often do you back up your data?

Clicker

I started using personal response systems (a.k.a., “clickers,” as they are often affectionately known) in my library instruction sessions during the fall of 2006. The instructional technology group at Bucknell University where I currently work hosted a guest speaker, Richard Rogers (Prof. of Economics, University of Massachussetts at Amherst), who talked about how he was using clickers for several purposes, but mainly to keep students actively engaged during lectures. After listening to him, I was anxious to experiment with clickers in my next instructional session. 

It took me a few sessions of experimenting with the clickers to find a rhythm that worked for me — the right amount of time to spend on each question, the amount of discussion in proportion to the percent of students who got the question right/wrong, what percentage of a class should be spent with the clickers vs. some other activity. There is no pat answer to any of those questions. If you are considering using clickers, expect a period of adjustment.

I quickly became a convert. With the clickers, I could easily see general patterns of knowledge in a particular class. How many students understand how to read citations? Do students know how to track down a full-text article after finding a citation? Do they know how to order materials through inter-library loan? 

More importantly, students — and their professor — are able to see how little they know. Often, faculty feel like they don’t need to spend their own class time working on students’ research skills because they (mistakenly) believe students are learning those skills elsewhere. (Yet too often, we hear from faculty that students are using the “wrong” sources or “bad” sources for research.) Having the faculty member see that only 10% of students in a class understand how to find an article is eye opening — and it led to a surge in the number of sessions scheduled the following semester. (Another question that proved to be quite useful was asking students how many research workshops they had had before. For classes with primary enrollment of juniors and seniors, faculty were shocked to see that their library instruction session was often the first for most students.) 

How are others using clickers in the classroom? What has been your greatest success with the clickers?

Carleton College Library

Recently I was speaking to a colleague at another institution about some tension that existed between the library and the information technology department. My colleague was frustrated about some information that she had been asked to provide. “They wanted to know some more details about who OCLC was before they opened up ports in the firewall. They’d never even heard of OCLC. Can you believe that?”

Well…yes. While OCLC is a vital player in the library world, they are aren’t a name our IT colleagues have necessarily needed to know. Especially if an institution doesn’t have a history of library/IT collaboration, it’s not surprising at all that someone whose job is network security would ask questions about opening up firewall ports for OCLC. To that person it’s just a request from an unknown external vendor.

Those of us in the library world need to understand that we have a lot of knowledge that might not be shared by others outside the profession. We also need to remember that people who ask questions aren’t trying to make things difficult, they are just doing their jobs. We each have unique areas of expertise, we use our own jargon, we come with certain professional assumptions. Let’s try to see each other’s points of view.

In this online forum, we hope to raise issues that affect libraries and our user communities, ask difficult questions, and provide a forum for open and honest discussion. We hope to challenge, inspire, and learn. Much of our discussions will focus on the area where libraries, information, people, and technology intersect:

• educational and instructional technology
• digital repositories, digital curation and preservation
• open access, new forms of publishing
• information literacy, new media literacy, 21st century literacy
• changes in pedagogy; active learning, problem-based learning, digital game-based learning
• partnering and collaborating with colleagues outside of the library — faculty, technologists, researchers, publishers, archivists, museum curators
• digital audio, video, text, images; streaming video
• open source applications and systems
• metadata
• next generation library systems
• knowledge management services
• new and emerging tools, systems, applications — work-related tools, and things we just think are interesting…

These are the issues we think about, the questions we ask ourselves. We’re looking forward to sharing our thoughts and engaging the broader library, technology, and academic communities.

We look forward to hearing from you!