Can it be? One year, one week since my last post here on Logical Operator.
The long hiatus has two sources. First, it was a busy year - it was the Year of Tenure, during which my focus was on evaluation, preparation of my tenure portfolio, and deadline-meeting. Such activities occupied quite a bit of my time; time I could not spend updating the Logical Operator.
In the end, I did receive tenure. I will be a fixture ’round here for quite a while, I hope.
However, more influential in my lack of effort has been the fact that I’ve felt like I had little to say. The controlled chaos of the past year left me feeling greatly out of the loop in the field (not only had I not had time to write for my blog; I had no time to read other blogs or really much of anything), and the mechanics of the tenure process left me without focus.
So, for the…two? three? readers I may have, this isn’t an attempt to make excuses, but more of an explanation: I did not have much to say, so I chose not to say anything. Better be thought a fool, and all that.
Logical Operator Uncategorized
A little while back, I said I might speak further about LibGuides. Now seemed like a good time; I’ve dug into it more deeply and I’ve got a better sense of what it can do.
Overall, I’m pleased. Really pleased, in fact - it’s made creating online tools for the students I teach whys and wherefores of library research dramatically easier and faster, and the fact that LibGuides handles layout and design means that I no longer have to write* CSS to make my web things pretty.
I mentioned in my last entry that the sessions I taught using LibGuides page like this one have been far more successful and engaging to students. The pattern has held - my most recent victory was for a class in research analysis and design for psychology students, and the guide is seeing a lot of hits. My Industrial Psych guide is far and away the leader, with hundreds of hits since I taught the session, and the professor there asked if he could make it a core component of the course from now until eternity (or, I suppose, until something better comes along). It’s working out nicely. Read more…
Logical Operator Uncategorized BI, libguides, library instruction, news
One of my responsibilities - a responsibility shared by many of my fellow librarians - is to teach library stuff to science students. Library orientation, BI, information literacy instruction, whatever you call it, it means teaching students the 5 W’s of the Library:
- Who is this guy?
- What is that squirrel doing out there? It looks merry.
- When will this end? Oh god, this is never going to end.
- Where is the coffee shop again?
- Why is he still talking?
In all seriousness, the prospect of teaching a library instruction teaching fills me with the nervousness, because although I have done it many times, I remain acutely aware of two things:
- Sometimes, you can’t make databases interesting, and
- I have no real training in teaching, and I have bored students nearly to death in the past.
However, I have to say that this week has proven to be an excellent week for library instruction. I’ve done two sessions, which is actually a little ahead of the pace for the sciences (I advertise every semester, and the response rate is almost always great in the Fall, and weaker in the Spring; I generally do one session per week at most), and both have gone very well.* Read more…
Logical Operator Uncategorized BI, engaging students, information literacy, libguides, library instruction
In the second session I attended at Science Online ‘09, Moshe Pritsker and Apryl Bailey discussed the use of video, images, and sound in the production of peer-reviewed (and non-peer-reviewed) literature in the sciences. The essential concept is the age-old exhortation to writers everywhere: show, don’t tell*. In other words, instead of a beautifully assembled collection of jargon (or shall we say, “terms of the art”) and complex written instructions, why not make a movie? Two services — JoVE (the Journal of Visualized Experiments) and Scivee.tv — approach the idea from different angles.
Read more…
Logical Operator Science Online '09 experiments, JoVE, scio09, Scivee, video
Installment One in a barrage of posts on Science Online ‘09–
Okay, “barrage” is probably the wrong word. I don’t plan a Time-on-Target setup here. Let’s call it a series of posts, instead.
The premise of the session was to explore the use of science fiction in science blogs (hence the title), and it was coordinated by Stephanie Zvan. Stephanie kicked off the discussion (this is an unconference, remember!) by simply throwing out to the audience the question “so…what do you think of it? Using science fiction in your blog?”
The discussion freewheeled almost immediately, delving into such varied issue as how the change of one element of science - essentially creating an innovation via author fiat - is the key to exploring how a character develops, to the fact that much scifi that doesn’t actually have any structure, plot, or characterization, to the question of why it’s always gotta be space dolphins (or space cetaceans)*.
Read more…
Logical Operator Science Online '09 science fiction, scifi, scio09