Searching for "online education"

academic dishonesty plagiarism in the digital age

Ercegovac, Z., & Richardson, J. J. (2004). Academic Dishonesty, Plagiarism Included, in the Digital Age: A Literature Review. College & Research Libraries65(4), 301-318.

http://login.libproxy.stcloudstate.edu/login?qurl=http%3a%2f%2fsearch.ebscohost.com%2flogin.aspx%3fdirect%3dtrue%26db%3dllf%26AN%3d502931540%26site%3dehost-live%26scope%3dsite

what constitutes plagiarism, how prevalent plagiarism is in our schools, colleges, and society, what is done to prevent and reduce plagiarism, the attitudes of faculty toward academic dishonesty in general, and individual differences as predictors of academic dishonesty

the interdisciplinary nature of the topic and the ethical challenges of accessing and using information technology, especially in the age of the Internet. Writings have been reported in the literatures of education, psychology, and library and information studies, each looking at academic dishonesty from different perspectives. The literature has been aimed at instructors and scholars in education and developmental psychology, as well as college librarians and school media specialists.

Although the literature appears to be scattered across many fields, standard dictionaries and encyclopedias agree on the meaning of plagiarism.

According to Webster’s, plagiarism is equated with kidnapping and defined as “the unauthorized use of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one’s own.”(FN10) The Oxford English Dictionary defines plagiarism as the “wrongful appropriation or purloining, and publication as one’s own, of the ideas, or the expression of the ideas (literary, artistic, musical, mechanical, etc.).”(

plagiarism is an elusive concept and has been treated differently in different contexts.

different types of plagiarism: direct plagiarism; truncation (where strings are deleted in the beginning or ending); excision (strings are deleted from the middle of sentences); insertions; inversions; substitutions; change of tense, person, number, or voice; undocumented factual information; inappropriate use of quotation marks; or paraphrasing.

defined plagiarism as a deliberate use of “someone else’s language, ideas, or other original (not common-knowledge) material without acknowledging its source.”(FN30) This definition is extended to printed and digital materials, manuscripts, and other works. Plagiarism is interrelated to intellectual property, copyright, and authorship, and is discussed from the perspective of multiculturalism.(FN31)

Jeffrey Klausman made three distinctions among direct plagiarism, paraphrase plagiarism, and patchwork plagiarism

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Cosgrove, J., Norelli, B., & Putnam, E. (2005). Setting the Record Straight: How Online Database Providers Are Handling Plagiarism and Fabrication Issues. College & Research Libraries66(2), 136-148.

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None of the database providers used links for corrections. Although it is true that the structure of a particular database (LexisNexis, for instance) may make static links more difficult to create than appending corrections, it is a shame that the most elemental characteristic of online resources–the ability to link–is so underutilized within the databases themselves.

Finding reliable materials using online databases is difficult enough for students, especially undergraduates, without having to navigate easily fixed pitfalls. The articles in this study are those most obviously in need of a correction or a link to a correction–articles identified by the publications themselves as being flawed by error, plagiarism, or fabrication. Academic librarians instruct students to carefully evaluate the literature in their campuses’ database resources. Unfortunately, it is not practical to expect undergraduate students to routinely search at the level necessary to uncover corrections and retractions nor do librarians commonly have the time to teach those skills.

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more on academic dishonesty, plagiarism in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=academic+dishonesty

digital resource sets available through MnPALS Plus

digital resource sets available through MnPALS Plus

Two sets of open access, free digital resources that may be of interest to students and faculty have been added to SCSU’s online catalog (MnPALS Plus).

Open Textbook Library (a project of the University of Minnesota)
(appears in Collection drop-down menu as “Univ of Mn Open Textbook Library”)
“Open textbooks are textbooks that have been funded, published, and licensed to be freely used, adapted, and distributed. These books have been reviewed by faculty from a variety of colleges and universities to assess their quality. These books can be downloaded for no cost, or printed at low cost. All textbooks are either used at multiple higher education institutions; or affiliated with an institution, scholarly society, or professional organization.”
For more information, see https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/

Ebooks Minnesota
“Ebooks Minnesota is an online ebook collection for all Minnesotans. The collection covers a wide variety of subjects for readers of all ages, and features content from our state’s independent publishers, including some of our best literature and nonfiction.”
For more information, see https://mndigital.org/projects/ebooks-minnesota

These resources are included in any search done in the online catalog. To view or search one of these collections specifically, go the the Advanced Search in MnPALS Plus and select the desired collection from the Collection dropdown. Users can add search terms, or just click “Find” without entering any search terms to see the entire collection.

 

Google in the classroom

How Has Google Affected The Way Students Learn?

con?:with the advent of personal assistants like Siri and Google Now that aim to serve up information before you even know you need it, you don’t even need to type the questions.

pro: Whenever new technology emerges — including newspapers and television — discussions about how it will threaten our brainpower always crops up, Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker wrote in a 2010 op-ed in The New York Times. Instead of making us stupid, he wrote, the Internet and technology “are the only things that will keep us smart.”

Pro and conDaphne Bavelier, a professor at the University of Geneva, wrote in 2011 that we may have lost the ability for oral memorization valued by the Greeks when writing was invented, but we gained additional skills of reading and text analysis.

conDaphne Bavelier, a professor at the University of Geneva, wrote in 2011 that we may have lost the ability for oral memorization valued by the Greeks when writing was invented, but we gained additional skills of reading and text analysis.

con: A 2008 study commissioned by the British Library found that young people go through information online very quickly without evaluating it for accuracy.

pro or con?: A 2011 study in the journal Science showed that when people know they have future access to information, they tend to have a better memory of how and where to find the information — instead of recalling the information itself.

pro: The bright side lies in a 2009 study conducted by Gary Small, the director of University of California Los Angeles’ Longevity Center, that explored brain activity when older adults used search engines. He found that among older people who have experience using the Internet, their brains are two times more active than those who don’t when conducting Internet searches.

the Internet holds great potential for education — but curriculum must change accordingly. Since content is so readily available, teachers should not merely dole out information and instead focus on cultivating critical thinking

make questions “Google-proof.”

“Design it so that Google is crucial to creating a response rather than finding one,” he writes in his company’s blog. “If students can Google answers — stumble on (what) you want them to remember in a few clicks — there’s a problem with the instructional design.”

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more on use of laptop and phones in the classroom in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2017/04/03/use-of-laptops-in-the-classroom/

digital access to nonprint collections

Digital Access to Non-Print Collections

University libraries have held collections of books and printed material throughout their existence and continue to be perceived as repositories for physical collections.  Other non-print specialized collections of interest have been held in various departments on campus such as Anthropology, Art, and Biology due to the unique needs of the collections and their usage.  With the advent of electronic media, it becomes possible to store these non-print collections in a central place, such as the Libray.

The skills needed to curate artifacts from an archeological excavation, biological specimens from various life forms, and sculpture work are very different, making it difficult for smaller university libraries to properly hold, curate, and make available such collections.  In addition, faculty in the various departments tend to want those collections near their coursework and research, so it can be readily available to students and researchers. With the expansion of online learning, the need for such availability becomes increasingly pronounced.

With the advent of 3 dimensional (3D) scanners, it has become possible for a smaller library to hold digital representations of these collections in an archive that can be curated from the various departments by experts in the discipline.  The Library can then make the digital representations available to other researchers, students, and the public through kiosks in the Library or via the Internet.  Current methods to scan and store an artifact in 3Dstill require expertise not often found in a Library.

We propose to use existing technology to build an easy-to-use system to scan smaller artifacts in 3D.  The project will include purchase and installation of a workstation in the Library where the artifact collection can be accessed using a large touch-screen monitor, and a portable, easy-to-use 3D scanning station.  Curators of collections from various departments on the St. Cloud State University campus can check out the scanning station, connect to power and Internet where the collection is located, and scan their collection into the libraries digital archives, making the collection easily available to students, other researchers and the public.

The project would include assembly of two workstations previously mentioned and potentially develop the robotic scanner.  Software would be produced to automate the workflow from the scanner to archiving the digital representation and then make the collection available on the Internet.

This project would be a collaboration between the St. Cloud State University Library (https://www.stcloudstate.edu/library/  and  Visualization Laboratory (https://www.facebook.com/SCSUVizLab/). The project would use the expertise and services of the St. Cloud State Visualization Laboratory.  Dr. Plamen Miltenoff, a faculty with the Library will coordinate the Library initiatives related to the use of the 3D scanner. Mark Gill, Visualization Engineer, and Dr. Mark Petzold, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering will lead a group of students in developing the software to automate the scanning, storage, and retrieval of the 3D models.  The Visualization Lab has already had success in 3D scanning objects for other departments and in creating interactive displays allowing retrieval of various digital content, including 3D scanned objects such animal skulls and video. A collaboration between the Library, VizLab and the Center for Teaching and Learning (, https://www.stcloudstate.edu/teaching/) will enable campus faculty to overcome technical and financial obstacles. It will promote the VizLab across campus, while sharing its technical resources with the Library and making those resources widely available across campus. Such work across silos will expose the necessity (if any) of standardization and will help faculty embrace stronger collaborative practices as well as spur the process of reproduction of best practices across disciplines.

Budget:

Hardware Cost
42” Touch Screen Monitor $2200
Monitor Mount $400
2 Computer Workstations $5000
Installation $500
Cart for Mobile 3D Scanner $1000
3D Scanner (either purchase or develop in-house) $2000
Total $11100

 

The budget covers two computer workstations.  One will be installed in the library as a way to access the digital catalog, and will include a 42 inch touch screen monitor mounted to a wall or stand.  This installation will provide students a way to interact with the models in a more natural way.  The second workstation would be mounted on a mobile cart and connected to the 3D scanner.  This would allow collection curators from different parts of campus to check out the scanner and scan their collections.  The ability to bring the scanner to the collection would increase the likelihood  the collections to be scanned into the library collection.

The 3D scanner would either be purchased off-the shelf or designed by a student team from the Engineering Department.  A solution will be sought to use and minimize the amount of training the operator would need.  If the scanner is developed in-house, a simple optical scanner such as an XBox Kinect device and a turntable or robotic arm will be used.  Support for the XBox Kinect is built into Microsoft Visual Studio, thus creating the interface efficient and costeffective.

Timeline

Task Start Time End Time
Catalog Software October 2017 December 2017
Scanner Interface October 2017 March 2018
Web Interface January 2018 May 2018
System Installation March 2018 May 2018

Personnel

Plamen Miltenoff, Ph.D., MLIS

pmiltenoff@stcloudstate.edu

320-308-3072

Dr. Miltenoff is part of a workgroup within the academic library, which works with faculty, students and staff on the application of new technologies in education. Dr. Miltenoff’s most recent research with Mark Gill is on the impact of Video 360 on students during library orientation: http://web.stcloudstate.edu/pmiltenoff/bi/

 

Mark Petzold, Ph.D.
mcpetzold@stcloudstate.edu
320-308-4182
Dr. Petzold is an Associate Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering.  His current projects involve visualization of meteorological data in a virtual reality environment and research into student retention issues.  He is co-PI on a $5 million NSF S-STEM grant which gives scholarships to low income students and investigates issues around student transitions to college.

Mark Gill

mcgill@stcloudstate.edu

320-308-5605

Mr. Gill is a Visualization Engineer for the College of Science and Engineering and runs the Visualization Laboratory.  He has worked for several major universities as well as Stennis Space Center and Mechdyne, Inc.  He holds a Masters of Science in Software Engineering.

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University of Nevada, Reno and Pennsylvania State University 41 campus libraries to include collaborative spaces where faculty and students gather to transform virtual ideas into reality.

Maker Commons in the Modern Library: Six Reasons 3D Printers Should be in Your School’s Library

Maker Commons in the Modern Library 6 REASONS 3D PRINTERS SHOULD BE IN YOUR LIBRARY

1. Librarians Know How to Share 2. Librarians Work Well with IT People 3. Librarians Serve Everybody 4. Librarians Can Fill Learning Gaps 5. Librarians like Student Workers 6. Librarians are Cross-Discipline

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more on grants in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=grant

code4lib 2018

Code2LIB February 2018

http://2018.code4lib.org/

2018 Preconference Voting

10. The Virtualized Library: A Librarian’s Introduction to Docker and Virtual Machines
This session will introduce two major types of virtualization, virtual machines using tools like VirtualBox and Vagrant, and containers using Docker. The relative strengths and drawbacks of the two approaches will be discussed along with plenty of hands-on time. Though geared towards integrating these tools into a development workflow, the workshop should be useful for anyone interested in creating stable and reproducible computing environments, and examples will focus on library-specific tools like Archivematica and EZPaarse. With virtualization taking a lot of the pain out of installing and distributing software, alleviating many cross-platform issues, and becoming increasingly common in library and industry practices, now is a great time to get your feet wet.

(One three-hour session)

11. Digital Empathy: Creating Safe Spaces Online
User research is often focused on measures of the usability of online spaces. We look at search traffic, run card sorting and usability testing activities, and track how users navigate our spaces. Those results inform design decisions through the lens of information architecture. This is important, but doesn’t encompass everything a user needs in a space.

This workshop will focus on the other component of user experience design and user research: how to create spaces where users feel safe. Users bring their anxieties and stressors with them to our online spaces, but informed design choices can help to ameliorate that stress. This will ultimately lead to a more positive interaction between your institution and your users.

The presenters will discuss the theory behind empathetic design, delve deeply into using ethnographic research methods – including an opportunity for attendees to practice those ethnographic skills with student participants – and finish with the practical application of these results to ongoing and future projects.

(One three-hour session)

14. ARIA Basics: Making Your Web Content Sing Accessibility

https://dequeuniversity.com/assets/html/jquery-summit/html5/slides/landmarks.html
Are you a web developer or create web content? Do you add dynamic elements to your pages? If so, you should be concerned with making those dynamic elements accessible and usable to as many as possible. One of the most powerful tools currently available for making web pages accessible is ARIA, the Accessible Rich Internet Applications specification. This workshop will teach you the basics for leveraging the full power of ARIA to make great accessible web pages. Through several hands-on exercises, participants will come to understand the purpose and power of ARIA and how to apply it for a variety of different dynamic web elements. Topics will include semantic HTML, ARIA landmarks and roles, expanding/collapsing content, and modal dialog. Participants will also be taught some basic use of the screen reader NVDA for use in accessibility testing. Finally, the lessons will also emphasize learning how to keep on learning as HTML, JavaScript, and ARIA continue to evolve and expand.

Participants will need a basic background in HTML, CSS, and some JavaScript.

(One three-hour session)

18. Learning and Teaching Tech
Tech workshops pose two unique problems: finding skilled instructors for that content, and instructing that content well. Library hosted workshops are often a primary educational resource for solo learners, and many librarians utilize these workshops as a primary outreach platform. Tackling these two issues together often makes the most sense for our limited resources. Whether a programming language or software tool, learning tech to teach tech can be one of the best motivations for learning that tech skill or tool, but equally important is to learn how to teach and present tech well.

This hands-on workshop will guide participants through developing their own learning plan, reviewing essential pedagogy for teaching tech, and crafting a workshop of their choice. Each participant will leave with an actionable learning schedule, a prioritized list of resources to investigate, and an outline of a workshop they would like to teach.

(Two three-hour sessions)

23. Introduction to Omeka S
Omeka S represents a complete rewrite of Omeka Classic (aka the Omeka 2.x series), adhering to our fundamental principles of encouraging use of metadata standards, easy web publishing, and sharing cultural history. New objectives in Omeka S include multisite functionality and increased interaction with other systems. This workshop will compare and contrast Omeka S with Omeka Classic to highlight our emphasis on 1) modern metadata standards, 2) interoperability with other systems including Linked Open Data, 3) use of modern web standards, and 4) web publishing to meet the goals medium- to large-sized institutions.

In this workshop we will walk through Omeka S Item creation, with emphasis on LoD principles. We will also look at the features of Omeka S that ease metadata input and facilitate project-defined usage and workflows. In accordance with our commitment to interoperability, we will describe how the API for Omeka S can be deployed for data exchange and sharing between many systems. We will also describe how Omeka S promotes multiple site creation from one installation, in the interest of easy publishing with many objects in many contexts, and simplifying the work of IT departments.

(One three-hour session)

24. Getting started with static website generators
Have you been curious about static website generators? Have you been wondering who Jekyll and Hugo are? Then this workshop is for you

My notehttps://opensource.com/article/17/5/hugo-vs-jekyll

But this article isn’t about setting up a domain name and hosting for your website. It’s for the step after that, the actual making of that site. The typical choice for a lot of people would be to use something like WordPress. It’s a one-click install on most hosting providers, and there’s a gigantic market of plugins and themes available to choose from, depending on the type of site you’re trying to build. But not only is WordPress a bit overkill for most websites, it also gives you a dynamically generated site with a lot of moving parts. If you don’t keep all of those pieces up to date, they can pose a significant security risk and your site could get hijacked.

The alternative would be to have a static website, with nothing dynamically generated on the server side. Just good old HTML and CSS (and perhaps a bit of Javascript for flair). The downside to that option has been that you’ve been relegated to coding the whole thing by hand yourself. It’s doable, but you just want a place to share your work. You shouldn’t have to know all the idiosyncrasies of low-level web design (and the monumental headache of cross-browser compatibility) to do that.

Static website generators are tools used to build a website made up only of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Static websites, unlike dynamic sites built with tools like Drupal or WordPress, do not use databases or server-side scripting languages. Static websites have a number of benefits over dynamic sites, including reduced security vulnerabilities, simpler long-term maintenance, and easier preservation.

In this hands-on workshop, we’ll start by exploring static website generators, their components, some of the different options available, and their benefits and disadvantages. Then, we’ll work on making our own sites, and for those that would like to, get them online with GitHub pages. Familiarity with HTML, git, and command line basics will be helpful but are not required.

(One three-hour session)

26. Using Digital Media for Research and Instruction
To use digital media effectively in both research and instruction, you need to go beyond just the playback of media files. You need to be able to stream the media, divide that stream into different segments, provide descriptive analysis of each segment, order, re-order and compare different segments from the same or different streams and create web sites that can show the result of your analysis. In this workshop, we will use Omeka and several plugins for working with digital media, to show the potential of video streaming, segmentation and descriptive analysis for research and instruction.

(One three-hour session)

28. Spark in the Dark 101 https://zeppelin.apache.org/
This is an introductory session on Apache Spark, a framework for large-scale data processing (https://spark.apache.org/). We will introduce high level concepts around Spark, including how Spark execution works and it’s relationship to the other technologies for working with Big Data. Following this introduction to the theory and background, we will walk workshop participants through hands-on usage of spark-shell, Zeppelin notebooks, and Spark SQL for processing library data. The workshop will wrap up with use cases and demos for leveraging Spark within cultural heritage institutions and information organizations, connecting the building blocks learned to current projects in the real world.

(One three-hour session)

29. Introduction to Spotlight https://github.com/projectblacklight/spotlight
http://www.spotlighttechnology.com/4-OpenSource.htm
Spotlight is an open source application that extends the digital library ecosystem by providing a means for institutions to reuse digital content in easy-to-produce, attractive, and scholarly-oriented websites. Librarians, curators, and other content experts can build Spotlight exhibits to showcase digital collections using a self-service workflow for selection, arrangement, curation, and presentation.

This workshop will introduce the main features of Spotlight and present examples of Spotlight-built exhibits from the community of adopters. We’ll also describe the technical requirements for adopting Spotlight and highlight the potential to customize and extend Spotlight’s capabilities for their own needs while contributing to its growth as an open source project.

(One three-hour session)

31. Getting Started Visualizing your IoT Data in Tableau https://www.tableau.com/
The Internet of Things is a rising trend in library research. IoT sensors can be used for space assessment, service design, and environmental monitoring. IoT tools create lots of data that can be overwhelming and hard to interpret. Tableau Public (https://public.tableau.com/en-us/s/) is a data visualization tool that allows you to explore this information quickly and intuitively to find new insights.

This full-day workshop will teach you the basics of building your own own IoT sensor using a Raspberry Pi (https://www.raspberrypi.org/) in order to gather, manipulate, and visualize your data.

All are welcome, but some familiarity with Python is recommended.

(Two three-hour sessions)

32. Enabling Social Media Research and Archiving
Social media data represents a tremendous opportunity for memory institutions of all kinds, be they large academic research libraries, or small community archives. Researchers from a broad swath of disciplines have a great deal of interest in working with social media content, but they often lack access to datasets or the technical skills needed to create them. Further, it is clear that social media is already a crucial part of the historical record in areas ranging from events your local community to national elections. But attempts to build archives of social media data are largely nascent. This workshop will be both an introduction to collecting data from the APIs of social media platforms, as well as a discussion of the roles of libraries and archives in that collecting.

Assuming no prior experience, the workshop will begin with an explanation of how APIs operate. We will then focus specifically on the Twitter API, as Twitter is of significant interest to researchers and hosts an important segment of discourse. Through a combination of hands-on and demos, we will gain experience with a number of tools that support collecting social media data (e.g., Twarc, Social Feed Manager, DocNow, Twurl, and TAGS), as well as tools that enable sharing social media datasets (e.g., Hydrator, TweetSets, and the Tweet ID Catalog).

The workshop will then turn to a discussion of how to build a successful program enabling social media collecting at your institution. This might cover a variety of topics including outreach to campus researchers, collection development strategies, the relationship between social media archiving and web archiving, and how to get involved with the social media archiving community. This discussion will be framed by a focus on ethical considerations of social media data, including privacy and responsible data sharing.

Time permitting, we will provide a sampling of some approaches to social media data analysis, including Twarc Utils and Jupyter Notebooks.

(One three-hour session)

students entitlement and disruptiveness

Student Entitlement: Key Questions and Short Answers

By: 

https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-professor-blog/student-entitlement-key-questions-short-answers

What is student entitlement? 

“tendency to possess an expectation of academic success without taking personal responsibility for achieving that success.”

How widespread is it?

The research (and there’s not a lot) reports finding less student entitlement than faculty do.

Can a student be entitled without being rude and disruptive? 

Yes. Students can have beliefs like those mentioned above and only discuss them with other students or not discuss them at all. Part of what makes entitlement challenging for teachers are those students who do verbally express the attitudes, often aggressively.

Are millennial students more entitled than previous generations? That’s another widely held assumption in the academic community, but support from research is indirect and inconsistent.

Is entitlement something that only happens in the academic environment? No, it has been studied, written about, and observed in other contexts (like work environments

What’s causing it?

A number think it’s the result of previous educational experiences and/or grade inflation. Some blame technology that gives students greater access to teachers and the expectation of immediate responses. Fairly regularly, student evaluations are blamed for the anonymous power and control they give students. And finally, there’s the rise in consumerism that’s now associated with education. Students (and their parents) pay (usually a lot) for college and the sense that those tuition dollars entitle them to certain things, is generally not what teachers think education entitles learners to receive.

How should teachers respond?

It helps if teachers clarify their expectations with constructive positive language and even more importantly with discussions of the rationales on which those expectations rest. Teacher authority gets most students to follow the rules, but force doesn’t generally change attitudes and those are what need to be fixed in this case.

October 18 for Student Entitlement: Truth, Fiction, or Some of Both and stay tuned for more in-depth information and resources that we’ll make available in Faculty Focus Premium in subsequent weeks.

References: Elias, R. Z. (2017). Academic entitlement and its relationship to cheating ethics. Journal of Education for Business, 92 (4), 194-199.

Greenberger, E., et. al. (2008). Self-entitled college students: Contributions of personality, parenting and motivational factors. Journal of Youth Adolescence, 37, 1193-1204.

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Responding to Disruptive Students

Negative attention doesn’t help difficult students change their ways, but teachers can alter classroom dynamics through this exercise.

Mapping Behavior

Draw a map of your classroom, including doors, windows, desks, blackboards—all significant items and areas. I’m sure you’ve already got a clear idea of where the most challenging students usually sit. Now imagine teaching class on a regular day. Trace the paths you usually take across the room. Do you sometimes speed up for a particular reason?

Now put your breathing on the map. Are you conscious of the way you breathe during class? Use a new color and draw a wavy line on top of the lines and arrows you’ve already sketched. Does the wavy line look even, or have you drawn some chaotic or nervous zigzags? Could it be that you’ve sometimes forgotten to breathe?

Investing time in building physical and emotional familiarity with the learning environment, instead of nervously anticipating disruption, changes the educator’s perspective toward the whole class, their interaction with individual students, and their self-awareness. Negative attention stops being a solution—instead it is seen as a hindrance to the process of understanding students’ needs.

scsu library position proposal

Please email completed forms to librarydeansoffice@stcloudstate.edu no later than noon on Thursday, October 5.

According to the email below, library faculty are asked to provide their feedback regarding the qualifications for a possible faculty line at the library.

  1. In the fall of 2013 during a faculty meeting attended by the back than library dean and during a discussion of an article provided by the dean, it was established that leading academic libraries in this country are seeking to break the mold of “library degree” and seek fresh ideas for the reinvention of the academic library by hiring faculty with more diverse (degree-wise) background.
  2. Is this still the case at the SCSU library? The “democratic” search for the answer of this question does not yield productive results, considering that the majority of the library faculty are “reference” and they “democratically” overturn votes, who see this library to be put on 21st century standards and rather seek more “reference” bodies for duties, which were recognized even by the same reference librarians as obsolete.
    It seems that the majority of the SCSU library are “purists” in the sense of seeking professionals with broader background (other than library, even “reference” skills).
    In addition, most of the current SCSU librarians are opposed to a second degree, as in acquiring more qualification, versus seeking just another diploma. There is a certain attitude of stagnation / intellectual incest, where new ideas are not generated and old ideas are prepped in “new attire” to look as innovative and/or 21st
    Last but not least, a consistent complain about workforce shortages (the attrition politics of the university’s reorganization contribute to the power of such complain) fuels the requests for reference librarians and, instead of looking for new ideas, new approaches and new work responsibilities, the library reorganization conversation deteriorates into squabbles for positions among different department.
    Most importantly, the narrow sightedness of being stuck in traditional work description impairs  most of the librarians to see potential allies and disruptors. E.g., the insistence on the supremacy of “information literacy” leads SCSU librarians to the erroneous conclusion of the exceptionality of information literacy and the disregard of multi[meta] literacies, thus depriving the entire campus of necessary 21st century skills such as visual literacy, media literacy, technology literacy, etc.
    Simultaneously, as mentioned above about potential allies and disruptors, the SCSU librarians insist on their “domain” and if they are not capable of leading meta-literacies instructions, they would also not allow and/or support others to do so.
    Considering the observations above, the following qualifications must be considered:
  3. According to the information in this blog post:
    https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2016/06/14/technology-requirements-samples/
    for the past year and ½, academic libraries are hiring specialists with the following qualifications and for the following positions (bolded and / or in red). Here are some highlights:
    Positions
    digital humanities
    Librarian and Instructional Technology Liaison

library Specialist: Data Visualization & Collections Analytics

Qualifications

Advanced degree required, preferably in education, educational technology, instructional design, or MLS with an emphasis in instruction and assessment.

Programming skills – Demonstrated experience with one or more metadata and scripting languages (e.g.Dublin Core, XSLT, Java, JavaScript, Python, or PHP)
Data visualization skills
multi [ meta] literacy skills

Data curation, helping students working with data
Experience with website creation and design in a CMS environment and accessibility and compliance issues
Demonstrated a high degree of facility with technologies and systems germane to the 21st century library, and be well versed in the issues surrounding scholarly communications and compliance issues (e.g. author identifiers, data sharing software, repositories, among others)

Bilingual

Provides and develops awareness and knowledge related to digital scholarship and research lifecycle for librarians and staff.

Experience developing for, and supporting, common open-source library applications such as Omeka, ArchiveSpace, Dspace,

 

Responsibilities
Establishing best practices for digital humanities labs, networks, and services

Assessing, evaluating, and peer reviewing DH projects and librarians
Actively promote TIGER or GRIC related activities through social networks and other platforms as needed.
Coordinates the transmission of online workshops through Google HangoutsScript metadata transformations and digital object processing using BASH, Python, and XSLT

liaison consults with faculty and students in a wide range of disciplines on best practices for teaching and using data/statistical software tools such as R, SPSS, Stata, and MatLab.

 

In response to the form attached to the Friday, September 29, email regarding St. Cloud State University Library Position Request Form:

 

  1. Title
    Digital Initiatives Librarian
  2. Responsibilities:
    TBD, but generally:
    – works with faculty across campus on promoting digital projects and other 21st century projects. Works with the English Department faculty on positioning the SCSU library as an equal participants in the digital humanities initiatives on campus
  • Works with the Visualization lab to establish the library as the leading unit on campus in interpretation of big data
  • Works with academic technology services on promoting library faculty as the leading force in the pedagogical use of academic technologies.
  1. Quantitative data justification
    this is a mute requirement for an innovative and useful library position. It can apply for a traditional request, such as another “reference” librarian. There cannot be a quantitative data justification for an innovative position, as explained to Keith Ewing in 2015. In order to accumulate such data, the position must be functioning at least for six months.
  2. Qualitative justification: Please provide qualitative explanation that supports need for this position.
    Numerous 21st century academic tendencies right now are scattered across campus and are a subject of political/power battles rather than a venue for campus collaboration and cooperation. Such position can seek the establishment of the library as the natural hub for “sandbox” activities across campus. It can seek a redirection of using digital initiatives on this campus for political gains by administrators and move the generation and accomplishment of such initiatives to the rightful owner and primary stakeholders: faculty and students.
    Currently, there are no additional facilities and resources required. Existing facilities and resources, such as the visualization lab, open source and free application can be used to generate the momentum of faculty working together toward a common goal, such as, e.g. digital humanities.

 

 

 

 

Scholarly Communication Library Publishing

Pre-Conference Workshop | Sunday, March 4, 2018 | 1:00pm – 5:00pm

Conference Track: Scholarly Communication & Library Publishing

More information and registration online at http://www.electroniclibrarian.org/18-workshop-scholarly-communication-essentials/

This workshop will provide attendees, no matter their role in their own institution, with the knowledge, vocabulary, and basic skills needed to communicate intelligently with other stakeholders in the fast-changing scholarly communication landscape.

the economics of commercial and open access publishing; open access publishing models; common misconceptions about open access and how to address them; predatory publishing; copyright, author rights and legislation; article-level- and alt- metrics, and open educational resources.

measuring library outcomes and value

THE VALUE OF ACADEMIC LIBRARIES
A Comprehensive Research Review and Report. Megan Oakleaf

http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/issues/value/val_report.pdf

Librarians in universities, colleges, and community colleges can establish, assess, and link
academic library outcomes to institutional outcomes related to the following areas:
student enrollment, student retention and graduation rates, student success, student
achievement, student learning, student engagement, faculty research productivity,
faculty teaching, service, and overarching institutional quality.
Assessment management systems help higher education educators, including librarians, manage their outcomes, record and maintain data on each outcome, facilitate connections to
similar outcomes throughout an institution, and generate reports.
Assessment management systems are helpful for documenting progress toward
strategic/organizational goals, but their real strength lies in managing learning
outcomes assessments.
to determine the impact of library interactions on users, libraries can collect data on how individual users engage with library resources and services.
increase library impact on student enrollment.
p. 13-14improved student retention and graduation rates. High -impact practices include: first -year seminars and experiences, common intellectual experiences, learning communities, writing – intensive courses, collaborative assignments and projects, undergraduate research, Value of Academic Libraries diversity/global learning, service learning/community -based learning, internships, capstone courses and projects

p. 14

Libraries support students’ ability to do well in internships, secure job placements, earn salaries, gain acceptance to graduate/professional schools, and obtain marketable skills.
librarians can investigate correlations between student library interactions and their GPA well as conduct test item audits of major professional/educational tests to determine correlations between library services or resources and specific test items.
p. 15 Review course content, readings, reserves, and assignments.
Track and increase library contributions to faculty research productivity.
Continue to investigate library impact on faculty grant proposals and funding, a means of generating institutional income. Librarians contribute to faculty grant proposals in a number of ways.
Demonstrate and improve library support of faculty teaching.
p. 20 Internal Focus: ROI – lib value = perceived benefits / perceived costs
production of a commodity – value=quantity of commodity produced × price per unit of commodity
p. 21 External focus
a fourth definition of value focuses on library impact on users. It asks, “What is the library trying to achieve? How can librarians tell if they have made a difference?” In universities, colleges, and community colleges, libraries impact learning, teaching, research, and service. A main method for measuring impact is to “observe what the [users] are actually doing and what they are producing as a result”
A fifth definition of value is based on user perceptions of the library in relation to competing alternatives. A related definition is “desired value” or “what a [user] wants to have happen when interacting with a [library] and/or using a [library’s] product or service” (Flint, Woodruff and Fisher Gardial 2002) . Both “impact” and “competing alternatives” approaches to value require libraries to gain new understanding of their users’ goals as well as the results of their interactions with academic libraries.
p. 23 Increasingly, academic library value is linked to service, rather than products. Because information products are generally produced outside of libraries, library value is increasingly invested in service aspects and librarian expertise.
service delivery supported by librarian expertise is an important library value.
p. 25 methodology based only on literature? weak!
p. 26 review and analysis of the literature: language and literature are old (e.g. educational administrators vs ed leaders).
G government often sees higher education as unresponsive to these economic demands. Other stakeholder groups —students, pa rents, communities, employers, and graduate/professional schools —expect higher education to make impacts in ways that are not primarily financial.

p. 29

Because institutional missions vary (Keeling, et al. 2008, 86; Fraser, McClure and
Leahy 2002, 512), the methods by which academic libraries contribute value vary as
well. Consequently, each academic library must determine the unique ways in which they contribute to the mission of their institution and use that information to guide planning and decision making (Hernon and Altman, Assessing Service Quality 1998, 31) . For example, the University of Minnesota Libraries has rewritten their mission and vision to increase alignment with their overarching institution’s goals and emphasis on strategic engagement (Lougee 2009, allow institutional missions to guide library assessment
Assessment vs. Research
In community colleges, colleges, and universities, assessment is about defining the
purpose of higher education and determining the nature of quality (Astin 1987)
.
Academic libraries serve a number of purposes, often to the point of being
overextended.
Assessment “strives to know…what is” and then uses that information to change the
status quo (Keeling, et al. 2008, 28); in contrast, research is designed to test
hypotheses. Assessment focuses on observations of change; research is concerned with the degree of correlation or causation among variables (Keeling, et al. 2008, 35) . Assessment “virtually always occurs in a political context ,” while research attempts to be apolitical” (Upcraft and Schuh 2002, 19) .
 p. 31 Assessment seeks to document observations, but research seeks to prove or disprove ideas. Assessors have to complete assessment projects, even when there are significant design flaws (e.g., resource limitations, time limitations, organizational contexts, design limitations, or political contexts); whereas researchers can start over (Upcraft and Schuh 2002, 19) . Assessors cannot always attain “perfect” studies, but must make do with “good enough” (Upcraft and Schuh 2002, 18) . Of course, assessments should be well planned, be based on clear outcomes (Gorman 2009, 9- 10) , and use appropriate methods (Keeling, et al. 2008, 39) ; but they “must be comfortable with saying ‘after’ as well as ‘as a result of’…experiences” (Ke eling, et al. 2008, 35) .
Two multiple measure approaches are most significant for library assessment: 1) triangulation “where multiple methods are used to find areas of convergence of data from different methods with an aim of overcoming the biases or limitations of data gathered from any one particular method” (Keeling, et al. 2008, 53) and 2) complementary mixed methods , which “seek to use data from multiple methods to build upon each other by clarifying, enhancing, or illuminating findings between or among methods” (Keeling, et al. 2008, 53) .
p. 34 Academic libraries can help higher education institutions retain and graduate students, a keystone part of institutional missions (Mezick 2007, 561) , but the challenge lies in determining how libraries can contribute and then document their contribution
p. 35. Student Engagement:  In recent years, academic libraries have been transformed to provide “technology and content ubiquity” as well as individualized support
My Note: I read the “technology and content ubiquity” as digital literacy / metaliteracies, where basic technology instructional sessions (everything that IMS offers for years) is included, but this library still clenches to information literacy only.
National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) http://nsse.indiana.edu/
http://nsse.indiana.edu/2017_Institutional_Report/pdf/NSSE17%20Snapshot%20%28NSSEville%20State%29.pdf
p. 37 Student Learning
In the past, academic libraries functioned primarily as information repositories; now they are becoming learning enterprises (Bennett 2009, 194) . This shift requires academic librarians to embed library services and resources in the teaching and learning activities of their institutions (Lewis 2007) . In the new paradigm, librarians focus on information skills, not information access (Bundy 2004, 3); they think like educators, not service providers (Bennett 2009, 194) .
p. 38. For librarians, the main content area of student learning is information literacy; however, they are not alone in their interest in student inform ation literacy skills (Oakleaf, Are They Learning? 2011).
My note: Yep. it was. 20 years ago. Metaliteracies is now.
p. 41 surrogates for student learning in Table 3.
p. 42 strategic planning for learning:
According to Kantor, the university library “exists to benefit the students of the educational institution as individuals ” (Library as an Information Utility 1976 , 101) . In contrast, academic libraries tend to assess learning outcomes using groups of students
p. 45 Assessment Management Systems
Tk20
Each assessment management system has a slightly different set of capabilities. Some guide outcomes creation, some develop rubrics, some score student work, or support student portfolios. All manage, maintain, and report assessment data
p. 46 faculty teaching
However, as online collections grow and discovery tools evolve, that role has become less critical (Schonfeld and Housewright 2010; Housewright and Schonfeld, Ithaka’s 2006 Studies of Key Stakeholders 2008, 256) . Now, libraries serve as research consultants, project managers, technical support professionals, purchasers , and archivists (Housewright, Themes of Change 2009, 256; Case 2008) .
Librarians can count citations of faculty publications (Dominguez 2005)
.

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Tenopir, C. (2012). Beyond usage: measuring library outcomes and value. Library Management33(1/2), 5-13.

http://login.libproxy.stcloudstate.edu/login?qurl=http%3a%2f%2fsearch.ebscohost.com%2flogin.aspx%3fdirect%3dtrue%26db%3dllf%26AN%3d70921798%26site%3dehost-live%26scope%3dsite

methods that can be used to measure the value of library products and services. (Oakleaf, 2010; Tenopir and King, 2007): three main categories

  1. Implicit value. Measuring usage through downloads or usage logs provide an implicit measure of value. It is assumed that because libraries are used, they are of value to the users. Usage of e-resources is relatively easy to measure on an ongoing basis and is especially useful in collection development decisions and comparison of specific journal titles or use across subject disciplines.

do not show purpose, satisfaction, or outcomes of use (or whether what is downloaded is actually read).

  1. Explicit methods of measuring value include qualitative interview techniques that ask faculty members, students, or others specifically about the value or outcomes attributed to their use of the library collections or services and surveys or interviews that focus on a specific (critical) incident of use.
  2. Derived values, such as Return on Investment (ROI), use multiple types of data collected on both the returns (benefits) and the library and user costs (investment) to explain value in monetary terms.

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more on ROI in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2014/11/02/roi-of-social-media/

K12 IT management

8 truths about K-12 IT systems management

By Gary Johnson September 13th, 2017

Unique complexities can be distilled down to eight truths, and may explain why vendors never seem to meet expectations in K-12 IT.

8 truths about K-12 IT systems management

Consider the information they handle every day. School districts in America today are complex, sophisticated businesses, not only managing multiple applications across multiple platforms, but also managing people and equipment in the real world, like bus fleets, library systems, and cafeterias.

you will find admins working with an average of 30 onsite and online platforms. That’s 30 systems to feed with data and update. The kicker is that those systems might not be on speaking terms with each other.

Interoperability is a multi-headed issue for any IT professional, but in the K-12 education world it is especially complex. These unique complexities can be distilled down to eight truths, and may explain why vendors who have been very successful in other IT verticals never seem to meet expectations in K-12.

The Solution Cannot Be Point-to-Point

Data from many active sources is profoundly difficult to keep current, especially when considering the different protocols used for each particular point-to-point integration.

There Must Be Multiple Ways of Moving Data

A successful broker/dashboard must be able to accommodate all of these integration methods. The broker needs to support it as well as the industry’s existing standards, such as SIF and CSV.

The System Must Merge Disparate Feeds

Data comes into educational systems from a variety of feeds, including CSVs and file sharing. Handling all these feeds develops a vital function, coveted by IT professionals and system admins everywhere: a comprehensive representation of the data truth of your district.

Your Data Solution Must Be Bidirectional

Different systems don’t always talk to each other politely, and with some districts using as many as 30 applications, writing grades back to the SIS can get thorny.

We Need a Flexible Data Model

some of those free or low-cost integrations are profoundly rigid and can’t accommodate the data reality of school districts.

We Must Deal with “Dumb” End Points

In the world of district data, we are moving toward REST APIs and other unintelligent end points. There is no inherent logic in an API that tells the system how to move data. And as mentioned earlier, many legacy systems still depend on CSV’s for data.

Integration Belongs in the Cloud but Must Accommodate On-Premise Apps

know the cloud actually is an ideal setting for interoperability, especially since so many of our applications are cloud-based. It gives you maximum visibility, maximum diagnostic capability and manageability. You can manage from anywhere, anytime.

Be Multi-Tenant with Supervisory Capability

For areas where intermediate units or a Board of Cooperative Educational Standards (BOCES) provide IT services to districts, the system admins need a big picture approach. The integration platform must allow the IU or BOCES to troubleshoot, diagnose, manage, and support multiple districts in one dashboard, but only show district personnel data belonging to their organization. State education agencies also have this need.

There are several reputable companies that provide an iPaaS–in fact Gartner compared 20 of them in their 2017 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Integration Platform as a Service. However, without a deep understanding of education data models, even these vendors may fall short, and may be expensive.

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more on IT for K12 in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=digital+literacy+edad

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