Estimated Hours of Learning: 28 Certificate of Completion available upon request
Learning outcomes
After participating in this eCourse, you will:
Gain experience using some of the best apps available and understand how they enable learning
Learn how to evaluate and review mobile apps
Learn how tablets complement laptops, and how their capabilities are creating new learning opportunities
Learn how apps are being used by people with special needs, and where to find additional resources for learning more
Receive guidance for creating your own app guides, offering workshops, and advising colleagues
In this 5-week eCourse, you’ll learn about the most useful apps available on tablet and mobile devices and how they can be applied in your library to create the best learning experiences for your patrons and students.
Mobile apps are empowering for people of all ages and abilities. Contrary to the popular idea that apps are only useful for “consumption,” the best apps are being used effectively as tools to enable learning and knowledge creation. In this eCourse, Nicole Hennig will show you how to incorporate apps as learning tools at your library.
Readings about security, writing, mobile apps in academia
Your thoughts on the readings (discussion forum)
Optional app review assignment
Week 3 – Reference
The Apps
Dictionaries, encyclopedias
Unit converters, maps, languages
Specialized reference apps
Subscription databases & citations
Readings & Discussion
Readings about jailbreaking, platforms, & mobile web
Apple’s iOS Human Interface Guidelines
Your thoughts on the readings (discussion forum)
Optional app review assignment
Week 4 – Multimedia
The Apps
Art viewing
Art creation
Photography and photo editing
Music listening
Music creation
Video viewing and editing
Readings & Discussion
Readings about technology & children
Your thoughts on the readings (discussion forum)
Optional app review assignment
Week 5 – Accessibility & More
Accessibility features of mobile devices
Readings & Discussion
Readings about assistive technology
Your thoughts on the readings (discussion forum)
Idea generation assignment
Ideas for using apps in library programs & services
Apps that wow
How this eCourse Works
The eCourse begins on June 5, 2017. Your participation will require approximately five to six hours a week, at times that fit your schedule. All activities take place on the website, and you will be expected to:
Read, listen to or view online content
Post to online discussion boards
Complete weekly assignments or activities
Instructor Nicole Hennig will monitor discussion boards regularly during the five-week period, lead group discussions, and will also answer individual questions. All interaction will take place on the eCourse site, which will be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It’s recommended that students log into the site on the first day of class or within a few days for an overview of the content and to begin the first lesson.
Starbird argues in a new paper, set to be presented at a computational social-science conference in May, that these “strange clusters” of wild conspiracy talk, when mapped, point to an emerging alternative media ecosystem on the web of surprising power and reach.
There are dozens of other conspiracy-propagating websites such as beforeitsnews.com, nodisinfo.com and veteranstoday.com.
It isn’t a traditional left-right political axis, she found. There are right-wing sites like Danger & Play and left-wing sensationalizers such as The Free Thought Project. Some appear to be just trying to make money, while others are aggressively pushing political agendas.
The true common denominator, she found, is anti-globalism — deep suspicion of free trade, multinational business and global institutions.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The News Literacy Project
Do you know any fact checking sites? Can you identify spot sponsored content? Do you understand syndication? What do you understand under “media literacy,” “news literacy,” “information literacy.” https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2017/03/28/fake-news-resources/
what is social media (examples). why is called SM? why is so popular? what makes it so popular?
use SM tools for your research and education:
– Determining your topic. How to?
Digg http://digg.com/, Reddit https://www.reddit.com/ , Quora https://www.quora.com
Facebook, Twitter – hashtags (class assignment 2-3 min to search)
LinkedIn Groups
YouTube and Slideshare (class assignment 2-3 min to search)
Flickr, Instagram, Pinterest for visual aids (like YouTube they are media repositories)
The American Philosophical Society (APS) Library in Philadelphia seeks applicants for its new Digital Humanities Fellowship.
This fellowship, for up to two (2) months, is open to scholars who are comfortable creating tools and visualizations, as well as those interested in working collaboratively with the APS technology team.
Librarians, scholars, and graduate students (MLIS or other) at any stage of their career may apply. Special consideration will be given to proposals that present APS Library holdings in new and engaging ways. Examples include (but are not limited to) projects that incorporate timelines, text analytics, network graphs, and maps.
Stipend: $3,000 per month will be awarded to the successful applicant after their arrival at the Library.
All Applicants must submit:
Cover letter
Curriculum vitae
Prospectus for a digital project
Examples of previous digital humanities projects (if available)
Contact information for two people who will submit confidential letters of reference
Full details are available on the application webpage:
Introduction to functional programming principles, including immutability, higher-order functions, and recursion using the Clojure programming language. This workshop will cover getting started with the Clojure REPL, building programs through function composition, testing, and web-development using ClojureScript.
This workshop will do a deep dive into approaches and recommend best practices for customizing Blacklight applications. We will discuss a range of topics, including styling and theming, customizing discovery experiences, and working with Solr.
Proposed by: Chris Beer, Jessie Keck, and Jack Reed
We all encounter failure in our professional lives: failed projects, failed systems, failed organizations. We often think of failure as a negative, but it has intrinsic value — and since it’s inevitable that we’ll eventually experience failure ourselves, it’s important to know how to accept it, how to take lessons from it, and how to grow from it professionally. Fail4Lib, now in its 5th year, is the perennial Code4Lib preconference dedicated to discussing and coming to terms with the failures that we all face in our professional lives. It is a safe space for us to explore failure, to talk about our own experiences with failure, and to encourage enlightened risk taking. The goal of Fail4Lib is for participants to be adept at failing gracefully, so that when we do fail, we do so in a way that moves us forward. This half-day preconference will consist of case studies, round-table discussions, and, for those interested in sharing, lightning talks on failures we’ve dealt with in our own work.
Amazon Web Services currently offers 58 services ranging from the familiar compute and storage systems to game development and the internet of things. We will focus on the 20-some services that you should be aware of as you move your applications to their cloud.
The morning session will be mostly overview and the afternoon session will be more practical examples and discussion. This could be broken into two sessions.
Proposed by: Cary Gordon, t/b/d, and t/b/d
FOLIO is a library services platform — infrastructure that allows cooperating library apps to share data. This workshop is a hands-on introduction to FOLIO for developers of library apps. In this tutorial you will work with your own Vagrant image through a series of exercises designed to demonstrate how to install an app on the platform and use the data sources and design elements the platform provides.
Have an idea for an app? Want to work with FOLIO developers and others in the community on the FOLIO platform to make it happen. Come to this half-day hack-a-thon! Ideas for new developers will be posted in the project Jira, or bring your own concepts and work with others to make them reality.
REQUIREMENTS Laptop (4GB) with Vagrant installed. Attending the FOLIO Tutorial is recommended, but not required.
Google Apps script is a server-side implementation of JavaScript which supports API calls to Google Services. This can provide an excellent platform for developing simple library applications. The libraries at Georgetown University and the University of Dayton have successfully deployed applications built with Google App Script.
In this workshop, we will step through the various types of applications that can be built with Google Apps Script.
(1) Custom cell formulas
(2) Spreadsheet Add On Functions (menu items, time based triggers)
(3) Google Apps Script as a Web Service
(4) Google Apps Script Add-Ons that can be shared globally or by domain
In this workshop, we will build sample instances of each of these types of applications (wifi-permitting) and spend some time brainstorming additional applications that would be useful for the library community.
Calls to mindfulness and self care can have mixed reception in our field. While some view this important work as navel-gazing or unnecessary, it is integral to being present and avoiding burnout. Often this skewed attention to output comes at the expense of our personal lives, our organizations, our health, our relationships, and our mental well-being. Learning to prioritize self-care is an ongoing project among those who perform emotional labor. While some view the work of mindfulness as self-indulgent, it has proven to keep many on the track of being present and avoiding burnout.*
The purpose of this preconference is to provide a short introduction to self care and mindfulness with practical work we can use regardless of setting. We’ll discuss microaggressions and allyship (microaggressions being the brief and commonplace verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities that marginalized people of various groups experience daily and allyship referring to the powerful role that individuals from privileged groups can play in supporting marginalized individuals). We will then transition to a modified unconference setting where participants can practice scenarios and learn practical solutions. Each of the presenters has different set of skills and experiences that allow for many techniques and strategies to be explored. Preconference attendees will participate in sessions like “Mentor Speed Dating” where they get to talk to and question potential mentors/mentees. They may be coached through a guided meditation or walked through a calming breathing exercise. For those looking to a more physical space, office yoga and stretching techniques may be shared depending on the outcomes of the unconference interest.
Foundational materials and articles will be shared with the registrants prior to the meeting with the option of further discussion at the workshop. An open access guide to all the resources and readings will be available after the preconference, and people will be encouraged to share additional their tools on a website.
Suggested Hashtag #c4lselfcare
* Abenavoli, R.M., Jennings, P.A., Greenberg, M.T., Harris, A.R., & Katz, D.A. (2013). The protective effects of mindfulness against burnout among educators. Psychology of Education Review, 37(2), 57-69
Proposed by: Carmen Mitchell, Lia Friedman, and Torie Quinonez
In this preconference, participants will be introduced to Virtual Reality uses in library settings, notably, by way of the VR Reading Room. Within the VR Reading Room prototype, users can collaboratively explore digital collections (e.g. HathiTrust) by way of VR headsets. Participants of this workshop will have the opportunity to experience HTC Vive functionality. The system will be setup with a prototype e-book experiment in order to model several VR affordances. Once attendees have been introduced to the HTC Vive hardware and sample project, groups of participants will have an opportunity to further brainstorm novel uses cases.
Python[1] has become one of the dominant languages in scientific computing and is used by researchers around the world. Its popularity is due in large part to a rich set of libraries for data analysis like Pandas[2] and NumPy[3] and tools for exploring scientific code like Jupyter notebooks[4]. Join us for this half-day workshop on the basics of using Pandas within a Jupyter notebook. We will cover importing data, selecting and subsetting data, grouping data, and generating simple visualizations. All are welcome, but some familiarity with Python is recommended, e.g. the concepts covered in the Codecademy[5] or Google[6] Python courses.
Learn about the features and capabilities of Sufia, a Hydra-based repository solution. Attendees will participate in a hand-on demonstration where they deposit content, edit metadata, create collections, and explore access control options. Attendees should bring laptops with Chrome, Firefox, or Safari installed. Please plan on bringing at least one image, document, or other digital content that you’re comfortable uploading and using for demo and experimentation purposes 🙂
The web can be a trove of openly accessible data, but it is not always readily available in a format that allows it to be downloaded for analysis and reuse. This workshop aims to introduce attendees to web scraping, a technique to automate extracting data from websites.
Part one of the workshop will use browser extensions and web tools to get started with web scraping quickly, give examples where this technique can be useful, and introduce how to use XPath queries to select elements on a page.
Part two will introduce how to write a spider in Python to follow hyperlinks and scrape several web pages using the Scrapy framework. We will conclude with an overview of the legal aspects of web scraping and an open discussion.
You don’t need to be a coder to enjoy this workshop! Anyone wishing to learn web scraping is welcome, although some familiarity with HTML will be helpful. Part two will require some experience with Python, attendees unfamiliar with this language are welcome to stay only for part one and still learn useful web scraping skills!
Paper prototyping is a low-cost, structured brainstorming technique that uses materials such as paper and pencils to better understand the way users interact with physical, visual, and textual information. It can help us learn how to better think through workflows, space design, and information architecture. Session attendees will learn about the ways low-fidelity prototyping and wireframing can be used to develop ideas, troubleshoot workflows, and improve learning and interaction.
In the first half of the workshop, participants will step through activities in icon design, persona development, and task development. In the second half they will develop a low fidelity prototype and step through a guerilla usability testing process with it.
Proposed by: Ekatarina (Eka) Grguric and Andreas Orphanides
Photo-sharing Site as Library Tool : A Web-based Survey
peer-reviewed article for Digital Library Perspectives: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/dlp
opportunity to user to develop a sense of ownership over the library resources.
Photo-sharing sites already have taken sharp inroads into the field of teaching-learnin encouraging a shift from teacher-led approach to user centred engagement (Kawka, et al,2012).
Introducing photo-sharing sites and integrating with other social networking sites, libraries are now making their web presence outside the “traditional web platform”. With facility of online managing and sharing of digital images, photo-sharing sites enable users to get remotely connected with others and interact with comment links. Photo-sharing sites that are commonly being used by libraries are Flickr (www.flickr.com), Instagram (instagram.com), Pinterest (in.pinterest.com), Photobucket (photobucket.com), Picasa (picasa.google.com), SmugMug (www.smugmug.com), etc (Bradley, 2007; Kroski, 2008; Salomon, 2013).
The results showed that blog and RSS are among the mostly used applications and web 0 applications are associated with overall website quality, particularly to the service quality.
Stvilia and Jörgensen (2010) suggests that controlled vocabulary terms may be
37 complemented with those user generated tags which users feel more comfortable with for information The study also reflects a growing interest among the user community to be involved in “social content creation and sharing communities in creating and enhancing the metadata of their photo collections to make the collections more accessible and visible”.
page 7-8.
2.1 Steps to increase accessibility to photo-sharing sites a) Improve visibility: To make photo-sharing sites of the library easily visible, a direct link to library homepage is essential
p. 9 2.2 Purposes of using photo-sharing sites a) Organising library tour
b) Community building
c) Tool for digitisation
d) Grabbing the users at their own place
e) Integrating Feeds with other application
f) Displaying new arrivals : Newly added books
g) Sharing news & events and publicize library activities
h) Archives of exhibits
i) Portal for academic and research activity: Photo-sharing sites may serve as platform tofoster teaching learning activity, particularly for those who may use these image resource sites for academic purpose
j) Experimentation : Being a relatively new approach to users service, these tools may be introduced on experimental basis to examine their proper utilisation before final implementation
k) Miscellaneous : Public library can reach out to the community physically, offer service to the traditionally underserved, homebound or people with disability, implement programmes to include marginalised section of the community and showcase its mobile outreach efforts in photo-sharing sites.
page 12-13
Before going to integrate photo-sharing site, a library should set the strategic objectives i.e., what purposes are to be served. “Purpose can provide clarity of vision when creating policies or guidelines” (Garofalo, 2013, p.28). The above discussedrange of purposes may help librarians to develop better understanding to makeinformed selection of photo-sharing utility and the nature of images to be posted through it. Goal setting should precede consideration of views of a sizeable section of all library stakeholders to know beforehand what they expect from the library.
• Once the purposes are outlined, a library should formulate policy/ guideline for photo-sharing practices, based on user requirement, staff resource, available time component and technological support base. Policy offers a clear guideline for the users and staff to decide the kind of images to be posted. A guideline is indeed essential for the optimum use of photo-sharing site. It also delineates the roles and responsibilities of the staff concerned and ensures regular monitoring of the posts. Policy may highlight fair use guidelines and allow re-use of images within the scope of copy-right.
• A best way to start is integrating an app, involving simple design with fewer images and let users be familiarized with the system. During the course of development more and more apps may be added, with more images to be posted to serve variety of purposes, depending on the institutional resource and user demand.
• Accessibility to photo-sharing site largely depends on its visibility to the audience. Icon of photo-sharing utility prominently located on website will increase the presentation of its visual identity. Library may set links to photo-sharing sites at home page or at drilled-down page.
• Being an emerging technology, photo-sharing site needs adequate exposure for optimum usage. Annotations associated to photo-sharing site will give an idea about the online tool and will guide users to better harness the application.
• Photo-sharing sites allow images to be organised in a variety of way. Categorising image resources under various topical headings at one location will improve resource identification and frees one from extensive searching.
• Regular posting of engaging images to photo-sharing site from the library and follow- up will attract users to tag and share images and strengthen community involvement with active user participation.
• “Social and informal photographs” of library staff will make them more approachable and strengthen patron-staff relationship.
• Library should seek user comments and suggestions to improve current photo-sharing application and to incorporate fresh element to library service provision. User feedback may be considered as a tool to evaluate the effectiveness of existing photo- sharing practices.
• To popularise the effort, usual promotional media like physical and online signs/ displays apart, library may use social media marketing platforms like blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc., and increase awareness of photo-sharing tools.
• Imparting technology training may develop necessary knowledge; improve skill, and change the attitude and mindset of library professionals to handle issues related to using this web-based powered-tools and repurpose existing accessibility settings.
• To provide quick link to photo-sharing site from anywhere in the web, a library may use add-ons / plug-ins to embed image sharing tools.
• Photo-sharing site may be implemented to satisfy multiple approach options of users. A section of users use photo-sharing site to have a glimpse of the newly arrived documents, highlights of catalogue, rare books, etc. Some others may use it to find images of historical importance with context. New users may find it attractive to pay
Social media has the potential to facilitate much closer relationships between libraries and their patrons. Current usage of social media by the library community generally remains ad hoc and somewhat experimental, but the uptake of these tools is accelerating, and they will likely play an increasingly important role in library service provision and outreach in the future. Taylor & Francis has produced a white paper that analyzes current practices relating social media’s use in the library and how this differs by librarian job role. The sample was taken from academic librarians around the world, which also allows us to examine differences by geographic location. The goal: to establish how librarians are currently using social media in their roles, the most useful social media tools and best applications for these tools in a library setting.
explores a variety of social media tools in terms of how they can be used to organize information and communities. Together, you will survey and use a variety of social media tools, such as Delicious, Diigo, Facebook, Goodreads, Google Hangouts, LibraryThing, Pinterest, Storify, Twitter, and more! You will also explore how social media tools can be used to organize and disseminate information and how they can be used to foster and sustain communities of learning.
With the widespread use of library technology that incorporates social media components, intelligent objects, and knowledge-sharing tools comes the ability of libraries to provide greater opportunities for patron engagement in those discovery systems through user-generated content. These features may include the ability of users to contribute commentary such as reviews, simple point-and-click rating systems (e.g. one star to five stars), or to engage in extensive discussions or other social interactions. This kind of content could transform authoritative files, alter information architecture, and change the flow of information within the library discovery system.
Across generations, concerns for privacy may dissipate with time as specific technologies take hold or as people become aware of a technology’s benefits and value those over their value for privacy.
Library Privacy Guidelines for Students in K-12 Schools
p. 1 definition of social media for libraries
six primarytypes exist: “collaborative projects, blogs, content communities, social networking sites,” and two types of virtual worlds: “virtual game worlds, which ask users to follow the rules of the game, and virtual social worlds, wherein users can behave without rules in almost any way they like” (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010: 59) it is not that I disagree with such definition, but i wish there was a “door” mentioning “flexibility” and “necessity to reassess” what social media is every year, 3 year, 5 years
p. 2 definition what is strategic planning
identify the needs of your target audiences,
identify the ways in which you can meet those needs, and
identify ways to respond confidently and proactively to changesin those needs.
Where the organization is
Where the organization should go
How the organization can get there (McNamara, 2011)
It must be:
Flexible
Based on data
Maintainable
Regularly cared for
covers and confirms my notes to the SCSU library use of its social media:
p. 83 ask uncomfortable questions
in planning, we must be prepared to ask, critically consider and answer questions that make us uncomfortable (not only that I was not let to ask questions, I was ousted from any body that was making decisions regarding social media. I was openly opposed and rebuked for asking why 3 reference librarians will keep the passwords to the account for the library SM)
p. 83 Communicate
If your team communicates honestly and thoroughly, then positive feelings and advocates for your social media endeavors will grow. In the span of 6 months, I had to ask three times where are the notes of the social media committee kept and eventually i will receive an answer, which in it nebulous and apologetic form was practically not an answer.
p. 83 Don’t rush to conclusions
Satisficing often works, but it can also lead to conclusions that are less then optimal. In the fall of 2013, I had to fight an overwhelming majority opposing my proposal that social media needs to include student representation, since SM is about dialog, not broadcasting (see page 86) and the current staff and faculty see SM as another form of broadcasting. In the span of six months, by the summer of 2014 library staff and faculty had fallen in the other extreme, letting one single student run all library SM. That student did/could not have understanding of the scope and goals of the library resulting in satisficing.
p. 84 aim for consensus, but don’t require it Consensus was the leitmotiv of the dean; it failed in general, and it failed in SM.
p. 84 get an external reviewer
p. 84 value and celebrate small success
a strategic plan will be realized through a series of small actions, not one or two pivotal plots.
p. 84 create accountability
p. 86 maintain a consistent tone and brand
visual and tone based consistency. This library DOES maintain consistency by posting Instagram pictures of people covering their faces with books, so part of their face compliments a face on cover of books. It is done by other libraries and it would have been cute and original if not overdone. If the SM activities of a library consist mostly of such activities then the “branding” part definitely is hurt. Yet, the faculty in this library vehemently adhere to “let’s see what other libraries are doing,” but does not understand that it needs further conceptualizing to figure out how to transform into “brand.”
p. 86 capitalize on the strengths of social media
“in many cases, business and libraries use SM exactly as they use their websites: to push content. This has been the main criticism from the start: the three reference librarians holding the passwords to the SM account were using Facebook as a announcement board and kept dormant the other accounts. The resolution of the library faculty who was called to arbitrate the argument with these three librarian: “I don’t understand very well Facebook.” The interim dean, who, subsequently had to resolve this dispute: “I don’t use Facebook.”
p. 87 Metrics
Analyze and tweak plan
measuring success is about maximizing time and efforts, not about laying blame for shortcomings or failures. this applies to daily tasks and responsibilities and shuffling time, but when the organization does not have a clear overarching goal and clear strategy how to achieve it, then issues must be raised up. which leads to:
p. 92 Plan for conversation
the inclusion of conversation. incorporate your patrons as primary content creators (not appointing just a single student worker to broadcast)
p. 92 use SM as an assessment or feedback tool
p. 93 plan to monitor your brand
if you decide to start watching these types of mentions, you’ll want to consider whether you’ll adopt a passive or an active role in responding to them.
This year we’d like to involve a wider segment of the teaching and learning community to help us design the survey. Please join us online for one of two 30-minute discussion sessions:
Sept 14 at 12pm ET OR Sept 15 at 2pm ET
To join, just go to https://educause.acms.com/eliweb on the date and time of the session and join as a guest. No registration or login needed.
From
Mike Caulfield’s Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers
(https://webliteracy.pressbooks.com/)
Fact-Checking Organizations
There are many fact-checking sites outside the U.S. Here is a small sample.