Hey folks. I kind of missed the month of May. After my 3 conferences in 30 days palooza I got back to work just in time to pack up my office and move to a new building. I got unpacked (mostly) just in time for all the projects I’ve been trying to put together to magically all come together on the same day. Seriously. Weeks/months of planning and I got emails from all the contact folks of all the projects within 36 hours of each other.
Right now I’m doing a lot of prep work for fall instruction sessions and focusing on outreach with student groups. I do have one IL session scheduled so far for summer school. Which is good, because this fall there are 56 sections of the class that we do the most IL sessions with.
I’ve been thinking about some new (well new to us) models of instruction for the fall. I usually have the 50-minute one-shot sessions (although sometimes I get a T/Th class so I get 75 minutes). I know some people don’t like those, but I do and think they can be beneficial if you design them carefully. However, I don’t believe that it is enough. Call my crazy, but I think students need to think about the library for more than 50 minutes in 4 years. I went to the Off-campus library services conference in my beloved Cleveland, Ohio (#2 of the 3 conferences in 30 days palooza). I figure that I probably won’t be able to convince all 56 sections of the class I work with to come into the library, let alone to come in more than once, and even if they wanted to I’m not sure we’d be able to (sanely) support that. So I decided to head up to The Cleve and learn ways of connecting with students online from the distance ed experts. It was neat. The folks from ANTS were there. I love that they’re making the conference rounds. I’ve already sent tutorial links to my favorite college student, and my coworkers at another one of our libraries. Fantastic!
The OCLS conference presenters had a lot of student feedback about learning objects and LibGuides. Don’t you love it when other people do research and publish it so you can learn from their experiences don’t need to start from scratch every time? (I *hate* the phrase “reinvent the wheel”) The conference proceedings are phone book thick (luckily our travel folks signed me up for the digital version – thanks y’all!) so there is a lot of material to wade through, but it’s full text searchable in Acrobat which helps so much.
This is the point of the post where I would usually insert some relevant song lyrics or a movie quote, but I’m listening to Yo-Yo Ma play the first movement of Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E minor, Op. 85. Yeah, y’all didn’t think I was cultured, did you? 😉 Ooh and now my shuffle has steered me to Radiohead’s “Punchup at a Wedding”. Good stuff!