It looks like there is a great turnout for the ACRL/CNI/EDUCAUSE joint virtual conference. Yesterday afternoon I led a session on Blended Librarianship with my colleague John Shank of Penn State University. I thought we’d have about 25 attendees. At one point we had 120 individuals in our virtual presentation area which is close to the record for any virtual program in which I’ve participated. Looking over the attendee profiles on the discussion board it looks like this is the first virtual conference for many of the participants. John and I have been big supporters of virtual conferencing since we began delivering workshops in the virtual environment.
In the afternoon I joined another heavily-attended session on an information literacy collaboration at Waterloo University by Laura Briggs and James Skidmore. Briggs is the librarian and Skidmore is a German professor. Although Waterloo does not have a curriculum wide information literacy initiative at this time, Briggs and Skidmore’s collaboration was a great example of how student research skills can be improved when faculty and librarians work together. The two showed good examples of how information literacy education was integrated into the course – primarily in the course’s ANGEL site – and their attempts to assess student learning about research skills. In some ways, the were disappointed that the students didn’t learn quite as much as they had hoped. Several attendees made good comments on the chat board about how difficult it is to teach these skills in a way that students are able to retain them (in this example the students had no direct instruction from the librarian but learned mostly from canned search examples). One consideration is that in this class of juniors, the librarian and faculty member may have had high expectations, but in the absence of a tiered, curriculum-wide information literacy initiative, can you really expect the students to internalize database specifics, the searching mechanics, and strategy techniques in a single course. It really needs to be developed over time. Information literacy, from my perspective, happens over the full four years of a student’s academic career. Still, this was a great example of librarian-faculty collaboration. I was impressed that Skidmore actually got involved with Briggs because he was concerned about the poor quality of his students’ research. We need more of this type of thinking and action from our faculty.
Today looks like a great schedule of events as well. I will hope to report on a few more programs – and I hope as well, that ACRL, CNI, and EDUCAUSE will make this a regular event. One improvement that we could use – there needs to be more faculty, information technologists, and other academic support professionals in attendance. Did CNI and EDUCAUSE promote this conference to their members? If not, ACRL needs to get them involved in promoting this event.
Have there been any thoughts to making the virtual conference free?
Well, I hope your comment gets back to the acrl folks. Some librarians would like this to be free. I do know there are costs associated with putting on a conference like this, and keep in mind that ACRL is likely going to use any money earned for good causes – like scholarships to the ACRL conference in 2007, grants to chapters, and so on. I will see if someone from ACRL can comment.
I think we should separate out the idea of charging in order to re-coup costs and charging in order to fund other initiatives. ACRL could do the first without doing the later.