Wondering About Workshops

Like many academic librarians, my colleagues and I teach several drop-in workshops each semester for faculty and staff at the college on topics like citation managers, Google Scholar and other specialized research tools, and instructional web design, among others. I’ve written a couple of times here about these workshops: we consider them to be opportunities for outreach as much as for instruction, though our attendance levels have waxed and waned over the years, leading us to add a workshops by request option for departments or other groups of interested faculty and staff. The latter has been intermittently successful — some semesters we’ve gotten several requests for workshops while others have seen none — though since these workshops can typically be prepped fairly quickly we’ve decided to keep offering them for now.

The past year or so has brought a new twist to our faculty/staff workshops: students! For several of the workshops we’ve offered — most recently one focusing on using ILL and other libraries in New York City to make the most of research beyond our college library — we’ve had one or two students attending as well as faculty and staff. We advertise the workshops on a faculty and staff email list that doesn’t include students, but we also hang posters around campus, which is probably the way students have learned about the workshops (or via our blog or Twitter). We’ve always had plenty of room in the workshops for the students who’ve dropped in and, as far as I know, there haven’t been any problems with the occasional student sitting in on a workshop with faculty and staff.

If there aren’t any problems, what’s to say about it? I keep coming back to thinking about students in the faculty/staff workshops for a couple of reasons. We used to offer drop-in workshops for students, too, but stopped doing so a few years ago because we very rarely had anyone show up. Perhaps it’s time to bring drop-in student workshops (not course-related) back into our instructional mix? One thing to note is that in the past the drop-in student workshops typically covered one resource like Academic Search Complete or LexisNexis, or were much more general workshops on research strategies for students. Maybe the more specific and advanced topics covered in the faculty/staff workshops are more appealing to our students, especially those who’ve already taken English Comp I, which requires a library instruction session?

On the other hand, every workshop requires at least a little bit of prep time, not to mention the time to promote it via email, posters, blogging, and Twitter. Our workshop committee is fairly busy already, so to add workshops that may not be well-attended could be tough.

All of which makes me wonder: if our faculty/staff workshops are not currently overcrowded, and our student workshops were not historically overcrowded, might we consider offering workshops that are open to any member of the college community, faculty, staff, and students alike?

To my knowledge we’ve never done that before. What are the possible ramifications of workshops open to all? Research has shown that interaction between students and faculty outside of the classroom has a positive impact on student engagement (Kuh et al., 2007, Piecing Together the Student Success Puzzle). Could open workshops provide those opportunities? Would faculty be uncomfortable learning something new alongside students, or vice versa? We would probably want to avoid workshop topics focused on developing plagiarism-resistant research assignments or the like, right? Or would there be a benefit to opening up an information literacy workshop pitched at faculty to students, as well?

If you’re offering workshops or other instructional opportunities for faculty, staff, and students to attend together, I’d love to hear about it!

If You Give a Student an iPad…

ACRLog welcomes a guest post from Veronica A. Wells, Access Services/Music Librarian at University of the Pacific. You can find her online at Euterpean Librarian.

If you give a student an iPad…she will ask for Angry Birds. This is one of the many lessons I learned when I handed four students each an iPad at a recent library workshop.

Thanks to a grant awarded to two of my colleagues, my library has had the opportunity to purchase and experiment with iPads for reference and instruction. It was quite entertaining to see the students’ reactions when I told them they would be using the iPads. It was even more entertaining to watch as they effortlessly used the requisite apps and navigated the device.

I attended ACRL’s Immersion Teacher Track Program last summer and I saw several librarians with iPads. I asked them if they were using them for reference and instruction. Most said they weren’t quite sure yet, but that they had been encouraged to experiment. To me, this is a very exciting time. There is no Best Practices with iPads…yet. Right now we are free to make up the rules, fail, and hopefully learn about ourselves, our colleagues, our students, and the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of this new technology. And that’s exactly what we’re doing at my library.

Earlier this month the Chronicle of Higher Education published an article discussing several iPad project presentations held at the annual Educause conference in Philadelphia, entitled Colleges Take Varied Approaches to iPad Experiments, With Mixed Results. None of these projects come from academic libraries, but I am really interested in the ways in which higher education institutions are experimenting with tablets and to see if they might have some advice for academic librarians. For example, Pepperdine University is comparing a group of students using iPads for their coursework to a group using printed books or laptops. According to the researchers, preliminary data shows that the iPad-using students appear to be more engaged with the course material. Perhaps this means that students might be “more engaged” in a library instruction session or a reference interaction when given the opportunity to use a tablet. For more details, check out the Pepperdine iPad Project website.

In my library workshop, we used the iPads with the help of QR Codes (or Quick Response Codes) to get students moving around the library in order to find books, sound recordings, musical scores, Billboard magazine, and the Multimedia Studio. In general, the class was relatively successful and I can’t wait to try it again with a larger group. While students were able to seamlessly and effectively use the iPads and apps, a couple of them struggled when it came to looking up something by call number and finding the music reference area. This fascinated me. Why is it that students can figure out an iPad without much effort, but not the physical library? Are they or is the library to blame? But I wonder if there might be a way for us to rethink our physical space of the library so that it “makes sense” to our digital natives like a tablet or cell phone does. It’s at least making think that I need to relocate the music reference section.

Have you experimented with tablets at your library? How have students reacted?