The future is a visual place. The media is dominated by image-based sharing. Carefully designed ads and brands are constantly bombarding us. Such a visually stimulated world raises important questions about visual literacy but it also asks questions about how libraries are communicating without words. What do our materials and use of images say about us? How are we engaging our communities with intentional graphic design?
This session will begin with basic graphic design principles and apply them to various print and electronic materials with the purpose of effectively communicating messages and engaging with communities. Emphasis will be placed on the practical considerations of the design process, software choices, where to find useful materials for including in designs, and places to be inspired. Attendees will leave with many free resource suggestions and an understanding of how to use design principles to create all kinds of materials from handouts and event posters to infographics and syllabi.
I like to say that I'm a librarian moonlighting as a musician. I live and work in the Adirondack Park of upstate New York. I connect people with ideas through music, information, and good design. I’m passionate about opening doors for my community by encouraging curiosity, exploration... Read More →
Learn why 25 iPad apps have been designated as the Best for Teaching and Learning by a group of AASL practitioners. In addition to the 25, additional outstanding apps in these categories will be identified: Books, STEM, Organization and Management, Social Sciences, and Content Creation. How do you find the appropriate apps for your classroom now that Apple has over a million iPad apps in their App store? Connie will share her favorite app review sites.
How is teaching informational literacy different with digital natives? This session moves beyond "How to teach an information literacy class 101", and focuses on issues specifically related to teaching information literacy to students who do not remember a time without Google. Utilizing a mixture of research and experience, practical ideas that can be used in a variety of ways will be presented. Attendees with learn how to enhance their own strengths in order to keep their own digital natives engaged and learning during information literacy sessions. With the right skills, you can turn a student's question from "can't I just Google it?" into "can you help me find a scholarly article for my paper?". This session is targeted for academic librarians, but all are welcome!
This session is for beginners who are interested in learning APIs or want to know what an API is. It will answer questions such as what is an API? How do APIs work? What are the advantages of APIs? The session will also show basic codes to get information (book cover, summary, review etc.) from Syndetics, basic codes to retrieve item information using Sirsi web services, basic codes to search Amazon's database and what we are doing with the returned result. If time permits, I will show how we are using the API to integrate novelist features into our catalog.
Games can be a fun way to involve your students and library users in library instruction. They can engage a learner’s internal motivation and encourage them to direct their own learning experience. But putting together a library learning game can be a daunting prospect. Many examples of learning games in the profession are built using specialized coding language and/or IT assistance. This session will present a model for making a learning game using Google tools – no coding or technical expertise required. The presenter will share his experience creating an online, asynchronous database scavenger hunt game as a professional development tool for library staff. Attendees will gain ideas for using the strategies and tools described to create engaging games for their learners.
Matt is an Associate Director at Minitex, where he works with colleagues on statewide e-resource programs like ELM and AskMN, cooperative purchasing of e-resources and library products, and high density library storage.
Learning citation styles is often both a painful and passive experience for students involving reading style guides or viewing tutorials. The underlying motivation is not to learn to cite correctly, but to solve the problem of finding the right example to copy, a situation whose stress is often intensified when done at the point of need shortly before an assignment is due. Some online citation style guides or “machines” are interactive to the extent that students fill in the information for their material and a computer program automatically generates the citation. In both instances, the “learn by doing” approach coupled with an absence of authentic instruction results in minimal learning and maximal frustration. Good instructional design is anchored in sound pedagogical principles and is goal driven. Employing a constructivist approach, two faculty librarians at the University of South Dakota identified objectives for developing a citation style lesson. First, the lesson needs to be as interactive as possible. Second, the student must produce the outcome. Third, multiple intelligence learning styles need to be supported throughout the instruction. Fourth, the lesson needs to be flexible in both how it is used and in the kinds of citation style formats that are supported. Fifth, feedback needs to be immediate. The presenters are currently developing Learn2Cite™ to address these objectives. By identifying the basic building blocks of citations and having students manipulate these blocks as they work to form complete and properly organized citations, active learning is achieved. Linguistic intelligence, visual or spatial intelligence, and tactile or bodily-kinesthetic intelligences are all in play as students interact with the lessons. Learn2Cite™ can be configured as a self-paced, stand-alone tutorial and can be used for in-classroom demonstrations. This session will include demonstrations of the on-line tutorial and in-classroom uses.
Many libraries have been using social media for years while others are just now entering the world of fans, followers, likes, and pins. But is social media worth the time and effort? How do you assess the return on investment? At one academic library, social media has recently become a point of emphasis with Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest teams formed to communicate about the library and to engage library users in conversation. This presentation will focus on how that library developed a social media assessment plan to determine the benefits of this work outweigh the cost in time. An assessment plan provides a pathway to follow to decide if the work that is being done is effective and to identify action steps if the work is not effective. The payoff for a social media assessment plan is better usage of personnel resources. The presentation will conclude with tips for libraries to start assessing their social media usage.
Currently, Minnesota State University, Mankato (MSU) Memorial Library's social media presence is shared by a committee. Members of the committee follow a six-day schedule where each day is assigned to a particular member. That member is responsible for the posts and Tweets of the day that correspond to the day's theme. This lightning talk is designed to highlight a project that was created for use with the library's social media presence to boost student involvement with MSU Memorial Library’s Facebook and Twitter pages. We will also discuss our library’s experience using Facebook ads. Every Fashionable Friday, the library’s social media sites (Facebook and Twitter) featured a photograph of a student with impeccable taste in fashion, along with their name, year, and major. We wanted to see if showcasing a student would boost our Likes and Retweets and ultimately improve our social media presence. In our talk we will present our library's social media process, our Fashionable Friday project, our Facebook ADventure, and evaluate our success rate.
Come and get a lightning overview of streaming video options for libraries. What options currently exist? Who sells streaming video? What are the norms? How does a streaming license differ from a DVD purchase? Does copyright fair use ever apply? Leave understanding the basics of selecting and licensing streaming video.
Media Services & Interlibrary Loan Librarian, Minnesota State University, Mankato
Barb has been a librarian at Minnesota State University Mankato for twenty years. Her primary area is the video collection, with additional responsibilities as Public Access library (circulation, interlibrary loan, equipment services) and with the K-12 education collections.
The McMaster University Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship provides pedagogical, research, and infrastructure support for people interested in the digital humanities. To support them and amuse us, we built out an unusual small makerspace where we do hardware reclamation, soldering, project buildouts, 3d printing, and other things. This session will explore why you might want to do something similar, how you'd go about doing it, and potential problems you might find along the way.
Jen Legatt has been a Tech Integrationist and a Library Media Specialist for over 15 years. She has worked in 1:1 environments in both high school and middle school. Jen currently is the Library Media Specialist at Jackson Middle School in the Anoka Hennepin District. In this role... Read More →
During the summer of 2013, Cook Library equipped a new library instruction classroom with 30 Apple iPads for student use during information literacy instruction sessions. The library aimed to capitalize on the potential mobile technology represents in the future of education through engaging students in active learning and promoting creative instruction. However, as the devices arrived, a staff survey revealed that the majority of instruction librarians felt uneasy about planning information literacy instruction for an iPad-equipped classroom. At Cook Library, we responded to this challenge through building a low-stakes, high support-peer learning network. This support has included the creation of an iPad teaching circle and discussion group, organizing an “iPads for Librarians” professional development program, and biannual iPad teaching demonstrations. This lightning talk will use Cook Library’s case study to illustrate easy steps libraries can take to create a community of practice around new technology initiatives to maximize impact and empower staff.