More powerpoint adventures (or not!)

Inspired by the old ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ (CYOA) books which we all read in our youth (didn’t we?), the idea behind the CYOA power-points is to empower the user by giving him choices about what he wants to learn, and to do this in an interactive way in order to facilitate engagement.

This is far more difficult than it sounds for information literacy-type areas. Firstly, the subject matter is pretty dry - its difficult enough to generate enthusiasm when you have a face-to-face ‘information literacy’ class and have the best jokes and props to hand, so to try and generate interest on a standalone power-point is a challenge that we still have to conquer. Also, in my experience classroom sessions work best when run within their subject context, drawing on meaningful subject examples and especially when you tackle their forthcoming essay question ! – to tailor a CYOA powerpoint essentially means starting from scratch and is pretty resource-intensive.

Secondly, it is actually far harder to create one of these adventures than it first seems. A 3-choice, 20-30 slide CYOA power-point takes at least a day to create. This is because the whole slide show needs to be meticulously mapped out before-hand: one extra explanatory slide in the presentation can put the whole adventure out and 100+ links will need amending.

Hopefully these problems can be mitigated by adding colour, pictures and possibly even sound to enliven the adventure. Part of our project is about learning what works well as an RLO and what doesn’t, and we will certainly be evaluating this in more detail.

If you have had experience creating CYOA powerpoints, we’d be interested to hear from you!

Podcasting fun

We’ve heard a lot about pod-casting over the last year and Nancy and I spent a fun afternoon yesterday recording 2 for this project:

1) An audio induction to the library. This concentrates on the key messages we want to get across and we hope that in time it will reduce the need for doing endless tours and induction talks. A recent survey at Birmingham found that over half of our students now have ipods / MP3 players so it makes sense to start using this technology.

2) An audio guide to our elibrary service. This is our flagship service, providing access to all of our electronic journals and databases. Although use of this is high, there are still many students who use Google as a first port of call, so the idea of this podcast is to make elibrary use as simple and useful as possible to capture these students. We hope that students might listen to this while on their home PC and beginning to explore what’s available.

We will be recording our third podcast next week:

3) The student experience. Thanks to the Guild Officers who have agreed to participate and have some great tips for making best use of the library. Surveys have found that students are most likely to seek help from their friends / fellow students, so it makes sense to capture this and use it to promote the library / information literacy.
We’re using Camtasia software for this and learning it as we go along – quite a task and many a botched recording on the way! The software is really quite advanced so we hope to explore this further later in the term and enhance some of our recordings with music and better editing etc. We both love exploring new technology, but its important not to under-estimate the time it takes to really master and make best use of this type of software. The final challenge is how to make these downloadable from WebCT, so our next task is to consult with our elearning team to check this out.

There is a need for information literacy!

Even though I was in the process of painting my bathroom last Thursday, I still had time (during a tea break) to read a very interesting article in The Guardian Technology section (http://technology.guardian.co.uk/weekly/story/0,,1861112,00.html) about web searching habits. It seems that the first result on any search engine will get 42.1% of click throughs, meaning that web searchers have so much faith in the search engine coming up with the goods that they'll trust that top result. But does it mean, the author asks, that the top result contains factual information?

This is the problem that many of us librarians face when delivering information skills training to students. As I stand in front of 400 new medical students on the 2nd of October my main message will be "Don't click the first result!!". I will be using exercises and problem based learning to teach them how to find good quality information on the web.

And so with our RLOs. These useful little tools will also help to increase awareness about the importance of information literacy. To evaluate the information they find as well as how to reference it correctly are still vital skills for students. A colleague of mine today returned from a meeting of academics who are creating a set of classes on reading, comprehending and evaluating academic papers. We can slot into this training and support our academics with online courses, face to face sessions and electronic RLOs. We can use articles like the one in The Guardian to promote our services to those who know that there is an information skills gap.

RLOs on the web

As part of this BRUM (Birmingham Re-Usable Materials) project, we conducted a brief audit into materials already available.

A key player in this area is obviously the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) in Re-Usable Learning Objects, led by London Metropolitan University, in partnership with the Universities of Nottingham and Cambridge. www.rlo-cetl.ac.uk Although still at an early stage in their development their site already contains some relevant information literacy materials such as an interactive referencing RLO and there are RLOs for reflective writing and qualitative and quantitative research etc.

JORUM www.jorum.ac.uk is also beginning to take off, as a national repository of academic-quality re-usable materials. There are a number of information-literacy type materials in JORUM and we be adding our own RLOs to this.

Personally, I also really like the idea of Cardiff’s Information Literacy Resource Bank https://ilrb.cf.ac.uk/ and the way they are encouraging academics to utilise their materials in their VLE.

Less-reusable (as they are institution-specific) but good examples of the use of technology for induction and information literacy, are the Sheffield ipod tour http://www.lbasg.group.shef.ac.uk/downloads/index.html and the Warwick Learning Grid recording http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/study/grid/users/firsttime/
We are particularly interested in their use of peer-to-peer support and learning and one of our own RLOs will include students’ own perspectives on what is important in the library.

There are certainly many more good examples. If you know of any useful information literacy Re-Usable Learning Objects or innovative use of technology in this area, please do post a comment / get in touch.

Choose your own library adventure

Here at the University of Birmingham, Ann-Marie James and myself, of the Academic Liaison and Collection Development department of Information Services, have bid successfully for a research grant from Eduserv to do a project on creation, use and impact of a suite of electronic reusable learning objects (RLOs) to help students with their information skills. For example, we've created a Turning Point interactive quiz on basic referencing.

We've got some academics on board who will pilot the RLOs in their lectures etc. in the autumn term and we're going to put on focus groups and have pre and post RLO questionnaires to find out how useful they are.

We've created quite a few of the fifteen RLOs (3 versions of 5 different type) and it's been a steep learning curve using some of the software.

There are Captivate demos, Turning Point interactive quizzes, choose your own adventure PowerPoints, digital recordings using Camtasia and Captivate and mp3 Podcasts using Camtasia and iTunes.

There is still a long to do list. I've just jotted down some ideas for the publicity material, to go into our divisional newsletter etc. , scripting the next digital recording and meeting with the project officer to check we're doing everything correctly. There will be updates as and when exciting things happen.

Here we are embracing technology! - Nancy on the left, Ann-Marie on the right.