2/15/13

I went and I was a presenter at the conference. My colleague Claver Hategekimana and I presented Getting Students Ready for Distance Learning.
The keynote speaker, Virginia Eubanks, was very interesting; I really didn’t get her connection to libraries. However, it hit close to home as I see my daughter and her little family work their butts off and still remain below the poverty level. I see them getting slapped around by the very systems that are supposed to help them. I am sending her the information that I received about Our Knowledge, Our Power (OKOP) and hopefully it will help her and her family.

I attended Mobile Stats Are Not Enough: What Do Mobile Library Site Users Actually Do? Elena summed it up very well. I will be talking with our electronic services librarian about responsive design because we were getting ready to go mobile. This was very timely for me.
No One is Leaving Without You . . . or Me Knowing: Interactive Classroom - Assessment Techniques (iCATs) Using Clicker Technology - Dale Vidmar, Information Literacy and Instruction Librarian, Southern Oregon University Hannon Library. My niece is attending SOU, she started in the fall and I was giving her first year tips. One of the tips was find a librarian and make that person your go to for information, any information. We looked the librarians up online and if I have a doppelganger librarian Dale is the one. So of course I had to attend his presentation. I have clickers for my classroom and I use them for the gullibility test, and for voting on topics. I learned several other ways that I can incorporate their use into classes for the on the spot assessment. I know this will help with some of the glazed over looks because it will reset the 10 minute attention clock. I am looking forward to implementing some of these new techniques.
Worth a Thousand Words: Infographics for Librarians - Michele DeSilva, Emerging Technologies Librarian, Central Oregon Community College. I liked this presentation because I thought the only way to get infographics is commercially. It is nice to know a person can make them themselves. I am a data-dork and feel infographics is a wonderful way to present all that data. Michele gave us some helpful websites and many good pointers on design. I will probably try and put some together after we get the results of our library survey.
Lighting Talks: Quick, informative, quick. Taking the 3x 5 card sort study online – seemed like a good idea if you are going to have a user group categorize info. Seemed easy enough to do.
Ditching Kindles- Good information. Suggested that if you don’t have kindles you may want to by-pass kindles go straight to tablets.
Technology Bar – A petting zoo for technology if you will. We have been contemplating such a petting zoo for a while now. This presentation may give me the shove needed to proceed past the thinking stage. There were a couple more but…

Barbara Oldham
Wenatchee Valley College
Librarian

2/14/13

Hi all:

I attended Online NW, also, and actually went to most of the same sessions as Adrienne. Thanks, Adrienne, for providing such  good summaries of them – and links!

There were a lot of very practical “take aways” from the sessions.  I loved the “Choose Your Own  Screencast” session that Adrienne wrote about, and will look into using the YouTube Annotations feature for future tutorials. The session on providing faculty with incentives for use and creation of OERs was also really excellent and relevant, especially in light of my work with Open Course Library and on my campus, trying to encourage faculty to use OERs.

One session I attended that Adrienne didn’t was about designing a library mobile website.  The title was Mobile Stats Are Not Enough: What Do Mobile Library Site Users Actually Do? By Hannah Gascho Rempel and Laurie Bridges, both of OSU.  They shared usage statistics and also the results of questionnaires that showed them how their users use the mobile version of their site.  It was really interesting. Top two things people looked up on mobile site?  Library hours and trying to find a way to reserve study rooms online.  They also discussed using the results of their research to redesign their site.  Instead of having to design a separate site for mobile devices, they are going with “Responsive Design” where they can design their main library website and the responsive design elements will automatically reformat and reorganize the page so that it will optimize for mobile devices.  No more having to maintain two separate websites.  This interested me a lot because Skagit has just released our new  college site  with Responsive Design elements and I’m in the process of redesigning our library’s site in that vein.  The link to their presentation is above.  Check it out.  Really interesting.

That’s about it.  As usual, I found that this conference was well worth it.  Let me know if you have any questions or need more details…

Elena Bianco
Norwood Cole Library
Skagit Valley College
elena.bianco@skagit.edu

2/13/13

Why, yes, I did! Thank you for asking. J

Overall: I always enjoy this conference and feel like even if I don’t immediately take something back and start doing it, I learned a lot.

Here is the link to programs: http://www.ous.edu/onlinenw/2013/program.html

I’m just going to list the title and presenter of the ones I saw and you can look at the program for the official description.

Keynote address with Virginia Eubanks. This was interesting and she is a good speaker. I didn’t feel it had much to do with my library, but it was fascinating.

Session 1: “Choose Your Own Screencast: How to Reach All Skill Levels Using Screenflow and Youtube Annotations” Stephen X. Flynn, Emerging Technologies Librarian, The College of Wooster

This was great. I really enjoyed his style and he spoke about video tutorials in a “choose your own adventure” format. This basically meant making it so it’s pieced where people can skip stuff they know and get to the stuff they need to learn. He talked about how to put together a good quality video tutorial (relevant to the LSTA COIL projects some of us are working on right now!) and I really felt like his guidelines made sense. Not just ‘it’s better this way’ but WHY is it better or easier. I like that.

Session 2: “API Hackery: Customizing Your Users' Experience Using APIs” Nicholas Schiller, Systems and Instruction Librarian, Washington State University Vancouver Here’s the link to his presentation.

This fell into the ‘learned stuff but not really going to do it’ category. I learned about API’s and that maybe I don’t want to learn some java coding to do it. Even if it’s easy.

Session 3: “Librarians Are the Gateway: Academic Social Media Applications for Scholars” Lorin Flores, Information Literacy Coordinator/Reference Librarian, Lisa Ancelet, Head of Reference, Terrence Edwards, Reference/Instruction Librarian, Alkek Library, Texas State University-San Marcos. Here is their reference list.

I hadn’t heard of a lot of the academic social media sites they mentioned, so this was new territory. (for example Mendeley and arXiv.org) Also the discussion on altmetrics (altmetrics.org) was fascinating. They also used pollev.com to get responses from the audience via text message. That was cool.

Session 4: “Ditching Textbooks: The OER Faculty Fellowship at Lane Community College” Jen Klaudinyi, Reference and Instruction Librarian and Faculty Technology Specialist, Lane Community College. It’s not linked from the program but here’s her blog.
This is something we have talked a lot about here in Washington, so not much new. However, the model she is using, offering incentives(student funded) for instructions to convert to OER and the semi- class-like setting to focus them on the conversion sound promising. The trick is to keep the incentives available! Since their focus was lowering costs to student, the student government put up money (I can’t remember the source) to offer iPads to faculty that converted.

The lightning talks were just that- fast and then over. I don’t remember as much about them as I should, but by then it was late in the day. Sorry.

I’d be happy to elaborate if needed or answer specific questions about anything I attended.

Adrienne Roush
Librarian
John Spellman Library
Grays Harbor College
aroush@ghc.edu