Wrapping up

It’s always a bit sad to leave conference. You make new friends, see old friends, and generally have a sleepaway camp feel about the whole event. At least that’s how I feel about the time spent.

Yesterday I went to the ACRL Science and Technology section (STS) program on innovation in science learning and the ACRL President’s Program. The President’s program speaker, Dan Ariely, was really interesting. So much so, in fact, that I was motivated to buy his new book. I’ve never really done much thinking from the behavioral economist perspective and his talk was quite fascinating. For me, the biggest Ah Ha! was related to the idea of free and what that means to people. Dan suggested that if a person buy’s a gym membership, but fails to use it, you motivate them to come back by reminding them that they are ripping themselves off each month for $__. In the library environment we tend to remind people ad nauseum that what we are providing is free. So, rather than emphasizing that the students have access to x number of databases for free, we need to emphasize that x  percentage of their tuition is spent on databases and they are in fact wasting $__ by not using them. Or something that that effect, he does a much better job with it.

Ironically, this is similar to something I do in the classroom all the time—and I was worried I was doing it wrong. I tell students all the time that our resources are incredibly expensive, certainly not free, and mostly paid for by them. I just don’t emphasize that they are losing out in a financial sense if they don’t use them.

The STS program was interesting although I felt that Felice Frankel, the first presenter, did not have anything for me that I could apply in the library or classroom. She’s the author of several books and is a well-known scientific image creator/photographer. It seemed the session was largely intended to promote her new book of scientific images. The imagery is stunning, don’t get me wrong, and even the concepts around science instruction. I guess I was just missing the bits on science and IL instruction—on a community college library budget. Here’s what there is from my sparse notes…

Visually Representing Science: More Than Pretty Pictures
Felice Frankel “That which we know we have first seen!” Goethe, 1798

Making a visual representation clarifies.

  • A representation is a visual expression that re-presents, translates, interprets. (the representation is not the thing itself)

Make me look!

  • You want your learner to think, “I don’t know what that is,” but hopefully the image will make the learner want to know
  • sometimes the aesthetic is what clarifies (blue green soft lithography example)

What is it that you want me to see?

  • the image can be the data (J. phys. chem. cover image)
  • images alow the viewer to gather the info more readily

Finding the abstraction

  • edit out the stuff that is unnecessary
  • there is more than one point of view to what is going on—which one can show well with images

Go beyond your first attempt
The power of the visual metaphor

  • having a library which can explain these concepts visually can be tremendously exciting and powerful

Maintaining the integrity of the science

  • (be careful not to remove integral data via enhancement)
  • always tell the viewer what has been manipulated
  • sometimes the manipulated image is more true to the science

Rocksbury Community College Picturing to Learn program
http://picturingtolearn.org