In the interim, most of my yapping and thinking is taking place on Twitter, where I’m still shinylib.

In an attempt to decrease the number of scheduled classes to which not a soul shows up, the Nursing faculty coordinator contacted me and requested a 6-hour-long drop-in session. I think she figured I could just hang out in my office and get work done until students came. I understand and appreciate her thinking, but few librarians get to spend much time in their offices, really.

So, we are no longer teaching a half day of 2nd year Nursing classes (to which no one shows up). I have yet to hear a confirmation from the NUR coordinator yet, but I think she’ll agree. I have proposed 2 x90min drop-in sessions. They will be on a Friday, which I think is a day that Nursing students don’t have class (that’s a pos and a neg, seriously).

The sessions will be open (no lesson plans) so students should come with questions. At minimum I’ll be prepped to do APA 6, WorldCat Local, and CINAHL updates. I have also invited 1st year Nursing students with the caveat that if we fill-up, computer preference goes to NUR 2 students. We’re totally not going to fill-up but it seems wise to have a plan, just in case.

We are still teaching 1st year Nursing students in September (3x 50min basic overview). That’s a model I think doesn’t work at all. Sure I get that the students need to just know where we are and that we’re around to help, but I have talked to them and they tell me that first day is such a blur for them that it doesn’t really stick. It is literally the first day of the term. They haven’t met their teachers, gotten their assignments, or even focused on the syllabus yet. Understandably, a lot of them don’t think about us again until it’s way too late. I’m  hoping for success with the drop-in model. If successful I will push for only offering combined drop-in sessions in the future. COME IF YOU WANT TO LEARN STUFF. Okay, maybe a bit more focusy than that.

Basically I’m trying to bring down the number of manhours expended on booking NUR classes to which few students show up and those who do retain little. Last year was the student-organized experiment (I think it worked well, I will continue it this year). This year I am replacing the 2nd year student mandatory sessions with drop-ins. In reality, this year I will be offering the same number of hours in the classroom for NUR 2 students, I’m just hoping that the format will actually get more of them in the door. Rather than saying “show up for all 50 of these minutes and learn what some other person thinks you need to know” I’m saying, “show up for some of these 90 minutes and ask me about what you need to know”.

In reality, the timing is still not ideal (late October, NUR 2 assignments are mostly due in the spring). I’m hoping that the open session (lesson planless) will allow students to just come and explore some things that are puzzling them.

Hopefully the 2nd year students were here last year and caught some of the buzz I finally got started amongst last year’s graduating class and are now feeling like they are in a position to take advantage of my services. I don’t know, we’ll find out.

I think there’s still a lot of room for improvement in how I deliver IL instruction to nursing students. I just keep working to understand what the year feels like to them (rather than to their instructors) and how they feel the pacing should go. So far I’m pretty sure that Nursing students would benefit most from seeing me twice a year, but I haven’t quite figured out how to make that work. I do find the whole process of recreating the NUR IL instruction program interesting and I’m hoping that after several years of shifts and changes we’ll eventually get there. This one is definitely a marathon (maybe a triathalon even) and nothing remotely like a sprint. Not that I would know…I won’t even run for the bus.

Well, I do have a little time, so let me say a few things. Midwinter meeting is boring. If no one has come out and told you that yet, let me be the first. It’s expensive and boring and unless you’re on some committee I really wouldn’t bother. At least not for the time being. Because I am on a committee I can tell you that the people at ALA are well aware of our feelings about Midwinter. I think if more of us express ourselves and push for innovation things might change. Either Midwinter will become even less important, relevant, and mandatory or it will open up a space for (more) meaningful dialogue amongst colleagues who seldom get together en masse (for a smaller price, one hopes).

Speaking of meaningful dialogue, I was at several discussion groups at Midwinter. One of them shines in my memory as a glowing example of everything right about discussion groups (more like that and Midwinter might start earning some redemption)—so kudos to Merinda Hensley, Wendy Holliday, and any other ACRL Instruction Section Folks involved in the Pedagogy & Social Technologies (essentially Teaching 2.0) discussion.

2 of the discussions I attended weren’t so special for me. CJCLS Hot Topics is always a good discussion for me, but this time I got an irritating phone call and had to bail to deal with some stuff. Boo. The other discussion I dropped in on after taking care of my phone call really bummed me out. Without getting into funky detail, let’s say that I think the facilitators had a very rigid understanding of the proposed discussion topic and in an attempt to corral people into discussing exactly what they wanted (some survey results) they belittled and restrained the participants.

I could go into greater detail because one of the people made me very cranky, but that really isn’t the point. My point is that the best conversations are organic. Throw a topic out there and see where your participants go with it. That’s how everyone gets to learn something. I hope I remember this when I take over as convener for the ACRL New Members discussion group—this year we discussed the pros and cons of tenure and the various tenure granting institutions. I always love ACRL NMDG, but maybe that’s because I’m a new academic librarian. Relevance is tasty.

Anyway. Today I taught for four hours, had ninety minutes worth of meetings, failed to eat any food whatsoever, drank three cups of tea and a diet Dr. Pepper, and um…some other stuff I can’t recall.

Lather, rinse, repeat. That’s pretty much how it goes most days. I’ll try to come up with a more interesting way to frame that next time.

In lieu of belated resolutions or some sort of similar post, I’m going to give a list of things I hope not to do this year. Some of them are totally self-explanatory, others I hope to get back to in greater depth…

What I hope not to do in the remaining months of 2009:

• fix or explain printer errors
• prep for classes I’m not actually teaching
• micro-manage the handouts/instructional resources
• work egregious amounts of undeclared overtime
• imply that the user has done something wrong when the experience has an unexpected outcome
• keep all of that crap in my inbox—or any other folders
• attempt to do so many things at one time
• give away so much of my time to library-related causes outside of work
• do so little for my community
• totally neglect my hobbies
• fail to read for pleasure
• rely on my memory to track my ideas and inspirations
• dread that peer reviewed teaching thing we have to do
• have so many unfinished drafts hanging around
• engage in a futile battle of shushing with students on the first floor
• allow students to trample the customer rights of other students
• a lot more, I’m sure…

What is it about this idea of obvious that is so appealing and yet so unattainable in general?

Clearly whomever chose our signage thought it was obvious at the time. Even I thought the signage was fairly straightforward until very recently. One day I was trying to see our library through someone else’s eyes and I realized that our signage is mostly gray. The walls in the library are gray. There are gray cement supports running throughout the library. Perhaps our gray on gray on gray scheme is not especially obvious. It’s more like camouflage in fact. We do have an especially snazzy bright red floor, but alas our signage is not on the floor. (Although a colleague recently suggested we mark out on the floor routes to the obvious locations in the library—printers. copiers, reference, etc.—in the fashion of hospitals [and prisons]. I love this idea!)

It used to be that when I would design a handout or class exercise or whatever I would try to expose the students to detail—not the obvious stuff that anyone could notice. Now I do just the opposite. I take everything my training has taught me is obvious (sure, it’s obvious to most librarians) and strive to call attention to it in a way that is easy to understand and makes sense to the students in the context of their assignments.

In a larger sense I wonder if there is anything that is truly apparent or obvious—or is everything bound to be subjective forever?

Links to online materials via delicious
http://delicious.com/assessment4librarians

UW Information Literacy blog
http://uwinfolit.blogspot.com/

I know that Trinity has Blood on the Stacks and UF has Bioactive and while those are really cool projects, they don’t quite strike the tone I’d hope for. I also don’t necessarily see directed gaming as the way to go (although I am pushing hard for a finals week gaming throwdown at the library, completely study break and non-academic). ARGs in and of themselves are very cool, but largely known for their usage in viral marketing campaigns.

I think the thing about viral marketing is that it is exciting for a short time but largely lacking in staying power. After all, viral or not, it’s still marketing. As Kevin Marks and Brian Oberkirch have both pointed out—the future is organic, not viral. These two are also a big part of the reason I’m thinking about unmarketing these days. Well, these guys and Pabst Brewing Company.

The way I see the outreach struggle is this: the people who come to you are already predisposed to want to be in your space. The people who need you to connect to them are generally not thinking about you, your space or how either might be a benefit. Who do those people think of most frequently? The people who are up in their spaces.

This is where those wacky Pabst guys come in. They have gotten a lot of attention lately for their “unmarketing” scheme, which really consists of just being in the places their intended market likes to be. You want to sell to young hipsters who bowl? Go be at young hip bowling alleys. Eventually, later at the grocery on a Friday night, the bowling hipster will remember their association with PBR and buy some. This is an extremely oversimplified view of how this unmarketing thing works, but there you have it. I think I will have to do more reading to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the whole thing. Brand Hijack has been strongly recommended.

So how do we do this at PCC? I suppose first we have to figure out where our target market likes to be and when it is appropriate to go be there too. I’ve tried some limited electronic forays into this world, but somewhat predictably, no one on Facebook really cares that we’re there. Sigh, does this mean I have to attend a sporting event??? Maybe this will provide more backing to my belief that we should get that ice cream or hot dog cart goin’.