things i'd really like to do

about me, blogeverydayofjune 11 Responses »
Jun 052011

If there was nothing stopping me, I would do many things.

I’d sleep until noon on a Sunday, just once.

I’d spend an entire day watching episode after episode of Colin and Justin’s Home Heist, Divine Designs, Property Ladder, Relocation Relocation and Grand Designs.

I’d cook a gourmet dinner every night.

I’d have a crafternoon with my friends at least once a month.

I’d make jewelry to go with all the new outfits I bought a couple of weeks back.

I’d read until the piles of books-on-loan and books-I-want-to-read dwindle to nothing.

I’d have a pedicure every weekend.

I’d start every day building tunnels and houses with my nephew while my niece knocks them down.

I’d have clean sheets on my bed every night.

I’d ban Fireman Sam from ever seeing the light of day in my house again.

I’d spend at least one day a week catching up with dear friends, like Lissy.

I’d write a children’s book and sweet talk a lovely friend into doing the drawings.

I’d add a trip to the Netherlands on the end of my forthcoming UK trip, and spend the whole time indulging my love of Dutch painting.

I’d only use Narciso Rodriguez shower gel.

I’d learn how to use my grandmother’s beautiful mahjong set – or re-learn.

I’d build myself a simple life, but ultimately, one not too different from the one I have now. Just with more time for friends, family and fun.

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redefining the ingredients in blended learning: blending synchronous and asynchronous activities

blogeverydayofjune 4 Responses »
Jun 052011

[First: a disclaimer. I am still very green in terms of my experience as an educator. What follows are my impressions of blended learning, which have been formed through my limited experience as an educator and my ponderings on how to get the right mix for online students. These are not necessarily a reflection of my institution's philosophy on blended learning, nor are they necessarily indicative of the approach taken in the course I teach into.]

I’m in the midst of writing a paper on one aspect of a large blended learning research project I’ve been working on for about the last 18 months. The paper looks at our experience at QUT in teaching a dual mode cohort (both online and face-to-face) while aiming to realise the benefits of blended learning.

And I’ve been thinking: what is blended learning for wholly online students? If we can never see those students face-to-face, what ingredient should replace that face-to-face interaction in the blended learning mix? For lots of institutions, lecture capture has been the answer to that question. I’m not convinced lecture capture is the answer – at least not in isolation.

These days, I aim to teach face-to-face classes that require student participation. Instead of telling students how it is, I prefer to work with students as they figure out how things work. Class time is for engaging in activities and discussions and hearing from guest speakers. With this approach, recording the lecture does not necessarily allow the online students to realise the same learning outcomes as the students who were physically in the room (although they may indeed walk away with the same content knowledge).

More and more, I’ve been wanting to replace the term ‘face-to-face’ with ‘synchronous’. Rather than seeing my students in the flesh, I think it is, in fact, more relevant to say that I want to be in a ‘ teaching space’ with them at a single point in time – whether that space is a physical or virtual one is largely irrelevant. If I think back to the activities I’ve run in face-to-face classes this semester, I can’t think of one that wouldn’t have been possible to run via Elluminate. Some of them may even have been easier to facilitate and more meaningful in that environment.

For me, blended learning is more about mixing synchronous learning (technology assisted or face-to-face) with asynchronous activities (predominantly [but not necessarily exclusively] online), than it is about mixing face to face and online. And this means that online students can engage in a blended learning experience without ever setting foot on campus.

But what drives students to select online courses rather than face-to-face courses? I’m aware that geographic distance from campus is only one contributing factor. For many online students, it is simply not possible to be in a single place – any place, campus or a home study – at a predetermined time. This means that it might be as difficult for an online student to attend a class in Elluminate as it is to come into campus for a class.

Where does that leave blended learning? Are educators chasing an unattainable dream by trying to achieve blended learning for online cohorts? Or do we need to rethink the balance between flexibility and learning outcomes? Are there any learning outcomes that can’t be realised through asynchronous interaction?

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voiceless

blogeverydayofjune 2 Responses »
Jun 022011

[Update: I'm calling this week and my state of being my "fug of sick". Just in case you were wondering.]

I woke up this morning and it seemed I had misplaced my voice. And I don’t just mean my voice is croaky. I mean it’s gone completely about 80% of the time. If I give it a rest for a couple of hours I seem to be able to squeak a few sentences out, but then I can actually feel my vocal chords clanging around in my throat (well, I imagine I can, anyway!).

Problematic. Voice is kind of the essential tool of a lecturer. It’s also pretty necessary for wrangling two year old twins, taking phone calls, and even for telling the doctor what’s wrong with you.

Alas, voiceless I am.

The last time I lost my voice was… hmmm… maybe 2003. And I distinctly remember it taking weeks to come back. Obviously, with the month I’ve got ahead of me, I kinda need it back on the double.

I’ve been sick now for six days, which is fairly unusual for me. I get my fair share of colds, but usually manage to work through them and come out the other side pretty quickly. This time, I’ve been hit fairly hard. I’ve had several false starts – I keep thinking I’m getting better, then it all goes down hill again.

I am terrible at being sick. I really suck at resting. I bore ridiculously easily. I get frustrated when I’m too tired to work. I am just not good at being idle. Or, more to the point, my brain rarely *is* idle, so when my body decides it has to be, I get frustrated that I can’t keep up my usual pace. And I stress about all the things I’m not doing. I am just really, really annoying when I’m unwell, and perhaps more so to myself than anyone else. Or at least I’d like to think that. My family would probably tell a completely different story.

And on that note, I’m off to find someone to give me some sympathy… just need to find a notepad on which to write out my woes to secure optimum mollycoddling.

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on june, and change

blogeverydayofjune 7 Responses »
Jun 012011

So let’s face it: I’m a crap blogger who, even though she finds her mojo, is incapable of hanging onto it. And yet here I am again, committing to blog everyday in June.

This is possibly even more unrealistic a goal than it was last year. This June, I have an incredibly full schedule. Besides the usual semester one wrap up and hibernation-inducing onslaught of marking and head-down-bum-up semester two preping, that is.

I’m heading to the UK in mid-June to go to EBLIP6, where I’m presenting a paper coauthored with the too-awesome-for-words Zaana Howard. While I’m in the UK, I’m also going to check out the i3: Information > Interactions > Impact conference. Another paper I coauthored is being presented by my colleague Helen Partridge at the Blended Learning Conference 2011 (also in the UK), just before I head over. So from now til I leave, I have a whole lot of writing on the go. I hope to blog the conferences I’m attending in the UK.

I won’t bore you with the mundane details, but there are, of course, a number of things on the go this month… projects, PhD, presentations and… can’t think of another ‘p’ thing!

But the most important thing happening this month is that June, for me, is marking a turning point. The state of my schedule and its impact on everything else in my life is all to clear. It’s time to do things a bit differently. Come July, I’ll be making some changes to how I manage my work and life and the balance between the two. Throughout June, I’m hoping to work out (and blog about) some practical strategies for eking a few hours of ‘me time’ out of each day, getting back on track with my health (diet! exercise!), and just generally getting my shit sorted. When I get back from the UK, I’ll be saying farewell to crazy, workaholic, over-committed Kate, and hello to the new, zen me.

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on getting my blogging mojo back

blogeverydayofjune 5 Responses »
Jun 302010

Thirty days ago, I accepted Con’s challenge to blog every day in June. I knew it would be a struggle to meet the daily quota, but from the outset, I had a ‘bigger’ reason for participating. The point of the exercise was, for me, to reach a decision on what to do with this blog. Given how inactive a blogger I’ve been, I was at the point where I was pondering whether I should just shut this blog down. Con’s challenge came at a perfect time, and I thought that trying to blog every day for a month was a pretty good way to test whether I actually have the energy and drive to continue blogging at all.

I started this blog, as I’ve mentioned before, because I wanted a space to reflect on professional issues – a soapbox, perhaps. Life has gotten in the way of blogging over the years, but my lack of posting has not been for want of things to post about. I have an opinion on everything! When I made the move to academia early this year, my intention was always to start blogging more actively and with some regularity. Unfortunately, I started my new job just before semester began, and my time was so quickly taken up by teaching and other commitments that I didn’t really have an opportunity to create a blogging habit.

Over the years, my blogging mojo has waxed and waned… But on the whole, it’s been missing in action quite a lot of the time.

During the last 30 days, I started to think that I was getting my blogging mojo back. This was confirmed for me yesterday when I inadvertently uninstalled WordPress and deleted my database, thereby taking out my entire blog. I felt sick when I realised what I’d done – over three years of posts and comments down the drain. I know I’m not the most prolific blogger, but some of the content I have posted here – and more importantly, the comments – is important to me. I also have a lot of content sitting in draft, where ideas are germinating. The thought of losing all of that content was pretty scary.

The #blogeverydayofjune challenge has made me reflect on a few questions:

  • What do I want this blog to be, if anything?
  • If I discontinued this blog, would I miss the opportunity to espouse my opinion on professional issues in an informal, conversational forum?
  • What role might this blog play for me as I start work on my PhD?
  • How do I want to shape my online profiles – both personal and professional?

In essence, I’ve come to the realisation that, in addition to this being a space in which I can grandstand on professional issues, (because I know you *all* want to hear my opinions!), this blog has a lot of other potential for me in the coming months, and maybe even years. It could be a space to

  • talk about my research, and hopefully capitalise on serendipity as a result
  • reflect on my practice as a researcher and an educator
  • chronicle my experiences as I work through my PhD
  • test out ideas and seek others’ input
  • share a little bit about myself, on a more personal level, from time-to-time

So in the last 24 hours, I’ve decided that virtually a librarian will continue to exist, although its shape may change a little. Because I’ve introduced more of the personal element here, I’ve decided to set up a second website to act as more of a portfolio (www.katedavis.info coming soon!). The new website will be the space I use for more formal documentation – publications lists, project summaries and so forth – while this site will still be the space I use to discuss and reflect in a more informal way.

What you won’t be seeing here is a post every day. But you will be seeing a post every now and then – hopefully with less gaps in between than I’ve been known to have in the past!

This challenge has been lots of things: at various times, it’s been fun, painful, a journey of enlightenment (!), educational, amusing, a bane, conversational, inspirational, and more… So thanks to Con for laying down the challenge, and to all the other #blogeverydayofjune-ers with whom I’ve shared the journey. You helped me get my mojo back!

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lessons learnt the hard way

blogeverydayofjune 1 Response »
Jun 302010

Yesterday I learnt some very important lessons, all learnt through a rather painful process.

  1. When you uninstall software, you should make sure you’ve chosen the right instance. Even if the different instances are installed on different domains.
  2. Don’t mess around with important stuff when you’re tired and unwell.
  3. Taking regular backups may be a boring administrative task, but it’s worth the effort.
  4. Taking backups before making changes to software is not an optional task.

You might have noticed this site was down for most of yesterday and this morning. That’s because I thought it was time to uninstall my test instance of WordPress. So off I went and did just that. Only, I managed to uninstall (and delete the database for) the instance of WordPress that runs this blog. I didn’t realise til hours later, by which time, my hosting provider had run that day’s backup, thereby backing up big fat nothing and deleting the previous day’s backup. Awesome!

Just as I thought I was going to have to reenter all of my posts, my provider turned up a back up from 26 June. That means I lost any comments made in the last three days, but that’s a lot better than years worth of my blog. *Phew*

So I’m off to by an external hard drive, on which I intend to back up my life (because, you guessed it – not only do I not back up my website, but I also don’t have a back up of my research or teaching files, my music, or my photos).

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what is a library technologist? or, research begets more research

blogeverydayofjune No Responses »
Jun 282010

I’m working on some research with Kathryn Greenhill. It involves a self-administered questionnaire in which we need to establish the depth of participants’ technology knowledge and skills. We’re aiming to establish which of the respondents are technology specialists and which of the respondents have a general interest in technology as it applies to their broader non-technology job. I guess you could say we’re trying to determine which respondents fit into the category of “library technologists” and which could be described as “librarians who have a general interest in using technology to enhance service provision”.

We could simply ask participants which category they see themselves falling into, but there are two inherent issues with this approach.

Issue number one: objectivity

While the nature of surveys as data collection instruments means that data is necessarily reflective in nature, my feeling is that, rather than asking participants to classify themselves, it would be more appropriate to have participants rate themselves against a series of competencies, and to rate the importance of each competency to their current position. It makes more sense for us to classify all participants from our objective viewpoint, based on what we know about participants’ perceptions of their level of technology skill and the relevance of these skills to their current position, and based on our conception of the categories. This seems to me to be a slightly more objective framework within which to undertake the categorisation.

This approach does not, however, solve the issue of objectivity – both because we’d still dealing with perceptions, and because the approach is not really viable. Certainly, there are many models in the literature that we could use to inform the design of a series of questions that would measure respondents’ level of competency across a number of skills and knowledge areas within the umbrella of technology competencies. However, the problem with all of these models is that there are a significant number of skills and knowledge areas that we would need to ask about. And that would make this small section of the survey unreasonably lengthy. This is not the primary focus of the research, but rather, represents a characteristic of participants that we need to know about in order to facilitate a particular view of the data we’ll be gathering. As such, we don’t want to weigh the survey down with too many questions on this topic.

So we’re back to asking participants to tell us which category they belong to, which brings us to the second issue.

Issue number two: what exactly is a library technologist?

I may just be looking in the wrong places, but I’m yet to discover a robust definition of the term “library technologist”, although there are plenty of instances in which it has been used to describe a type of professional. (And I have to confess that I haven’t completed a full literature search – just some quick and dirty trawling.) This makes me question my own conception of the term, which is in essence based around what you might call a “propensity to tinker with tech”. In a nutshell, my personal definition of  “library technologist” does not exclude people who don’t possess highly technical skills (like sys admin type skills, for example). But I’m conscious that the term is used to describe professionals with far more technical expertise than is possessed by many of us who exhibit a willingness to tinker.

We need a definition of “library technologist” because, before we ask people if they *are* something, we need to define that something. We need to ensure there is a shared understanding of the term. In the absence of a definition in the literature, establishing a shared understanding sounds like a research project of its own. There are certainly other avenues to explore (like, for example, whether we can work with definitions for similar terms – for example, “education technologist”), but for now, I guess I’m just a little surprised that we don’t have a definition yet.

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more on reflective practice

blogeverydayofjune, ebl, evaluation No Responses »
Jun 272010

I posted recently about the importance of publishing, and in that post I talked about reflection and how important I think that process is. And in my last post, I focused on evaluation – and reflection is a key tool in the personal evaluation toolkit.

So I was interested today to see a tweet about a new article on reflection and Evidence Based Library and Information Practice (EBLIP). EBLIP rock star Andrew Booth has just published an article called Upon reflection: five mirrors of evidence based practice.

Whether you’re for or against (or perhaps ambivalent about) EBLIP, this article is well worth a read.

via @dkouf

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making time for metrics

blogeverydayofjune, ebl, evaluation 2 Responses »
Jun 272010

I have lots of soap boxes, a number of which I’ve posted about here before. Evaluation (otherwise known as assessment) is probably my favourite soap box of all.

It’s also something that I don’t believe we take as seriously as we should. Librarians are really good at collecting statistics – perhaps *too* good at it. The issue, I think, is that we focus on the collecting with such intent that we sometimes miss out on the analysing. We measure everything that’s measurable, and some other stuff too, but I’m not entirely sure that we work with the data we collect in a way that tells us something meaningful about what we’re doing.

Do we actually change how we do things or how promote our services because of what the data tells us? And on an even more fundamental level, do we even take a considered look at the data we collect, or do we just send it straight up the line to meet our reporting requirements?

Evaluation of what we do on a day to day basis is critical. It’s critical because we owe it to our customers to be offering services that meet their needs and that are used. It’s critical because we are constantly asked to do more with less resources, and we need to be rational and thoughtful in deciding where to invest our energies. It’s critical because without meaningful evaluation, how can we ever improve?

Evaluation is also a critical phase in managing any project, and in my experience, it is a phase that is perhaps undervalued (or at least, under-emphasised) in what some might call 2.0 projects. I have observed that, in implementing online services that make use of freely available web based tools, practitioners tend to focus on agility. I’ve seen this result in a lack of planning, in terms of service design, project management and evaluation, and it’s my contention (and a profound one at that!) that in order to be meaningful, evaluation must be planned and aligned with the aims and objectives of the project. You need to know in advance what you’re going to measure in order to collect the right data along the way, and to ensure that you have adequate time allocated to evaluation.

I’m thinking about evaluation at the moment because I’m working on materials for a new unit that I’m running next semester, and working on a plan to evaluate how the unit performs in terms of allowing students to realise the unit’s learning objectives. I’m also thinking about the two units I taught in first semester, and reflecting on both my performance and how the unit structure and content worked. There are many inputs in terms of data: student feedback on my performance, and my personal scores on the Learning Experience Survey (LEX); student feedback on the units, and the unit scores on the LEX; student performance; informal feedback received from students; and students’ reflections (students write one reflection for each assessment item). Of course, working with all of this data will take time, but I think the evaluative process is critical, so I’m setting aside the time to do it.

Do you give evaluation the time, energy and thought power it deserves?

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saturday link love

blogeverydayofjune No Responses »
Jun 262010

I’m totally due a think post, but my brain is somewhat fried tonight. So today’s post is a bunch of stuff I’ve read lately and been inspired by or that have caused a light bulb moment for me. Here they are.

Right, now I’m off to watch successive episodes of Relocation Relocation. Ah, Saturday night!

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