The Distant Librarian

Rick's Café Canadien: Inaugural CIDER presentation

Back in December I posted about the launch of something called CIDER, the Canadian Institute for Distance Education Research.  Next Friday, March 11 (wow does time fly!), CIDER is offering an online presentation through Elluminate which will look at "the state of distance education research in Canada and at CIDER, present a rationale for increasing funding and support, and discuss “design-based research” method specific to distance education research. The session will also present the component pieces and functions of CIDER."  I've signed up and if I actually am able to "attend" I'll let you know if anything particularly interesting was mentioned...

Link: Rick's Cafe Canadien: Inaugural CIDER presentation.

Harris County Public Library - Internet Explorer Toolbar

A couple of months ago I was introduced to the Jackson Library IE toolbar, and since then have purchased a toolkit called Toolbar Studio to help me develop a similar one for my distance students (not an endorsement for the product, it's just what I did).  It's fairly easy, but I haven't really made the time to work on it much.  In the comments section of that post Gianluca Drago pointed towards a toolbar he had made that works for Firefox, and he coded it by hand!  Lots of good links on his page if you're up to trying this.  And today I learned of another library toolbar that's in the wild thanks to the Digital Reference blog.

Link: Harris County Public Library - Internet Explorer Toolbar.

Does anyone know of more examples of these?

Congratulations Martha!

This was just posted to the OFFCAMP Listserv - it's not yet replicated on the ACRL website :-/

Contact: Megan Bielefeld
ACRL Program Coordinator
mbielefeld@ala.org
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 11, 2005

Kreszock named 2005 ACRL DLS Haworth Press Distance Learning Librarian
Conference Sponsorship Award Winner

CHICAGO - Martha Kreszock, coordinator of distance learning studies for
Appalachian State University, has been named the 2005 recipient of the
Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Distance Learning
Section (DLS) Haworth Press Distance Learning Librarian Conference
Sponsorship Award. This annual award honors an ACRL member working in
the field of, or contributing to the success of, distance learning
librarianship or related library service in higher education.

"Martha was selected from a number of strong nominees for her
significant contributions to the students and faculty of Appalachian
State, and for her ongoing contributions to the field of Distance
Learning Librarianship through research, publications, and
presentations," said Tom Abbott, chair of the DLS award committee.

Kreszock's presentations include "But they Never Come to Campus!"
co-presented with Candelaria and Wilmesherr at the Association of
Continuing and Higher Education Region Fifth Annual Conference in April,
2003; "Greetings from the Mothership: Library Services for Off-Campus
Students," Teaching and Learning at Appalachian, v.6 2001/2002; "ACRL
Guidelines and Library Services for Off-Campus Students,"
North Carolina Distance Learning Alliance Conference, New Bern, NC July
2000

The Haworth Press, Inc., sponsor of the award, will present the $1,200
award and plaque at the American Library Association (ALA) Annual
Conference in Chicago during the DLS program on Saturday, June 25, at
1:30 p.m.

ACRL is a division of the American Library Association, representing
12,000 academic and research librarians and interested individuals. ACRL
is the only individual membership organization in North America that
develops programs, products and services to meet the unique needs of
academic and research librarians.   Its initiatives enable the higher
education community to understand the role that academic libraries play
in the teaching, learning and research environments.

UTPA Library -- LOEX of the West 2004

Earlier this week down in the comments section of this post on Captivate vs. ViewletBuilder, we uncovered a few other institutional examples of these types of tutorials (screen capture / convert to flash).  I finally got a chance to look through all the links, and right at the end was this great page put together by Ward Price at UT Pan-American.  This was (as you'll quickly figure out from the title) a presentation Ward gave at LOEX of the West in which he examines many different ways of putting multimedia content in front of distance students.  What's neat is that he doesn't just talk about 'em, he provides examples, in all their glory or gore, of each and every one.  This was the first time I'd seen or heard of some of these things.  Well worth the time to check out.  I did find most of these examples worked much better in IE than Firefox... 

Now having pointed you at it, I do have to admit I didn't see anything here I was going to rush out and use, but it's still neat to see.

Link: Creating Online Media Instruction if you're not big, rich, or geeky.

E-Learn Call for Participation

Submission Deadline: April 28. 
Conference Dates: October 24-28, 2005
Location: Vancouver, BC (Canada)

Summary: This annual conference serves as a multi-disciplinary forum for the exchange of information on research, development, and applications of all topics related to e-Learning in the Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education sectors.

Link: E-Learn Call for Participation.

The Digital Librarian: R.I.P 2005 - Federated Search

I tried to leave the following comment at The Digital Librarian, but there seems to be an error in their comment code - several tries and I couldn't get it to go.  I also couldn't find any contact information, so I'm hoping posting here will eventually get back to the author. (c'mon, not even an "about me" link?)

Link: The Digital Librarian: R.I.P 2005 - Federated Search.

My comment:

Here's a fly in the ointment, paraphrased from a much more deep-thinking colleague.

The Schoogle federated search model works well (or will work well eventually) with providers of full text content because it's in their best interest to get their content before the eyes of the general public so the general public will buy their articles. 

But what incentive is there for the producer of a strictly A&I database to open its content to Schoogle? Right now these databases, say Biological Abstracts for instance, make their money by selling their content to libraries. What income would they derive if they gave it all away to Schoogle?

You ask, "If Google becomes a better provider of scholarly articles and information than a typical university library...", but Google may not ever become a more comprehensive provider. Right now they sure lead the way for convenience, which goes a long way for the typical researcher, but I'm not sure they'll ever be the most comprehensive. Could be wrong, that's just my opinion.

Having said that, I have to agree that I have yet to see a federated search tool that a typical student would choose to use before Schoogle!

Library Support for Online Learners: e-Resources, e-Services, and the Human Factors

Next week I'm a guest lecturer for a course on Distributed Learning offered by our Graduate Division of Education.  The topic for the week is support services for distance education, and in preparation the prof is having the students read a chapter of an online textbook titled Library Support for Online Learners: e-Resources, e-Services, and the Human Factors.  This e-book (also available for paper purchase) is produced for students at Athabasca University (several hours north of here), which bills itself as Canada's Open University; they do know DE.  The chapter is written by a couple of librarians and someone from the AU School of Business, and is a really solid piece outlining library support for distance students.  It's not cutting edge stuff, and it mostly references services at AU, which is to be expected since it's written for AU students, but it's well-written and comprehensive - a good overview of our craft.

eLiteracy Conference 2005 CFP extended

Last month I posted about the call for papers for eLit 2005. The deadline for paper submissions has now been extended to March 18th. As a reminder, this conference is June 15-17 2005, and is to be held in Glasgow, Scotland.

High school all over again

Hadn't heard of this site before so I went to see where I was ranked, fully expecting not even to be listed in the Library & Information Science category.  I started at the end (page 12) and worked my way forward.  Imagine my surprise when I found this blog on page two!  There are no comments associated with the ratings, and I've got to agree with Stephen that it's a little suspect, but I find your blog useful Stephen and voted you a 10, which brought you up  .02 in the rankings!

High school all over again 

This blog-ranking site brought back bad memories of social hierarchies that defined my high school life (and yours, too?) Would it be unethical for me to vote for my own blog?

[via Digital Reference]

Comments on Macromedia Captivate & Qarbon ViewletBuilder?

Sherri at UNLV is looking for other opinions...

Comments on Macromedia Captivate & Qarbon ViewletBuilder?

 

I'm currently evaluating tutorial software for both instruction (emphasis: tutorials, scoring and evalution mechanisms) and distance education (emphasis: not so much the scoring aspect but learning and instructional applications). I've worked previously with Qarbon's ViewletBuilder and really enjoyed the simplicity and ease of use. I've also been taking a closer look at Macromedia's Captivate. Only thing is, I haven't had a lot of experience using it and haven't had a lot of luck finding too many reviews that are written from the academic eLearning perspective. We currently have two licenses of Camtasia Studio installed on workstations that are available for public use (not ideal for staff), but I've never been a fan of Camtasia anyway.

Robin Good offers a comprehensive comparison of ViewletBuilder and Camtasia in "Creating interactive learning tutorials for software"

Leave a comment if you have experiences that you'd like to share in using any of these (or other unmentioned) software packages.

[via ::schwagbag::]

Long weekend

I'm away for the next four days (heading off to Northern Voice tomorrow afternoon - anybody out there from Vancouver?) and will likely be catching up on stuff until mid-next week, so I probably won't be posting again until then.  Buh-buy.

Real live Captivate example

Greg Szczyerbak at Millersville University was kind enough to share an example of a Captivate tutorial he built to demonstrate an introduction to their catalogue sorry, catalog ;-)  Even more kindly, he said I could share it with you too.  This one is a work in progress - he's having some students in the school's communication department work on the voiceovers - can you say "professional-sounding"?  I like that idea, and I like how he's envisioning a whole suite of these tutorials, branding them as Compass Directionals.  The link above is out of context; the landing page for the tutorial is here.  Oh, and I see Greg's been busy, as now there are two more tutorials available.

Google gets it... academic affiliation option

Hey, Google implemented my idea to allow students to indicate an affiliation with an academic institution!  No, there's been no acknowledgment from them, and yeah, I suppose it's possible they thought of this all by themselves, but I'd like to think otherwise :-)  I just emailed them to see if they'd put the U of Calgary up there - I'll let you know if they respond.

Google gets it...

Is your school providing access to Scholar through a link resolver? Make sure you get on Scholar Preferences list. I'm not sure this list will scale very well, but I reckon they'll work out a better mechanism for finding your school if you're a student/faculty/staff person. (Thanks Brad!)

[via On Google Scholar]

Blogs and podcasts: Educause shows the way?

I've mentioned podcasts a few times in the past six months.  For a little while I've been toying with the idea of recording a series of interviews with distance students and making them available as a podcast, but I don't think I'm going to have the time, so you can do it.  :-)  Anyway, as a result of that exploration, I've been following a blog called Auricle, which has had a good number of posts about how to record interviews conducted over VOIP.

So this morning I see the following post: Blogs and podcasts: Educause shows the way? and in following the link I see that Educause has separate RSS feeds for a whole whack of subcategories of interest to distance librarians (and you thought this was a post about podcasting!).  To wit: (look for the full list of RSS feeds on the left side of the page when you visit any of these...)

• Digital Reference Services
• E-Learning
• Electronic Books
• Libraries and Technology

Oh yeah, and one for podcasting too ;-)

RSS ROCKS! — The Learning Web - Central

Was just exchanging email with Shelly in Texas and noticed she had recently blogged about a novel implementation of the Chatango tool I mentioned way back in August.  What she's done is instead of having that application appear on her library service page, she's integrated it into WebCT, so it appears right in front of the students where they are (in their course shell), instead of where we wish they would be (on our library pages) :-).  This makes a whole lot of sense to me.  I've been meaning to let you all know that IMHO my experiment with Chatango has been a dismal failure because only one student has contacted me through it, but now I think it's probably a result of its location.  Added to my to do list: implement Chatango into a couple BlackBoard courses and see if the usage picks up.  Thanks Shelly!

Link: RSS ROCKS! — The Learning Web - Central. 
(stick with Shelly's blog - they're just implementing a new content management system down there and haven't got the RSS feeds working for the blog component yet).

Mirrorworld - Guerrillas in the mist

Last year I read William Gibson's latest novel, Pattern Recognition.  In it, the protagonist travels from the US to London, and describes the city as a mirrorworld, in that it's pretty much the same as back home, but some things are just a little bit off; just slightly different to make her feel as though she's looking at a reflection of the real thing instead of the real thing.

Last week I finished an article titled, Guerillas in the mist: breaking through boundaries to provide a first-class remote library service, by Heather Keeble and Louise McGill, who both work in the UK. (Serials, 17(1) March 2004 19-24).  After I read it I immediately scrawled "mirrorworld!" at the top of the first page because I have so been there with just about everything they describe, and yet usually in just a slightly different way.  One example is that one of their students is on a submarine, so they kinda have to work closely with him to figure out where and when to get him his documents.  I have a distant (duh!) student who works on an oil platform in the Black Sea (I think that's where he is at least).

This article offers a good summary of how we distance librarians really need to operate outside of normal channels (thus the guerrilla reference).  Some of the passages I highlighted include the differences between equality and equity in service, how student records and library systems are often too rigid to accomodate distance students, how they can't send books to students who don't reside in the same country as the main library, how they have a challenge persuading their academic colleagues that librarians teach rather than train, and how they got a teaching and learning grant to develop an interactive information literacy tutorial to be integrated within various courses, which is exactly what I'm involved in this semester!  Freaky, man!  ;-)

Always Fresh: Fast Content for Library Websites with Really Simple Syndication (RSS)

More stuff related to blended librarianship - if you follow the link to the ppt presentation you'll see how USask has fed their RSS feed to the front page of their library site as a "What's New" section, and there's also a screenshot of that same feed fed into their campus portal using the same concept that was discussed in this tool to provide an RSS feed into a BlackBoard (or other CMS) course shell.  Great way to provide information to your distance students!

Link: ref:blog:spot: Always Fresh: Fast Content for Library Websites with Really Simple Syndication (RSS).

Welcome to Gmail

I think Gmail must be close to opening to the general public 'cause all of a sudden I have 50 invites to give away, and I've heard many others have a lot too.  If you don't yet have a Gmail account and you'd like one, send me an email at ppival@gmail.com and you shall have one :-)

Link: Welcome to Gmail.

Low Threshold Applications (LTA)

I ran across this site long ago, and could never get the RSS feed to display in my aggregator of choice, so had kind of forgotten about it.  They just moved to a new site, and the RSS feed works fine for me now, so now I'll recommend it to you!

A Low Threshold Application  "is a teaching/learning application of information technology  that is reliable, accessible, easy to learn, non-intimidating and (incrementally) inexpensive. Each LTA has observable positive consequences, and contributes to important long term changes in teaching and/or learning.  "... the potential user (teacher or learner) perceives an LTA as NOT challenging, not intimidating, not requiring a lot of additional work or new thinking. LTAs… are also 'low-threshold' in the sense of having low INCREMENTAL costs for purchase, training, support, and maintenance." (attribution)

So basically what we've got here are a slew of low-cost, easy-to-implement, technology-related things that you (yes, even you!) can use to impress your colleagues, students and supervisors.  For instance, I recently noted the embedded librarians discussion that had been occurring on the OFFCAMP mailing list.  Librarians getting themselves involved and inserted in course management systems (CMS).  The most recent LTA shows how you (yes, even you!) can insert a custom RSS feed into a Blackboard or WebCT course shell.  So if you wanted to start blogging to reach your distance students, but didn't know how you could get them to read your feed or your posts, now you can have your posts appear in one, two, or all of the Blackboard or WebCT courses in which you've gotten yourself involved!  Nice.  Oh, and it doesn't have to be your blog - you can create a custom feed, or borrow pretty much any feed you can find and have it display in the CMS.

This is a good site to watch.  Or contribute to!

ViewletBuilder price drop

Last month in my comparison of ViewletBuilder Pro to Captivate I quoted an educational price of $399 for ViewletBuilder Pro.  Today comes word that they've dropped the price of the Pro version to $299 US, and while I have no proof of this, in the past they've offered an educational discount of up to 50%, so that might still be in effect as well, and if it is, ViewletBuilder Pro would be a little cheaper than Captivate... ($199 US for an educational license).

Link: Qarbon - ViewletBuilder For All!.

Call for contributors - Journal of Library & Information Services in Distance Learning

Hello reader!  (I'm kidding, I know there are at least three of you out there!)  I'm looking for your help.  I recently agreed to assume the editorship of the eServices in Libraries column for the Journal of Library & Information Services in Distance Learning, and I'm looking for contributors for the column. 

I have several ideas for topics, but am also interested in you bringing your own ideas to the column.  It's a quarterly publication, which gives us a challenge in that whatever we write about won't hit print for several months.

Information about the journal can be found here, and the last three tables of contents (PDF), which show what was covered in this column in those issues, can be found here, here, and here.  Just to give you a flavor for what's already been covered...

Are you interested?  If so, please drop me an email at ppival@ucalgary.ca

Thanks,  hope to hear from you!

brief jybe update - good customer service

Just wanted to let you know that I posted a link to yesterday's post about our jybe test in the jybe support forums, and within a couple of hours got an email from Brian at the company asking me if we could run through the same scenerios so he could see what was happening.  We connected late yesterday afternoon and spent about 1/2 hour together using jybe, and he did see what the issues were.  I found him to be very receptive to suggestions and eager to figure out how to work around our issues.  They have legitimate concerns about allowing authenticated pages to pass through w/o actually authenticating, but he also said they were interested in the education and library markets so they'd be trying to figure out some way to deal with that issue.  They're also looking in to some way to let users know if their pages aren't in sync, as Greg and I discovered when we first ran into the authentication issue yesterday.

Basically I just wanted to say how impressed I am that a company offering this free product is so eager to listen to criticism and suggestions from their "customers".

And on a related note, even though I think I'm gonna start using Captivate more than Viewletbuilder, I always have and continue to receive excellent customer support from Qarbon, and as I've said before, I have no affiliation with them other than as a happy customer.  Smiles all around 

ALA - Call for presentations and poster sessions

2005 ALA Annual Preconference, Chicago, IL
Reinvented Reference: The Integration of Digital and Traditional
Reference Services

Friday, June 24, 2005
8:30 a.m. - 4:30 p.m.

The RUSA MARS/RSS Preconference Planning Committee is looking for interesting, varied case studies of libraries that have successfully integrated their digital reference service into their pre-existing, traditional reference services. Three case studies will be selected to present. Poster sessions are welcome as well.

Each of the 3 case studies presenting will have 20 minutes. Poster sessions will be set up with time for perusal during breaks and lunch.

Topics should cover any of the following:
*       Staffing model
*       Reference service package
*       Funding model
*       Other aspects of integration

Proposals should include:
1.      Brief summary of presentation or poster session topic (250 words or less).  Please specify whether your proposal is to present a case study or a poster session;
2.      Brief description of library environment including size and type of library, user population, overview of digital reference services, other background information (100 words or less);
3.      Brief biography of presenter (50 words or less).

Deadline for submission:  Monday, February 28, 2005.  Submit proposals via email to: David Ward, dh-ward@uiuc.edu.  Questions? Contact Laura Probst, lkp5@psulias.psu.edu, or Lisa Horowitz, lisah@mit.edu.

For a full description of the preconference and for information on
registering, see the ALA preconference web site at
http://www.ala.org/ala/eventsandconferencesb/annual/2005a/precons.htm.

The preconference is presented by the Machine-Assisted Reference (MARS) and Reference Services (RSS) Sections of the Reference and User Services

jybe - not ready for library prime time

Last Friday I posted about a co-browsing extension for Firefox called jybe, and asked if anyone wanted to test it out.  I got a couple of takers (thanks Greg and Shelly) and we gave it a try this morning.  Summary: not gonna help you with your distance students.

We were all able to join the same session easily enough, and when browsing the open web it worked just fine.  All three people were able to type in a URL and have the other two see it, but this is a drawback too as any one of us could take control of the browser at any time.  Not a big deal with only two people, but could get confusing / frustrating with more.

The two big problems we discovered were:

1. jybe won't follow a new popup window.  So if you're trying to show SFX or if your database links open in a new browser window, the person who clicks the link will see a new window open on his/her machine, but the remote user will still be staring at the launching screen.  Could be overcome by copy/pasting the new URL into the original window, but a little cumbersome.
2. The bigger issue is with database authentication.  Greg was able to choose a link to a database here at the U of C, and because I'm sitting on campus my screen passed me right through, but he was shown a U of C authentication screen.  It's not the fact that he was shown that screen that's the problem - you could walk your distance student through the login process.  The problem was that we were being shown two different screens, and didn't realize it until it was mentioned in the chat window.  Greg gave me a temporary password to one of his databases and I was able to follow along, but it really seemed to get buggy at that point, and eventually I got kicked out too.

So it doesn't seem to be able to co-browse authenticated sites, which has to be a deal-breaker for library support of distance students.  Too bad - maybe that'll improve with later versions.  I'm going to point their support people to this post and we'll see if they address it.

Thanks again for your help Greg and Shelly!