Information Wants To Be Free – Page 6 – A librarian, writer and educator reflecting on the profession and the tools we use to serve our patrons

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Good for what? Considering context in building learning objects.

I'm working with a colleague of mine (Amy Hofer of Threshold Concepts fame) to create a suite of tutorials that are going to be integrated into online University Studies (think…

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Managing the “whole person”

I've been wanting to write about managing people for a long time. This post has been marinating in my head for years and a few things managed to knock it…

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Our new model for Freshman instruction and how it went

One year ago, I became our General Education Instruction Coordinator, which meant that I was in charge of our instruction to Freshman Inquiry and Sophomore Inquiry (our first and second…

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Library DIY: Unmediated point-of-need support

I recently realized that while I write about a lot of things, I do not often write about the work I'm doing at Portland State and through the Oregon Library…

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Leaning into the messy world of work-life balance

It's easy to be self-righteous when you're pregnant. At least it was for me. It was very easy for me to clearly define in my own mind what sort of…

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DIY vs. Startup, or false dichotomies and labels

ACRL was a terrific conference experience for me. Not only did I get to see a lot of good friends and have a lot of deep conversations with other instruction…

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Mobile Learning: The Teacher in Your Pocket

There's a great new book out on mobile technologies in libraries and I was fortunate to have been asked to contribute a chapter on mobile learning and mobile instruction in…

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My critique of Value of Academic Libraries and a happy update

My critique of the Value of Academic Libraries initiative has just been published in OLA Quarterly (it's the first article in the PDF). I wrote it on the fly after…

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Stratification and losing faculty status

I was surprised when I read a couple of weeks ago that the University of Virginia was taking faculty status away from its librarians. Even more surprising was the fact…

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Shared vision, transparency, and the high performing organization

As I've mentioned before, Lisa Hinchliffe and I presented on and authored a paper for the Library Assessment Conference in October. The spoke about applying the High Performance Programming Model…

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Assessment on the brain

This has been a crazy year, full of a lot of research and activities centered around assessment. From my participation in RAILS last Spring, to my Assessment LibGuide, to my…

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Gender, “thought leaders”, ego, and subversion

Lots of people have been writing about Ask Miss Julie's post Ego, thy name is librarianship. Julie is a talented and humorous writer and a hard-working and innovative children's librarian.…

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Self-efficacy in retention and how we can help build it

A little while back, I wrote a post about the role of narratives in our lives. The stories we tell about our lives that inform the way we see ourselves…

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The entrepreneurial library

Years ago, I visited the libraries at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. After lots of conversations, the one word that stuck with me was entrepreneurial. The library faculty there…

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Getting out of your own story

When I was a psychotherapist, I was drawn to narrative therapy and cognitive therapy in my own work with clients. Both support the idea that the way people view and…

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Living our values

I have wanted to write about so many things that have come across my desktop lately, but work and getting ready for a major trip to New Zealand with my…

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The devil you know in first-year instruction

It's pretty clear from the comments on my recent posts that many of us have a sense that the sort of information literacy instruction we're providing is not having the…

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Behavior vs. belief and changing culture

At LOEX of the West this summer (a fantastic conference, btw), Joan Kaplowitz did a session where she started by asking attendees what words they associate with assessment. I won't…

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Broad vs. deep in information literacy instruction

When I was at Norwich, my focus was often on increasing our instruction stats. My Director wanted to see us doing more instruction and being in at least two classes…