November 2007 Archives

(Ellysa's note: My second (and final) conference blog from the Student-Centered conference)

Dr. George Kuh is an inspiring researcher and speaker. Dr. Kuh researches student engagement at Indiana University Bloomington and directs the Center for Postsecondary Research, the National Survey of Student Engagement, and the College Student Experiences Questionnaire Research Program. (Lots of reading and food for thought on all three sites.)

Much of his research centers on the idea that a range of campus activities encouraging student involvement (both curricular and co-curricular) increases overall student retention. Dr. Kuh even has a Facebook Group devoted to him (initated by his students, no less). Just imagine how thrilled Loanne and I were when we heard he was speaking at this conference. We cited his work frequently in the book chapter I mentioned in the previous post.

Dr. Kuh began his lunch presentation by referencing this report as a must-read: College Learning for the New Global Century.

Pre-college characteristics associated with Student Success:
--Academic preparation in college-level skills
--Financing
--Family Education and Support

He discussed Helicopter Parents briefly, noting that there are two prevalent characteristics within these families:
--Students are "very often" in contact with parent(s).
--Parents "frequently contact" college officials.
Dr. Kuh noted that 10% of first-year students fit this definition. Wow.

Early College Indicators of Success:
--Realizing goals
--College is a psycho-social fit with student
--Academic & social support is accessible
--Involvement in the 'right' kind of activities
--The more credit hours completed early on, the more likely the student is to successfully complete college.

Dr. Kuh defined student engagement as "time and energy devoted to educationally purposeful activities."

How do we reach our least-engaged students?
--Student/faculty contact
--Active learning
--Prompt instructor feedback
--High expectations of student
--Respect for diverse learning styles
--Students' development of cooperative, team-based skills

Dr. Kuh identified proven Pathways to Student Success:
--Early socialization activities (orientation and more)
--Redundant early (first two weeks of school) warning systems and safety nets
--The more engaged campus students become, the more academically successful they will be.

Kuh reinforced several times the importance and positive effect of a librarian's involvement in academic courses. :)

He advocated making it possible for students to participate in one "high-impact" activity in the first year and again during the course of their major. (In his second session, Kuh expanded on this as a specific recommendation for Penn State, identifying high-impact activities as study-abroad, writing-intensive courses, internships, campus work opportunities, etc...)

He closed by asking the audience how we can lay a greater claim on our students' discretionary time (noting that they have more of this time than we think).

Several ideas that Dr. Kuh shared which resonated with me:
--He stressed the importance of tying the goals of co-curricular (outside of class) activities with students' curricular goals. An example of this in practice would be discussing with work study students or interns how their on-the-job experiences inform their overall experiences and goals relevant to their major and career of choice. I am going to implement this practice with my PR/Marketing interns.
--He noted that at IU, they created orientation videos that were entirely student-directed. They gave students cameras, and directed them to make short films highlighting what they thought new students needed to know about IU. The results he said were often raw, but resonated with new students. I am anxious to try this methodology out with a short "5 Things Students Need to Know About the Library" here.

In short, (and this after a long post) Dr. Kuh shared many terrific ideas (all backed up with research) for connecting with and engaging students at many points throughout campus. If you're interested in reading more on his research findings, I recommend his book, Student Success in College: Creating Conditions That Matter.

Ellysa's note: I am recording notes from the Penn State Student Centered conference today.

My adjectives to describe first-year student:
--wary
--open to suggestion
--blank slate

My adjectives for the graduating senior:
seasoned
measured
motivated

National Demographic Trends in Higher Ed.:
More racial diversity (more Latino students nationally)
More traditional students (on-campus residents; full-time)

Penn State Demographic Data:
Fewer women (common among land-grants)
More full-time
More financial aid
Fewer "minority" students
Number of low-income students decreasing
79% White (UP) (compared with 70% nationally)
At UP, only 5% of students are non-traditional

National Trends for Incoming Students
--More participation in community service (mandated in many high schools)
--Decrease in interaction across ethnic groups--segregation in high schools drive this
--Achieving 'A' averages in high school at a record high; along with reported boredom
--Decreased high school drinking (surprising)
--Our students come to us with survival strategies that work in high school, which don't work in college.
--Multi-tasking is heavy; students know how to advocate for themselves very well (arguing for higher grades)

Pope, D.C. (2001). "Doing school": How we are creating a generation of stressed out, materialistic and miseducated students.

Students' Educational Expectations:
--Enhanced personal (student) support
--Integrated information technology (24/7 access, embedded in classes; etc...)
--Provide an opportunity for intellectual, technological and spiritual growth

Pascarella and Terenzini--Campus Student Engagement (Their book, How College Affects Students, is terrific.)
The total level of a student's campus engagement (academic, interpersonal and co-curricular) impacts students' overall level of success.

(A side note: Loanne and I wrote a chapter based off much of this research, on the library's involvement and role in co-curricular education, in The Role of the Library in the First College Year.)

There are positive correlations between parental involvement and student outcomes.

Reflection matters--embed reflection into the learning process. Learning portfolios, diaries...

Implications for Penn State:
Size impedes engagement. Reduce the 'psychological' size of Penn State.
Increase opportunities to "engage with difference." (move students out of their cocoons and engage)
Capitalize on out-of-class (co-curricular) experiences
Integrate and intertwine students' academic and non-academic activities.
Faculty should integrate more co-curricular activities into class
Encourage participation in campus life
Create on-campus employment opportunities

Stephen Abrams pointed to a fascinating post on Facebook Application Trends on No Man's Blog The author, Asi Sharabi, identifies three predominant ways in which people use Facebook applications:

Identity formation: 43% of active app use falls into this category. These apps help users frame themselves for others online, and also assist users in perceiving their own personality. Apps falling into this category include iLike, Movies, personality tests, Magic 8-Ball, My Questions, etc...

Phatic Communication comprises 37% of active app use. These apps establish atmosphere on the Facebook platform and/or help users maintain contact with others. Examples include Free Gifts; Poke (and SuperPoke!); seasonal/holiday apps, and I suppose, my favorite fun app, More Cowbell.

Other - 20%. These include social tools (My Entourage); Communication (FunWall) and Games (Pong, anyone? No? Pirates, perhaps?)

You will notice that other tools, like branded applications (Netflix, Blockbuster, etc..) do not show up in here. Nor, for that matter, do education-oriented apps. Not surprising, but it nicely segments out what a majority of users currently value in a Facebook app. Is that not to say that someday we won't see a broader range of use, when Facebook (or some other social web platform) becomes a more robust entity (and not, as a commenter on this O'Reilly piece said, "just a browser library and some AJAXy web services.")

Sharabi's post also directed me to Adonomics, a site that analyzes Facebook app use. (Who knew?) I tried, and couldn't find the Penn State Libraries Search tool on there, even though we currently have 1290 users. (Adonomics only indexes apps with over 1000 users.) I was able to find listings for the University of Alberta Libraries and Ryerson University.

Here's a graph of the activity for the U of A Libraries app. See that burst in activity at the beginning of school? I wonder how they publicized their app.

Lots to consider. I never cease to be amazed at the wealth of information and analysis out there on Facebook users and usage trends.

Virginia Heffernan wrote a nifty essay about the joys of lurking in this Sunday's NYTimes Magazine. The first paragraph alone just killed me:

For years, I’ve spent hours a day on Web sites devoted variously to television, finance, consumer electronics, celebrity gossip, furniture design, health anomalies and real estate. To the sites’ message boards, which I follow almost as avidly as I did the first seasons of “Damages” and “Mad Men,” I’ve contributed a total of three overwritten comments. I can recall them verbatim. They sank like stones.

I am also an inveterate lurker from way back. My first experiences lurking online were on ISCABBS--the telnet-based bulletin board system run by a student computing group at the U of Iowa. Like Virginia Heffernan, I remained mostly silent on there, as everything I said fell flat. I was roundly ignored on ISCABBS, and this by people who I pretty much chose to roundly ignore in real life. How fitting.

And now? The Web is a virtual cornucopia of lurking opportunities, isn't it? This blog is essentially the first time that I have felt comfortable in an online, active voice. It took me a long time to find it. I still take the opportunity to do lots of lurking---on library-related blogs and on blogs I read for entertainment. Lurking affords us the opportunity to learn from (and in an ancillary way, participate in) social and professional situations without all of the messy drama of direct interactions. Some might say that lurking is what drives the growing popularity of the Social Web.

And one P.S: In the spirit of lurking, I'll be disappointed if you comment on this post! :)

The blogosphere is ablaze with talk about the Kindle.
(Sorry, couldn't resist writing that.)

Pattern Recognition has lots of good info and analysis on the Kindle, including the reveal that you cannot re-sell the books you buy for it, and that Amazon tracks information related to the content on your device and your use of it. Yikes!

I think I'll put my $399 toward an iPhone, and keep those regular ol', dependable, very 1.0, paper books in my collection instead. They seem to be working for me.

I admit it, I am suffering from Facebook Fatigue. Something about the site has become overwhelming to me. Is it that every time I login, I am hit with an array of news that I could not care less about? (June listened to a song by Sean Paul! Gloria scored 50000 points for Ellysa's Trivia Team! (I still don't know how I started a TV Trivia Team that I have never participated in) Alex is playing Hot Potato! Would you like to join him?)

My FB Fatigue is so great that I could not even bring myself to create one of the new FB Pages. Or become a fan of one of the several Penn State Libraries pages already created. Why am I feeling this way? Are some of our students feeling the same thing? I did not start feeling this way until Facebook Ads' recent debut. The Facebook Ads structure is very similar to FriendFeed (which I blogged my negative reaction to here. How very prescient that post now seems.)

The person I live with (who happens to be a lawyer) directed my attention to this WSJ law blog post on Facebook Ads. The post discusses how the Ads are possibly violating privacy laws---this Huffington Post column expands on this topic, and points out some things that I did not know about the corporate ads. Did you know that if you rent a video online at Blockbuster, a pop-up will ask you if you would like to notify Facebook of your rental? If you do not respond to the pop-up in fifteen seconds--the pop-up goes away, and a 'Yes' is sent to Facebook. Wow.

The recent OCLC report, Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World, reported that over 68% of college students felt it was important to keep their personal information private (see Appendix A, p. 10) How is this new level of transparency and little privacy on Facebook sitting with them? What does this lack of privacy mean for the future Social Web? Do students care about this now? Or is it something that will only resonate with them twenty years from now when they are dealing with the ramifications of all of this personal info floating about online?

Much more to read on this---here, here, here, and here.

One of the articles/posts on this refers to the many Ad-related news feed items as spam--and that's exactly what they are. Will this drive users away? Is there a way to keep a robust social network thriving (and make a profit) without over-commericalizing the entire thing?

Back in March, I gave a talk at the CIC Libraries conference, Interface=Instruction. I discussed how an intuitive, easy-to-use library interface can inherently teach our users how to find the information they need. Since March, our library has made great progress in this area. We've launched the Libraries' Facebook App, made a library research iGoogle tab, and created the Research JumpStart--an interface especially for undergraduates that doubles as a collection of portable widgets primed for use on other sites (such as PageFlakes, Netvibes, Blogger, etc..)

During the CIC talk, I showed the Maryville University Library's home page. Right in the middle of the page, there's a search tool that, with one click, goes directly into EBSCOHost and connects the user with articles related to their search terms.
Few libraries are doing this--one click to find the articles you need. Many, many libraries are making a library catalog search box available on their home page, and perhaps a tool to find articles via their meta-search / multi-search tool. If you're taking your users through a MultiSearch tool, there are still too many clicks. Too many opportunities to make the wrong choice and get lost (like the gentle patron in this video).

All of this is a long way of saying that (thanks to Binky's hard work!) we now have our own one-click search box for ProQuest. It doesn't go through MultiSearch--it goes directly into the native interface. The new ProQuest search box is available on the Research JumpStart page, for use there, or as a portable widget. It will also be available soon in the Libraries' Facebook app. Try it out!

Amazing, the changes and innovations that can happen in nine months or less!

I saw this in the Target ad this weekend. I am only slightly embarrassed to be about 25 years older than the average preteen and still want this.

I shudder to think of the gadgets they'll have by the time my kids are in middle school (and how I'll keep them--not to mention myself--away from these things and focused on more worthwhile pursuits.)

Check out this description of a session being presented tomorrow at the DLF Fall Forum in Philadelphia:

(taken from the conference program):

What Can Web 2.0 Technologies Do for our Library Web Sites? The Example of Pennvibes. Delphine Khanna and Michael Winkler, both University of Pennsylvania Pennvibes is a framework for content delivery and organization inspired by Netvibes, iGoogle, and Pageflakes. It is being developed at the Penn Libraries using AJAX, XML and Java technologies with the goal of creating a web presence that is drastically more responsive and flexible to the needs of our patrons. We also hope that Pennvibes provides an extensible delivery platform for arbitrary digital library content. When we go live (end of 2007), Pennvibes will enable our Librarians to build new reference pages in a few minutes, complete with custom-tailored (and proxied) lists of resources built from PennTags, integrated search tools (e.g., a Pubmed widget), RSS feeds, editable Webnotes, rotating image widgets, and a "My Library Account" widget that integrates items checked out, fines, and document delivery requests for the patron. In the second phase of the project, we would like not only librarians, but also Penn faculty and students to be able to create and modify Pennvibes pages, thereby making our Library Web site fundamentally more interactive and collaborative. In our presentation, we will demonstrate Pennvibes, outline its potentials for Library Web sites, and discuss the strengths and challenges of the underlying technology. * Please note that "Pennvibes" is an internal name that might be changed when we go live.

Wow. Wow! I wish I was there to see this. If you are in PHL at the DLF (Kevin...), I'd love to hear/see anything from this session. :)

One question about this concept in general: Is it better to develop our own portals (like Pennvibes) or to make all of our tools and content support flexible use elsewhere (ala Facebook, iGoogle, and now OpenSocial.) I have my opinion on this (you can probably guess), but I'd certainly like to hear others. And--regardless---I'd love to see Pennvibes.

There's speculation that Facebook will very soon announce Social Ads (that is, a new advertising structure enabling ads targeted to a user's interests and profile data.) Google's AdSense works somewhat like this now, except that it is more tied to the data available on any given page. (If you're a GMail user, you'll know what I'm talking about. Open an email about a statistics project that you're working on, and ads for statistical analysis services pop up in the side bar.) SocialAds will reportedly mine user data.

Scary, Big Brother-ish implications aside, targeting ads in this manner could eventually present new opportunities for libraries. Imagine if a library was able to leverage a service like this and mine user interests, enrolled courses, majors and more. Individualized links could be provided to specific library resources, based on individual needs. In other words, if I was enrolled in CAS 100A, a sidebar might pop up when I'm logged into Facebook linking to some of the best databases for the current 100A assignment. Just one more way of bringing the library to the user, rather than vice versa.

More info and analysis on SocialAds can be found here.

Wendy was Google Scholar, Anne was Google Maps, and Emily was Google Chat!