EDUCAUSE recently published the
ECAR Study of Undergraduates and IT. Among their findings in this annual publication, they saw a significant increase in the use of social networking sites (like Facebook):
Key Findings, p. 6 (Click image to enlarge)
and a move toward more mobile technology:
“About half of the respondents (51.2%) indicated they own an Internet-capable handheld device, and another 11.8% said they plan to purchase one in the next 12 months” (Key Findings, p. 9).
although they still prefer learning in a face to face environment:
“No matter how extensively the mobile revolution – or any other technology-based disruption for that matter-impacts higher education, respondents to our survey consistently tell us that they want to see the use of IT balanced with the human touch in their academic environment. In their responses to the final open-ended question of our survey, students wrote explicitly about a preference for “real books and people” and said that “shiny new tech is still no substitute for well-trained, passionate instructors.” (Key Findings, p. 12).
The full report, and a shorter (13 p.) key findings document are both available online.
December Open format : December 1, 2009 : 10 am : Hagerty Library — Room L33
Information Overload: Strategies for Balance
This Open Discussion format meeting will focus on the challenges involved in managing the stimuli we experience each day. Technological advances have brought us to a point where we are able to do so many things at once, but are we equipped to handle it? [Thanks to John Wiggins for the topic idea!]
We’ll use an audio interview with Linda Stone, founder of the phrases “continuous partial attention” and “email apnea”, on the CBC series “Spark” (synchronicity!), as a starting point for the discussion. The interview starts at 26:54 and is less than 20 minutes long. Listen here.
Please join us December 1 for an interesting discussion, to share methods for how we each manage the inputs in our work lives, and strategies for keeping our minds and bodies healthy.
We’ll provide Green Tea (bring your own mug), muffins and fruit. See you there!
November Presentation : November 3, 2009 : 10 am : 2235 Hahnemann Library
DUCOM Archives joined us to talk about their collections, offer some details about the extent and content of their offerings, details on their move, and an update on how to visit them after the move.
Their presentation slides are available in PDF format here, and you can visit their blog to get ongoing information on their projects.
Tomorrow is the second in the new series of events for Drexel University Libraries’ staff, where we’ll hear from The Drexel University College of Medicine Archives about their projects and collections.
Join us! We’ll provide morning-style snacks (muffins and the like) so pick up a drink from the coffee shop and we’ll see you there!
November 3, 2009 : 10 am : 2235 Hahnemann Library
Now that we have access to
Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro here at the library (via IRT), here’s a few minor tips for using it successfully.
- Check your system requirements beforehand. There is a page that helps you do just that, here.
- Make sure you have a camera/headset if you want to be seen and heard.
- Practice! There are many, many options, and practicing before a presentation is extremely useful.
- Remember that you have an option to record your session. It’s useful to review, and we can always delete it if you don’t want to keep it.
For those who are new to this tool, it’s a virtual meeting room software, similar to Wimba, but a little easier to use. It has many, many features which can be really useful if explored thoroughly. You can share your screen, upload presentations and documents, and conduct online polls and discussion on-the-fly.
Here are two recordings that Tim Siftar, IST Librarian, made for intro courses at the iSchool:
INFO Systems and Technology Research Tips (09:18)
INFO Introduction to Gartner Research (06:22)
Here’s the link to the Drexel version of Adobe Connect, the login screen. If you want to know more, please let me know!
A former colleague posted this link on Facebook, and I thought I’d share it here because of the new Mac workstations in the library, and at the reference desk. It’s a short list of “How-To’s” on moving from a PC to a Mac, with links to additional posts toward the end.
October 5×5 : October 6, 2009 : 10 am : L33 Hagerty Library
At this 5×5, we welcome the following presenters who’ll be sharing information about current projects.
Jess Rossi Ward & Rebekah Kilzer
Library Staff Events project and survey results.
Larry Milliken
Organizing English 101 Instruction sessions in conjunction with the English Department
Noelle Egan & Nancy Eagan
The first-ever Electronic Resources Fair, held at Hagerty Library on October 1, 2009. [Slides PDF]
Katherine Lynch
Information on how the search boxes work on the newly updated website. [Slides coming soon]
Rob Sieckiewicz
Digital exhibitions in Archives. [Slides PDF]
Slides from this event are located on the L drive at L:/Teams/Spark presentations/200910
Friday I gave a presentation at the
Western New York Library Resource Council’s conference,
Revved up for Reference: Virtual Reference in New York State. It was held in Ithaca, NY, and had about 50 attendees for the full event.
I spoke on Drexel’s implementation of Libraryh3lp, and my slides (pdf) are posted here, along with the other presenters’ slides, and photos of the event on the conference website.
My talk featured some statistical charts from LibraryH3lp –here’s the amount of IM traffic to the widget on the library home page, by month.
Jan-Sept 23, 2009
Here’s a chart of IMs we get, by time of day, and day of the week.
If you’d like to see more of these stats, please leave a comment, or just send me an email.
Thanks to everyone who filled out the survey for Library Staff Events that Jess and I distributed recently.
As we mentioned, this is an exploration and a method for getting everyone’s input on how best to organize Library Staff Events, growing out of the idea of the Brown Bag presentations and the Technical Services Snack Bag which has been so popular recently.
We got 54 responses to the survey, and of those 63% usually attend events now.
Here are a couple of charts that show what keeps people from coming, and what would get people to come:
Other things that came up:
- Staff want to see events held at both locations
- Over 90% think that Tuesday or Thursday mornings are the best times
- People would like more encouragement to attend, topics that are relevant to their jobs, and food!
After reviewing your responses, Jess and I have fashioned a plan that will establish a schedule for events. We’re looking to hold an event each month, in one of three basic formats.
- A presentation-style format, similar to the Tech Services Snack Bag.
- A “5×5″ format, where 5 people talk for five minutes each about one of their projects.
- An open format, to facilitate discussion on a specific topic.
We’re also planning to hold at least one of these, per quarter, at Hahnemann Library. Based on your feedback, we’ll be sending out calendar meeting requests for each event via email, and we’ll be posting the full schedule to this blog so you can see who will be presenting what topic at any time.
We hope you’ll continue to give us feedback as the process goes along, and we want to make the series as useful as possible!
Do you hate when you click a link and it downloads a PDF to your computer, whether you meant to or not? I’ve taken to looking at the link text in the browser status before I click on it, just so I don’t end up with a million PDFs on my desktop.
What about PDF forms or PDFs you want to edit? What if you don’t have a professional edition of Acrobat on your computer?
There are a couple of useful web tools that can help you avoid the Annoying PDF Trap.
First, is PDFMeNot, where you paste your URL to force it to open in a browser window. There’s a handy bookmarklet and a Firefox extension which automatically converts PDF links on a page to open in your browser instead.
Second, PDFEscape. You can use this, free, to fill out PDF forms or to edit a PDF. You can also register, or login with your Google account, to create and save PDF forms that you want others to fill out.
