New words

I was reading an article this afternoon and came across several words with which I was unfamiliar so (of course) I looked them up. They're pretty fun words so I thought I'd share them. I must admit I'm not sure when one would ever use them, the author whose article I was reading could easily have used more familiar words and I confess that I mentally accused him of using $10 words just to make himself sound more intelligent (or something). Here they are (with help from Webster's):

perspicuous

Main Entry:
per·spic·u·ous Listen to the pronunciation of perspicuous
Pronunciation:
\pər-ˈspi-kyə-wəs\
Function:
adjective
Etymology:
Latin perspicuus transparent, perspicuous, from perspicere
Date:
1586

: plain to the understanding especially because of clarity and precision of presentation

opprobrium

Main Entry:

op·pro·bri·um

Pronunciation:

\-brē-əm\

Function:

noun

Etymology:

Latin, from opprobrare to reproach, from ob in the way of + probrum reproach; akin to Latin pro forward and to Latin ferre to carry, bring — more at ob-, for, bear

Date:

1656

1: something that brings disgrace2 a: public disgrace or ill fame that follows from conduct considered grossly wrong or vicious b: contempt, reproach


defeasance

Main Entry:

de·fea·sance

Pronunciation:

\di-ˈfē-zən(t)s\

Function:

noun

Etymology:

Middle English defesance, from Anglo-French, from defesaunt, present participle of defaire

Date:

15th century

1 a (1): the termination of a property interest in accordance with stipulated conditions (as in a deed) (2): an instrument stating such conditions of limitation b: a rendering null or void2: defeat, overthrow

NVivo7 Test Drive Report #5

This is a short one. It just occurred to me that one of the big assumptions that NVivo makes is that all of your documents will be digital. But that might not be the case especially with historical research (diaries, photos, etc.). I wonder how they account for non-digital data? Must explore.

NVivo7 Test Drive Report #4

Preliminary conclusions.

I've been writing these first entries as an class assignment and while I have 26 more days in my trial of the software and plan to continue using it to analyze my usability data and report my experiences here (after I finish my other class assignments), I did have to complete and turn in the assignment I was originally writing for. This is the conclusion that I wrote for that assignment.

Several very useful points became clear as I worked with the NVivo7 trial. I began to find a number of things in my data that I did not expect to find, for instance, there are a number of behaviors evident among our users that, now that I am aware of them, will affect the way I teach library instruction. That is useful in itself but in terms of conducting qualitative research, I also see that there is a fine line that every researcher has to draw for him or herself between relevant findings and irrelevant findings. Where to draw that line would depend on the research question, the type of research design, the theoretical framework of the project and the theoretical orientation of the researcher.

My frame of mind is important to the quality of the results. It does not do much good to rush through data anlaysis. When I’m in a hurry (e.g. under a deadline to finish an analysis), I am at my least analytical and am least liable to go test an idea and am most liable to miss something in the data. Also, I tend toward linearity by nature. In this analysis of my usability data (which I started at the beginning of this semester and after all of my data collection was complete), I wanted to conduct the analysis participant by participant and then task by task rather than having to go back to participants whose transcripts I had already coded to look at them again. Both of these habits are things that I understand I will need to guard against as I continue to conduct qualitative research.

As far as the product, NVivo7 goes, it seems to me to be the most flexible and therefore useful of the QDA programs I have tested this semester. My “likes” lists outweighed my “dislikes” lists and it seems to combine most of the features that I found useful in all of the QDA programs I have tested. It seems to be intuitive enough for a novice researcher to grasp and begin using without to steep a learning curve but it also has some more advanced linking, memoing, querying, and modeling features that will satisfy a more sophisticated researcher.

The biggest drawback is the inability to code data in any format other than text (although I understand that this has been addressed in the next version). Another is that NVivo7, like most of the other QDA programs I have worked with this semester, seems oriented toward grounded theory research. I can think of two reasons why this might be so; first, because grounded theory is more systematic (at least Strauss & Corbin’s version of it) that other qualitative approaches and it is easier to develop computer programs that support this kind of thinking. But second, it may be the context of my perception that makes it seem so, given my inexperience with qualitative research the more systematic approaches like grounded theory would be easier for me to grasp and to find evidence of and uses for in the software.

NVivo7 Test Drive Report #3

Coding.

One thing that is different about how I’m coding my usability transcripts is that when I was watching the video recording as I was listening to and reading the transcript, I tended to group segments by task. I was thinking that, after I had coded them all, I would go back and compare each task. That doesn’t seem to be uppermost in my mind as I analyze and code in NVivo7 even though I’m using codes I created while I watching the video recording as I was listening to and reading the transcript.

I downloaded a trial copy of Camtasia with which I created an “external” for and played back as I analyzed the second transcript/video with NVivo. That helped a lot to continue my analysis of how our participants moved around the screen and from page to page. However the whole thing would be more useful for analyzing this kind of data if the video were built in to NVivo itself. I’ll be interested to see how that works in NVivo8.

Queries.

The Getting Started Guide wasn’t much help to me for learning about constructing and conducting queries so I watched the online tutorial. It gave me a lot of ideas about queries I could make of my data, as little as there is. I tried queries by node and word frequency and matrix queries. Matrix queries were my favorites because I could really begin to see how patterns might be emerging from my data (I was looking for correspondence between those participants who tended to browse the links clicking on those with which they were unfamiliar or not recognizing a term or label and those participants who opened up a particular page that we have labeled “Remote Access” because a high correspondence might indicate that we need to re-name that page with a more meaningful term).

Likes:
- being able to create a query and then re-run it as you continue to add data
- being able to save the whole project and move with it from one computer to another

NVivo7 Test Drive Report #2

November 20, 2007 – Creating my ‘project’

I followed the step-by-step instructions in the Getting Started guide for setting up a new project. As I worked through the steps, I noted some things I liked and disliked about NVivo7:

Likes:
- You can use regular Word files (.doc) or even text files (.txt) instead of having to convert everything to Rich Text files (.rtf), although .rtf files are acceptable. This is not really a very big deal I suppose but always felt cumbersome to me when working with other QDA software (e.g. MaxQDA and Transana).
- The ability to import multiple documents at once rather than having to select and import them one at a time.

Dislikes:
- You can’t use punctuation in naming nodes, e.g. I wanted to name a node “everything ought to be together” including the quotation marks because I was quoting a participant.
- (this one started out as a like) There doesn’t appear to be a limit to the length of description that one can give to nodes like there is in Transana…whoops! I was wrong
- No spell check
- While coding I can only look at a list of EITHER my free nodes or my tree nodes but not both at once, that’s awkward
- The little window that opens up every 15 minutes to remind you to save your work in annoying, wonder if there’s a way to change that setting to auto-save without asking me…there is! I found it by using Help but it was exactly where I would have expected it to be had I been thinking more clearly about the similarities between NVivo7 and Outlook.


I used the online help screens to find out how to add attributes to cases after reading that this was possible in the Quick Start Guide. I decided to identify each of my participants as a case since we had collected data describing characteristics like age, gender, perceived computer skills, internet use, library web site use, academic status, major, etc. I created attributes for each piece of data we collected.

Next, I added some tree nodes and free nodes based on codes I had already created and been using with this data in another piece of QDA software. One of the things I’m hoping to find out is whether one can create a tree node at a higher level of a hierarchy and then assign existing, hierarchically lower nodes to the new hierarchically higher level node.

I read through one entire transcript and coded it. During the process I created some new codes. These transcripts accompany a video recording of the screen of the workstation on which the participant is completing tasks. This is the first time I’ve analyzed a transcript without simultaneously watching the video recording of the sequence of pages visited. It’s a different experience focusing completely on the text. I can’t tell yet whether I’ll get more or less or just different results doing it this way.

NVivo7 Test Drive Report #1

It HAS been a while since I posted anything here. Between hiring a new employee at work and catching some kind of flu bug in October that I've just now gotten rid of I haven't had time to post. However, I'm working on an assignment for my Advanced Qualitative Research Methods class that I thought might be interesting and/or useful. The assignment is to try out a qualitative data analysis software called NVivo7. We were required to either try it out in the qualitative computer laboratory on campus (at TWU) or download a trial version of the software to our personal computers.

Being roughly 400 miles from campus and the Qual Lab, I chose to download a trial version of QSR’s NVivo7 qualitative data analysis software. I was excited and looking forward to testing it after Mary Helen Thompson’s presentation in our October class meeting so it is probably easy to imagine my disappointment when the software did not work properly when I downloaded it. Frankly, had the assignment not specifically called for the use of this particular software, I probably would have given up at this stage and not pursued a fix both because of the limited amount of time have for this assignment and because of previous, unsuccessful, frustrating encounters with technical support personell.

However, after two unsuccessful attempts to download, install, and use the trial version of the software, I reluctantly emailed their technical support staff. I was pleasantly surprised (and not a little astonished) to received a timely, helpful response. Unfortunately, the fix they suggested did not work. On my own initiative, I uninstalled and reinstalled the software, this time noting the error messages that appeared as the installation progressed (which I evidently ignored during the first install). I replied to the technical support staff’s email explaining what I’d done and why and what had been the result. In return, I received another pleasant, clearly articulated, helpful email that walked me step-by-step through uninstalling the component software (required for running NVivo but not created or published by QSR) including things to watch out and test for. I followed the directions exactly and am now to give NVivo7 a test on several of the transcripts taken from recordings of the usability test sessions we conducted on our newly designed library web site this summer.

Ah Ha moments

Don't ya just love those "ah ha" moments? You know, when a couple of things in your mind just come together and gel into a completely new idea? Especially when it's an idea that is useful? I've had a couple this afternoon and wanted to share them.

Both ah ha's go goes back to a conversation I had with a classmate recently about the difference between theoretical orientation and theoretical framework in the context of qualitative research reports (e.g. article, dissertations, etc.). We decided that a theoretical framework was a deliberately selected basis or grounding for a research project, usually based on someone else's previous research, and something that may inform one research study but doesn't necessarily inform all of one's research. A theoretical orientation on the other hand, was more like a world view, possibly constructed from one's social and cultural background rather than consciously selected. My classmate called it a lens through which research was viewed. Its something that a researcher can become aware of and acknowledge but not necessarily something that can be entirely set aside and definitely something that will inform all of one's research.

The ah has for me came while I was reading a dissertation that I'm reviewing for class. I'd been trying to apply our definitions of theoretical orientation and framework to this dissertation and I realized first, that the author was using the type of research he did (grounded theory) as a theoretical framework, not something I'd ever considered before. That was the first ah ha.

The second one was that he was using multiple theoretical frameworks. Not only was he using grounded theory as a theoretical framework, he was also using a number of other theories to frame his study. I had also not considered that before, everything I've read about doing qualitative research has talked about a single theoretical foundation for a research project, never more than one!

Research methods

I'm taking a class in advanced qualitative research methods this fall which I'm thoroughly enjoying. It seems to be dovetailing with my work at the library a bit which is both fun (or else I wouldn't be doing it) and informative because it's forcing me to look at a kind of qualitative research that I don't thing is covered directly in class.

One of the English professors at TAMUCC asked me to speak to her master's level Bibliography and Research Methods class about the different kinds of research. When I asked her whether she was looking for a particular focus she said she wanted a broad overview for them with an emphasis on research methods in the humanities. Well, what an exciting challenge! I know very little about research methods in the humanities having focused on the social sciences mainly with some peeks into the sciences for contrast.

So I began collecting books about humanities research and discovered some very cool things. For instance, research in the humanities places much more emphasis on the hunt for literature on a topic. There are loads of how-to books about how to find resources for humanities research (my personal favorite being Thomas Mann's The Oxford Guide to Library Research) but very few on how to "do" the discovery process and the criteria upon which how that process is judged by peers. Where as in the social sciences "research methods" books focus on a larger number of different aspects of conducting research including developing a research problem/question, selecting data collection and analysis methodologies, theoretical orientations, theoretical frameworks, guidelines for reporting results and judging quality.

At the moment, I think this is because in the social sciences (and the hard sciences), researchers create their own data (e.g. they measure something or transcribe interactions or write notes) whereas in the humanities, researchers don't create their data, they have to go out and find it (e.g. in primary and secondary documents). So the emphasis on "how to do" research in a discipline is focused on where the data comes from.

Anyhow, I managed to create a fairly general matrix comparing qualitative research and quantitative research for the class and spend about 45 minutes talking with them about the differences and similarities. Then I asked them to break into groups of three or four and gave each of them a research "type" from the matrix and asked them to develop a research problem/question and tell the rest of us how they would collect data to answer it. They all worked with the same issue: assessing learning outcomes for students in a first-year learning experience.

I expected pretty superficial responses given that they'd had all of 45 minutes of introduction but they accepted the challenge enthusiastically and came up with some really wonderful answers. What was really cool (for me) was how their answers provided me with material on which to expand my earlier explanations about qualitative and quantitative methods. For instance, one group described how they would use three different sources of data for a qualitative analysis of the issue which allowed me to expand on how qualitative projects are judged on trustworthiness and on some other ways to achieve trustworthiness (since they'd already described triangulation). I was inspired to create this exercise by John W. Creswell's book Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design: Choosing among five approaches (Sage).

I had such a good time teaching this class that I had a hard time stopping and leaving. When I did I met one of the students in the hall. She told me about how much she disliked this class because she wanted to do creative writing, not research. So I told her about narrative research where the researcher's job is to tell the story of an event or phenomenon in an individual's life. I gave her an example from Creswell's book. When I was done there was this amazing spark in her eye. She thanked me enthusiastically and asked if I thought that she could use narrative research for her final project in class.

I CANNOT TELL YOU HOW COOL THAT WAS! There is no way I can describe how that made me feel. It is so thrilling to be able to spark a student's interest, to watch the "ah ha" in their faces. It reminded me of the feeling I had the first day of library school...this is awesome, I love doing this, why didn't I know this was possible?!?! And I can't wait to do it again!

Just when you think you know something

I've got an assignment to review an article that reports on qualitative research. The one I chose is a grounded theory approach to scholars' use of and decisions to publish in open access journals. After I read through the article once, I was taken aback at how little of what I know about qualitative research was included. There was more explanation of the method than description of the research.

Since I had been thinking of using grounded theory for my mock dissertation proposal later in the semester, I checked out the grounded theory "bible" (Strauss and Corbin, 1998) from the library. What they really say about it (and the way they say it, which, I'm learning, is just as important to qualitative research) isn't what I interpreted from what others (Patton and Creswell in particular)were saying.

Just goes to show that you really need to consult the primary source.

Lessons learned

When they talk about theory in math, look out! They don't mean theory the way I've always thought about it, or at least the way I've thought about it lately, in terms of theories of education or communication expressed in words with specific epistemological, ontological, and axiological perspectives. They mean formulas and proofs of formulas that prove not only the practical, realistically possible situations but all situations no matter how highly improbable.

Now I suppose you could argue that these two things are fairly similar. Theory in the social sciences are described with words, sometimes highly specialized terms and this is not all that different from theory expressed with numbers and symbols that are also a highly specialized language of sorts.

You could argue that and you'd be right but there is a world of difference in the preparation one needs in order to understand mathematical theory and theory in the social sciences so perhaps I won't appear too naive when I tell you that I didn't REALLY understand the difference until this week.

My degree at TWU requires me to not only complete the core library science courses but also several courses in a cognate area. I chose statistics as my cognate and included in my degree plan a course called Theory of Statistics in which I enrolled this semester. Sadly, and much to my disappointment, I have learned quickly that I am no where nearly prepared to succeed in this class.

And it hasn't been pretty. I started tripping over calculus and trigonometry after about the second class and it went down hill from there, which is disappointing because I was really enjoying learning about statistics from another perspective. However, I've come to my senses, realized that I don't have the mathematical background to understand the theory that underlies the statistical manipulations that programs like SPSS and SAS do for us social scientists, and dropped the class.

Maybe I can be a mathematician or a rocket scientist in my next life!

Podcast for FS6793

Today I learned how to podcast courtesy of an assignment for my Advanced Qualitative Research Methods class. Here's what I created for them...


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Research methods and job ads

I'm writing up a job ad for a vacant position in my department today. I've been thinking about the skills and qualifications that I'm looking for and it occurs to me that one of the things that makes hiring difficult is that we (I) typically don't think much about how I'll measure the qualities that I'm looking for in a new employee. For instance, if I say that I'm looking for someone who is self-motivated and has a positive attitude, how will I determine whether my applicants have those qualities? That's not a question I would have asked myself before I started learning about research methods.

Before, I would have probably tried to come up with some way to quantify things like supervisory experience and familiarity with Windows Office software which are fairly easily quantified into measurements that have an ordinal relationship. But I would also have tried to quantify things like self-motivation and positive attitude which I think is much more difficult, not to mention subjective. This time I'd like to take a more qualitative approach to analyzing resumes, applications, reference letters and interviews (and helping the members of my search committee to do the same).

Usability and the new library web site

This is it! The weekend that we take down the old library web site and publish the new one. It's a project I've worked hard on all summer.

In July, along with some colleagues, I conducted usability tests on the new (unpublished) site. Then I reviewed the recordings of the usability sessions as well as the comments that my colleagues and I made after each usability test session and comments from the library staff and compiled a list of changes to the new site. The changes were mostly based on the things that our test participants had trouble with during the usability testing although some were based on staff commments and research that the Information Architecture Working Group did as they planned the new site. Finally, a number of us in the library have worked very hard to implement those changes in time for the preparations for the beginning of the fall semester to be completed.

As of Monday, August 13, 2007 you can see our new web site at http://rattler.tamucc.edu. The parts I worked on most are the Search All Databases pages (you can see them by clicking on the "Find Articles" link on the library homepage) and the Find Journals list (you can see this by clicking on the "Find" drop down menu at the top of the page and selecting Journals). Unfortunately, because our contracts with online information resource vendors require us to limit access to them to students, staff, and faculty of our university, you probably won't be able to see much.

Anyway, I'm fairly proud of what we've accomplished this summer and happy to have some data with which to work this fall. I'd welcome any comments that anyone cares to make about the site.

Getting carried away

All of a sudden I'm racking up a list of fun things to do this fall. I responded to a call for articles on serials and electronic resources management and social sciences data archives in a new library science encyclopedia. Don't know that I'll get invited to actually write them but it sounded like a good opportunity (especially since the articles would be refereed).

I also found out that I could apply (and would probably be accepted) to work as a Graduate Teaching or Research Assistant in the School of Library and Information Studies at TWU. That sounds like GREAT fun and would fill in a gap in my vitae (I need some teaching experience).

I'm taking two classes this fall, Theory of Statistics and Advanced Qualitative Research Methods.

And I still have tons of data from the usability study I just completed at work to analyse. I'd like to write an article (or two) based on those results.

I'm also chair of the Library School Outreach Committee for NASIG this year. I had to step down from chairing their Awards & Recognition Committee because the Executive Board felt (correctly) that I wouldn't be able to give both committees my full attention.

And I'm still reviewing reference books for Library Journal and the occasional serials related book for The Serials Librarian.

I guess it sounds a little like I'm bragging about all of this (and maybe I am a bit) but my intention when I started writing this was to try to "think aloud" about which of these opportunities I should accept (if and when they're offered). 'Course some of them I've already committed to. I have a bad habit of taking on more than I can do which I thought I had under control (partly by taping a sign that said "NO" on my computer monitor) but which I've obviously let run rampant again this summer.

Book reviews

I found a couple of the book reviews I've written recently and thought you might be interested in reading them.

One is for the Billboard Illustrated Encyclopedia of Country Music.

And the other is for the Encyclopedia of Politics and Religion(you have to scroll down a bit to find this one).

ALA 2007 – Eye to I: Visual Literacy Meets Information Literacy

I like this session because I left my computer at the hotel on Sunday (because we were going to the National Gallery of Art later in the afternoon) and had to take notes on a very small piece of paper and that gave me time to think. Actually, I hadn’t planned to take notes at all but apparently I’m physically incapable of not writing down the interesting things that I hear. Anyway…

The presenters were Cindy Cunningham who is Director of Media Metadata and Cataloging at Corbis Corp.., Danuta Nitecki who is Associate University Librarian at Yale University, and Loanne Snavely who is Head of Instructional Programs at Penn State University and their presentation was very well organized. They began by explaining that visual literacy is important because images have become so prevalent in our lives and will in all likelihood continue to be. Thus, visual literacy will rapidly become as important as information literacy (by which they mean textual information literacy).

There are several characteristics of visual images that make them more complex to seek and find. First is ownership; copyright of a visual image is often held by multiple entities including (using a photograph of an artwork as an example) the artist, the owner of the artwork, and the photographer. The second complexity is in making images accessible (e.g. cataloging them) because of the subjective nature of interpreting the symbols represented in an image; much more subjective than the interpretation of text for which we have much greater consensus on meaning.

How’s this for a great job? At Corbis there is a team of people who scan the media (newspapers, TV, etc.) for trends and then they search for images that have some meaning or representation for the trend AND as many words as they can come up with to describe them…including making up words!

They shared a couple of web site URLs with us as examples of trends in photographic images:

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129

http://www.video.google.com/videoplay?docid=824643990976635143

Then they asked, so what is visual literacy and why do we need to describe it? The answer is

- to gauge student development

- to evaluate teaching effectiveness

- to measure people’s ability to use them (visual images)

The problem is that there are no standards to describe what the “right”, “necessary” level of visual literacy is. Danuta Nitecki presented a rubric that they have developed as a potential standard (FMI see ). The disadvantage to their rubric is that it doesn’t address or measure the ability to find images.

Cindy Cunningham mentioned that there are studies about image seeking. That made me wonder whether any of the methods and frameworks that have been applied to (textual) information seeking having been applied to image seeking (e.g. Lynne Westbrook’s mental models or learning theory). It reminded me of my first year in library school when I was so interested in researching the availability of visual images on the web, in particular art images.

ALA 2007 - The Future of Information Retrieval

This session was composed of four speakers. The first was Marydee Ojala who edits ONLINE: The Leading Magazine for Information Professionals and blogs at http://onlineinsider.net/.

The questions she addressed were:
Are there philosophical differences between information professionals and end-users?
How does this affect searchability and findability?

IPs enjoy the search and sharing info between themselves BUT this leads us to forget to stop, overlook things, and, it begins to take longer. On the other hand, users want to find things, they don’t care about sources. The web makes searching pervasive but also unstable and had produced a culture of ‘gaming the system’ among publishers and providers.

In the future, the worst case scenario would be a highly controlled information environment where price doesn’t guarantee quality: shopping trumps research. In the best case, interfaces become intuitive, there are no licencing wars, high quality information is easily available.


The next presenter was Jay Datema, Technology Editor for Library Journal.

He talked about how “search[ing] has been commoditized” where the cost is privacy and people are making money from it, however, search syndication is a benefit to those who know what they’re looking for.

Sites like del.icio.us make it possible to find out what people are reading quickly and easily (presumably that makes it better than searching). See my del.icio.us page at http://del.icio.us/sarahwsutton

Authentication (‘s ability to preserve the privacy of the searcher) is the future of searching. There is the growing expectation of finding the past in the search (e.g. backfiles).

He mentioned Zotero as a means of creating a personal digital library. Note that zotero is one of my del.icio.us bookmarks in my ToRead tag category.

Here’s an interesting idea: Grokker as a federated search mechanism (some of the SUNY libraries are using it for that purpose).

Next, Mike Buschman, Technology Evangelist, Live Search Selection (Microsoft) spoke on The Future of Information Retrieval: When all books are online which seemed to me to be a bit preachy and sale-pitch-ish.

http://get.live.com/

MS Live Search Academic. About 5% of the worlds information is online, he talked primarily about the Live Search and the Book Search products.

In the future direction section of his presentation he mentions “unlocking non-textual information”. He mentioned music instruction books as an example but I immediately thought of the visual information seeking session (Eye to I), that I attended yesterday.

Questions to consider:
What is the atomic unit of the book?
What is a work?
What is the future of the physical library?
How is the movement to digital information going to affect what library professionals do?

Finally, R. David Lankes http://www.DavidLankes.org (LIS Faculty) presented on The future of information retrieval: Finding conversations

I realize that these notes have been getting progressively more disjointed, probably because it’s early, it’s the third day of the conference, he’s the last of four speakers.


The failure of Reference EXTRACT: mining data from reference transactions (which had been cleaned of any personally identifying info) and then calculated frequency of appearance of databases.

Miwa’s Question Paradox: people ask the same questions at the beginning and end of a search with completely different intentions

McClure’s Citation Strategy: in order to get cited, say it first, say it last, or say it stupid

Note: he made both of these up based on things people he knows have done and/or said.

http://iis.syr.edu/Projects/PNOpen What he means by ‘conversation’ has to do with this project to decompose reference transactions using complexity theory and network theory as frameworks…the conversation is the network created by the paths between utterances in these decomposed transactions.

Find the paper they wrote called, “Participatory Networks: The Library as Conversation”.

The web (etc.) makes a great deal of “conversational” data available.

Book as “conversation” (his definition) because the author had to organize the info it contains into chapters. Which is an interesting idea to compare to the NASIG keynote speaker about conversations in books as defined by marginal notes…a conversation in the more traditional sense: people communicating ideas in writing over time.

ALA 2007 - Utilizing learning theory in online environments.

I arrived at this session late so I don't have the structure of the talk in front of me (so to speak) and can't structure this post in the same way as I have the preceding ones. Here are some of the ideas she presented:

Goals of learning in any discipline are the same, learning to think like, process and interpret data like a [enter discipline here].

There are lots of different types of learning (visual, auditory, kinesthic, etc.) and you can tell by observing them what their preferred learning styles are. By 'learning' from them we can create richer online learning evironments.

Most of this presentation is focused on library instruction and virtual reference.

Current educational theories (popular now):
(1) The idea that students learn in social groups; they learn from listening to each other and talking about things.
(2) Situated learning means that the learning takes place in the same place in which the knowledge will be later used; learning in context.
(3) Brain based learning or "ten minutes on, ten minutes off", in other words sharing some information and then giving the brain time "off" to absorb it.
(4) Behaviorism; negative feedback doesn't work.

A combination of face to face learning and online learning works best; helps to create an ongoing conversation which is (again) how Millennials learn.

She addressed generational differences in terms of it informing the learning process.

It seems to me that a lot of this has to do with non-verbal communication online...which sounds like an oxymoron until you think about "places" like second life and the presenters' comments about the changes in online communication that occur once the communicators have met face to face, for instance, think about the way you IM with someone or read a message from them (be it email or a blog comment, etc.) and how careful you are about what you say when you don't "know" them in person compared to how when you communicate with someone you do "know" in person and can almost hear the tone of their voice and can more easily tell when they're being sincere and when they're being sarcastic.


Interesting observation: I seem to engage in more reflection about the speaker's topic when I don't have an agenda for the presentation.

The Power Point for this presentation will be posted on the ALA website.

ALA 2007 - LRRT Research Forum: Information Seeking from Childhood through College

Note: LRRT is debuting a research mentor program; find the link and more info see their website (after a few days). Also, to volunteer for an LRRT committee, contact the incoming president soon.

The four programs in this session were ordered by age of the participants.

First was Lynne McKechnie (the I School at UW) speaking on “Spiderman is not for babies” The Boys and reading problem from the perspective of the boys themselves.

Boys lag behind girls in standardized tests of reading skills. McKechnie conducted semi structured interviews with boys aged 7 to 12 and made lists of all of their reading materials (including books, videos). They found that boys are reading. What they are reading is different between boys and girls.

This was a qualitative study and her results were presented in the voices of the boys who were interviewed. There were lots of quotes to illustrate the findings. Some of them were collected by (i.e. interviews were conducted by) her students (presumably MLS or PhD students). I would have been interested in a hearing a little bit more about the researchers’ perspectives in order to get a feel for their research paradigms

Melissa Gross (Florida State) presented next. Her presentation was entitled The Information Seeking Behaviors of School Children” which was part of a larger study that used both qualitative and quantitative methods which was published in the form of a book by Scarecrow Press. She focused on the qualitative results in this presentation. In it she compares self-generated and imposed information seeking. Some of the children were excited and happy to be asked to find some piece of information by a teacher or classmate but while this was looked on positively in the younger children it was perceived as not so positive by older children.

She began by defining the terms in her research question and the roles the people in her study generally took. She used focused in-depth interviews with seven teachers from one school including teachers, students (between the ages of 4 and 12), and the school library media specialist. She also spent some time explaining the limitations placed on the study by the ages of the children participants. She presented her results in her power point slides and provided anecdotal evidence (the childrens’ stories about their reading) verbally.

Here’s a thought: I wonder how one creates trustworthiness in this kind of study. Can you still use member checking with young children? How? Maybe through triangulation. I’ll have to look at her book to find out I s’pose.

It will also be interesting to read all of the presenters’ published research reports. It seemed to me that they presented here in language and terms that would be accessible to this audience.

The third presentation was on tweens’ information seeking behavior. Tweens are ages 9 to 13. Along with this information, he described some of their other characteristics and context. What he’s presenting is part of a larger study by Karen Fisher called “Talking to You” and had to do with finding out why people prefer to turn to each other for information, particularly for what she calls “everyday life information seeking.” In order to gather data they planned a “Tween Day” sort of one day camp which they repeated three times at three different locations (one on campus – UW, an urban outreach ministry, and a suburban elementary school).

They were asking things like what types of everyday information do they perceive a need for? How do they seek everyday information? What barriers do they encounter? (and four more that I missed because the slide passed two quickly).

They used focus groups, creative interactive web-based exercises, individual interviews all of which were recorded to collect data. He didn’t talk much (nor did the other presenters) about how they analyzed their data. He presented results and quotes from transcripts both in his power point slides and verbally. He gave a hint of their data analysis in describing their need to ‘decode’ some of the tweens’ terms (“stuff”); he talked about coding the transcript of the group interviews.

It’s interesting that, so far, none of the information sharing is happening in electronic environments. Whoops! Just as I write this, one of the quotes on one of his slides included a reference to chat rooms.

As a side note, he is a very engaging speaker and obviously passionate about tweens and his research…so much so, in fact, that he’s having trouble stopping.

Here’s an interesting finding (that they’re going to explore further): when asked what librarians can teach you to use to find information, newspapers and magazines and articles were the category that got the fewest votes.

Lynn Westbrook presented last on “Google the Random Stuff: Mental Models of Academic Information Seeking”. Her purpose for the study was to use mental models to examine information seeking; how they visualize and conceptualize about information when they’re dealing with an imposed query. The sample for the study was purposive and self-selected and bounded by matriculation level and academic achievement. She did in-depth interviews and observations, transcribed it all and used HyperResearch to code and analyze the data. Then she presented the components of some of her participants’ mental models.

She presented three different perspectives from the students in her study using quotes. Then she defined mental models and presented the advantages and disadvantages of their use as a frame work for research as well as how they’re used and how they develop. She spent most of her time expanding on the models that emerged from her data analysis.

Hmm, it would be interesting to look for how and if mental models and competency theory are related in the literature.

ALA 2007 - Library Research Round Table Research Forum, part two

In the second segment of this session, Laurie Bonnici (Drexel), Lynne Watson (Florida State) presented on "Other place as library". What they were interested in was do "other places" compete with libraries (using Oldenburg’s “Third Place” (1989) as their theoretical framework).

They used unobtrusive observation between 4/2006 – 8/2006 and a web based survey in February 2007 as their methods.

They presented some of the demographics from their survey and one of those was generation: 1 silent, 12 boomers, 12 x’s, 90 millennials.
Only 3% of the respondents to the survey given in the coffee house were using library resources but 3% also said they would like assistance with using library resources.

Most of their respondents stayed in the library between one and five hours (50% roughly).

Some of their reasons for not using the library:
- have a computer at home/work
- takes too long & pay to print
- internet service is poor
- no wifi
- have wireless laptop, don’t need to go to the library

In the library café most get coffee and move to the library (50%+).

They went through this presentation so fast that I only got about half of their points, need to look to see if they publish this somewhere (proceedings?).


Finally, Marie Radford (Rutgers), Lynn Silipigni Connaway (OCLC) presented the results of a multi year (10/05 – 9/07) project looking at virtual reference. Four phases: focus groups, analysis of live chat reference interviews, online surveys, telephone interviews. I’m not sure what their research question was, from the discussion I think that it has to do with the success of virtual reference transactions and, specifically, the success when the librarian clarifies the user’s query as compared to when the librarian doesn’t do so. [Query clarification = reference interview.]

Their results are available on the web at OCLC in a URL that ended with /synchronicity.