I had a brief, but enjoyable, visit to the Western Conference on Science Education at UWO (July 6-8, 2011). I attended on the Thursday to share with educators in attendance some of the things we’re experimenting with in the Science Literacy component of iSci. The format was interesting – speakers were paired up by topic similarity, and after those there was a discussion period lasting about a half hour. I was paired up with Francis Jones out of UBC, who was doing some very cool things in a second-year Earth and Ocean Science course to develop ‘scientific skills’. Some of the things that Francis and we are trying overlap, and some diverge, but that’s where great idea sharing can happen. I’ll be getting in touch with Francis to get more detail on a few areas, particularly his approach to students developing a good scientific question.

My presentation is below. I was particularly chuffed when one of the attendees told me that I had the best designed slides at the conference.

Explaining Science: Embedding Science Literacy into a Research-Based Undergraduate Program

On Thursday March 31st, Krista Godfrey, Karen Nicholson and I participated in a panel presentation on three models of embedded librarianship at ACRL 2011. In an unusual twist, we had no convener to introduce us, so we ran the show ourselves. We were playing to packed house, probably due to a combination of talking about a hot topic, and being in an ideal timeslot (10:30am on the first day). Our ‘hook’ was that we were presenting our models as if they were the best, and we were debating each other to prove to the audience, and let them be our jury (plus, a beer was on the line).

One feature that ACRL offered was to print a twitter hashtag in the conference schedule (further reinforced by including it on our title slide). This led to a lively ‘backchannel’ conversation in the audience, which included thoughts, links and notes. A big plus of a twitter discussion is that it allows the presenters to read what the audience is thinking in a way that doesn’t often come across in questions. Furthermore, that ‘discussion’ can be saved and shared (which I’ve done below).
Thanks to all who participated! (And special thanks to those that personally approached us after the talk to say they enjoyed it)

Embedded Librarians: Three Models – ACRL 2011

Twitter archive after the jump.

Twitter Archive

Another year, another take on teaching presentation skills. This year for iSci, we are teaching presentation skills in three classes.

Class One

1. Class was asked to think of principles or practices that one should consider when evaluating a presentation. The class came up with five (e.g. consideration of audience, flow, etc.), which we used like a rubric to evaluate video presentations. We then watched each video in turn and evaluated (using clickers) and discussed the good/bad/ugly of each. Not surprisingly, there were many strong opinions and a few disagreements; it made great fodder for conversation.
2. Following this, a best-practices document co-authored by the entire class was drafted. We did this using a Google Doc with permissions set so that everyone with the link could edit it. (downside: all editors are anonymous, and undergraduate students are prone to take advantage of anonymity in such a situation!) The class was informed that their document would form some of the basis of their evaluations for their final presentations.

Videos below:

[The third video was a video I found on Vimeo of a student's presentation, with the usual complement of 'ums', 'likes' and uptalking. In consideration of that individual, I will leave that video out. Contact me if you really want to see it.]

Class Two

1. A quirky poem/video emphasizing the importance of speaking with conviction, and avoiding the dreaded up-talk.
2. A presentation of some considerations in slide design. The challenge here was to find a pre-prepared slideshow that demonstrated good principles for scientific presentations. If I had more time to prepare, I would have found an actual well-made PPT with scientific content. As it was, I only found some slideshare shows that talked about good principles, but from a general/marketing/business perspective, not necessarily academic. (If you have great examples, please share them). I should also add that we did not show all of these slides, and included plenty of caveats. We didn’t want to give rules, but suggestions and guides.

Video

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.

Slides:

Class Three

It hasn’t happened yet, but the plan is this: the students are working in groups, planning their mission to Mars. They will be delivering a final presentation at the conclusion. For our class, they will present 4 slides from their presentation to the class, as a ‘warm up’ or practice round. No marks, no pressure, feedback as requested.

This year, I spent another afternoon with the MacShads (Shad Valley students @ McMaster) along with my co-facilitator, Susan.  We wanted to take an opportunity to do some non-library, non-information literacy instruction, free from all fetters of normal expectations. So, what we came up with was to riff off of the MacShad’s overall theme project topic: Canada’s aging population.

To this end, we looked for interesting multimedia that dealt with the topic, and built part of the session around that. The videos we sourced were about depopulation, filial  piety, ageism and ‘curing’ aging. These topics were all very good for sparking interesting lines of questioning and follow-up discussion. Part two of the three-hour session was originally to be a design exercise in creating an ‘age-friendly city’. This was scrapped, because it tread too close to the design challenge the students were working on. Instead, we tried our hand at leading a debate. There were two topics (and four teams, one for each side of each topic). We made clear rules and guidelines for the debate, which propelled it along nicely. Also, I was happy to get a chance to use the Thode Library ThInK Space as it was designed for, as an active learning classroom.

I think that the workshop was fairly successful. The Shads always impress with their knuckle-down work ethic, and there was some good laughs, too.

[Small update: The report that the Shad co-director got from the student leaders was that the students were sleepy during the videos, but better during the discussion. Not exactly the glowing praise we were going for!]

Workshop Slides

Debate Rules

Multimedia Used

White Coat/Black Art podcast – Ageing, Ageism and the Silver Tsunami

A presentation I made for a quick and dirty introduction to what impact factor is, how it is calculated, where to find it, and some discussion of its problems. The class might have had 10 students in it (max), but it was very difficult to engage them in a discussion about what kinds of flaws the measure might have, or how else you might measure it. I went into the audience and sat next to the students until they started participating! Might as well make them feel awkward, too.

An advanced search strategies presentation for iSci. Including boolean!

I was asked to contribute to a presentation/skit/demo for iSci, with the idea of showing some poor and good presentation techniques. Since one of my biggest presentation pet-peeves is uptalking, I volunteered to demonstrate that phenomena. During some basic prep, I started reading some articles about it, and decided to make the presentation ABOUT uptalking, while also delivering it in the uptalking tone. (Other demos included over-enthusiasm, bored, lack of eye-contact, bad slide design, etc.)

But here’s the problem with trying to tell students they uptalk – they have no idea when they’re doing it. In fact, later in the class, during a discussion, I heard a student answer a question while uptalking! Oh well.

Technically, my first information literacy class. The first hour and a bit was taken up with this ‘lecture’, which included some opportunity to discuss evaluation criteria for websites, and a source jeopardy game.

Part II, the second hour and a half, required the students to find, collect, checkout, photocopy, print, and cite. They did this as a group, and some had to leave our location to visit another library. In effect, this was an opportunity to ‘troubleshoot’ common problems with me in the room.

Library 101 for iSci 2009

Information Sources Location Activity.

Toronto, MaRS Centre – July 29th, 2009 – Free Admission
Slides and Speaker List available

The title of the conference was slightly misleading, as it suggested a broad view of science 2.0 landscape. Instead, I found that at least half the talks were aimed at a specific type of researcher: those that do computational science research. There were, however, some interesting ideas that were of a broader nature, which I will discuss further.

Michael Nielsen – Doing Science Online

Nielsen opened his talk with a discussion of blogging in the sciences. In particular, he described the blog of Terrence Tao, a mathematician and Fields medalist. What makes Tao’s blog special is that it is a place for very high-level thinking and discussion.  Tao writes blog posts outlining a mathematical problem he’s working on, along with his ideas for how they might be solved, or introducing a new way to think about them. The comments section is full of other mathmaticians offering advice, rebuttal, criticism, and discussion. It has, in essence, become a forum for mathematical thought that cannot be replicated in traditional journal-style publishing. The output of Tao’s blog is professional enough that it has been formally published in two volumes: “Structure and Randomness: pages from year one of a mathematical blog” and “Poincaré’s legacies: pages from year two of a mathematical blog“.

Blogs allow for a rapid exchange of information, almost in real-time. It also makes the scientific conversation readily searchable, and open. While traditional scientific publishing methods are still critical, it is interesting to note that other media can be an important part of the process. Another example is the so-called open notebook approach to using the web. In a similar way, ideas and notes are published and made available for viewing.

Tao and Nielsen, amongst others, have started up another blog (and associated wiki) called Polymath Projects, designed to be “massively collaborative mathematical research projects”. Essentially, these spaces allow many mathematicians to combine their talents to solve larger, more difficult math problems, which will later be published (attributed to a polymath pseudonym). While not a new idea (see Bourbaki for collectives publishing under pseudonyms, and later, Crowdsourcing), it is still incredibly powerful.

What can the library do, then, to support this kind of work? The simplest action is to support the tools that researchers and scientists need, like blogs and wikis. These tools will not use themselves, however, so the librarian must play advocate. Another, more complex act is to find ways to support open data curation for scientists, that allows for data to be re-used and re-analyzed.

Cameron Neylon – A Web Native Research Record: Applying the Best of the Web to the Lab Notebook

Neylon opened his talk by suggesting that the traditional mode of distributing scientific information is waning, while other modes are rising. The problem, he suggests, is that current publishing methods are too static, too non-interactive. Beyond this, traditional publishing is slow, doesn’t allow for re-use, mashing-up, and does not necessarily accommodate the ‘size’ of a publishable idea. Neylon sees modern science as requiring strong connections to other science, suggesting that it be less like words in a book and more like a highly branched and interconnected network.

In his lab, he is using the web in a different way – rather than do a bit of research, then transcribing it to a paper notebook, and then possibly transcribing it again online, he skips the middle bit. He has wired his machines to take the results of an analysis and upload it automatically to his website. The online lab notebook, then, is partially automated, networked and linked, and very interactive. But, most of all, it is open. Failed experiments, unused or raw data, and so on – it is all present and accounted for, and available to be manipulated and mined by other researchers.  There are hurdles associated with such openness, though: most researchers are less willing to share results and findings so quickly, lest they be scooped by a competitor. According to the Wikipedia entry, there are also issues with curation and organization of such an incredible amount of data.

Jon Udell: Collaborative Curation of Public Events

Udell pointed out that when it comes to public events, the most common system of notification is simple tacked up poster (on poles, windows, etc.). At the community level, this is a more comprehensive event aggregator than anything that exists online. As such, most of these posters don’t have an associated webpage, nor is there a comprehensive index. While these posters have a low barrier to entry, they offer poor searchability.

A solution that Udell envisons is an event aggregator – an online tool that collects calendar information from a number of disparate sources, and can than output them back to the end user. More than that, however, Udell wants to maintain some core values for this platform: collaboration, open data, standards, transparency, and re-use. This project also asks that users do not only need to be subscribers of data and information, but can be producers of it. Udell sees members of the project as ‘curators’ – people that go out and collect event information, but also create it, and encourage that the community produces it, too.

There is a challenge in this, however. Many event producers (cities, tourism boards, universities, etc.) do not publish their event data in an open format – the ideal is .ICS or iCal – and so that information cannot be aggregated.

I have taken a personal stake in this project. (you can, too! – In fact, Udell sees librarians as having role in this kind of work.) After the talk, I volunteered myself to be an event curator for Guelph, ON. I have found it challenging, in the sense that many of the organizations that list events in the city lock up their information in RSS or email notifications that cannot be easily captured. Nonetheless, I have ‘nagged’ the major event producers to open their information up, and continue to scour the ‘net for iCal feeds.

And so…

In the land of Science 2.0, I see a role for librarians – whether it be providing access to technologies or curating data or other kinds of information. It is important to be listening to pioneering researchers, discovering their needs, and finding ways to meet them.

McMaster annually hosts Shad Valley students for one month during the summer. The integrated science program (starting this summer), iSci, was asked if they wanted to contribute. So, in that capacity, I volunteered to lead one 3-hour session to conclude the topic of communication and the media. I chose to make the students the communicators: they would create and deliver a 5 minute presentation during the session. The catch? The slide presentation would contain 20 slides, and each would display for 15 seconds. This is the ‘ignite‘ format of presentation, and it’s not easy!

The students were game, however, and whipped up presentations (on whatever they wanted to talk about). Obviously, the biggest issue was timing – making sure they were able to speak ‘around’ the 15 second slides. Some spoke too fast to cram information in, and others didn’t have enough to say. Another sticking point was the 20 slide requirement – this was interpreted by many as meaning that their presentation required 20 different ‘ideas’: “I can’t think of 20 things to say!”. This is a common problem with – to borrow from Tufte – the cognitive style of powerpoint presentations. I tried to reinforce the notion that you can share an idea that will take more than 15 seconds; that is, change the slide, but maintain the idea. It was a tough sell!

The presentation below was what I delivered (in the ignite style) to show them how to create theirs.