Password post

So much has changed that I thought I should do a fresh password post.

There are now 3 ways to get into library resources from off campus:

1. You can log into the library catalog and databases using the same login as MySCSU, eLearning Vista, and the campus lab computers. Please see the Password Reset form, or a OIT Service Desk for help with your network login.

1. Use the login boxes on the LEFT at http://www.consuls.org/patroninfo, the Login or My Record link in the CONSULS Library Catalog, or the databases login screen.
2. Enter your Network Username and Password (MySCSU/Vista login).
3. Be sure to pick the correct campus!
4. Click the Submit button.
5. Problems with your Network Login need to be directed to the IT Helpdesk.

Note: If you have recently reset your password, the new password may take some time to "migrate" to the library login. Please try your old password, or use the Library PIN or Remote access in the meanwhile.

If you mistype and need to try again, the campus choice will reset to Central. Be sure to choose the correct campus on each attempt.

2. You can also use your University ID number and Library PIN to login.

1. Create your Library PIN at http://www.consuls.org/patroninfo, the Login or My Record link in the CONSULS Library Catalog, or the databases login screen.
2. Enter your ID number in the login boxes on the RIGHT.
3. Leave the PIN box blank and click the Submit button.
4. If you have a current library account and you do not have a PIN, you should get a form to create a PIN.
5. Your Library PIN should be at least 6 characters long, and use numbers, letters, or both. The library PIN is not case sensitive. DO NOT use "special" characters, such as *, #, or ! DO NOT use repeating patterns (such as 121212 -- dates are sometimes a problem, Jan 1, 1999 = 010199, for instance). You will need to enter the exact PN in both boxes.
6. Click Submit.
7. If you get an error message about your PIN being "not complex" enough, try a different PIN. Remember, do not use "special characters" or repeating patterns.
8. If you get an error message about "invalid" or "expired" entries, you may already have a PIN (possibly created by accident) or your library account may be blocked. For "invalid" entries, try the "Forgot your PIN" link below the PIN box. That will send a message to the email we have on file. If you do not get an email, or get a different error message, call the Circulation Desk at 203-392-5756 to check the status of your account and/or to delete an old or accidentally created PIN.

Video tutorial on creating a Library PIN (Flash plugin required).

3. An alternative route into the databases from offcampus is available through the campus Remote server. You will still need to log into CONSULS to view e-reserves, and request and renew books.

1. Log on to https://remote.southernct.edu/ using your Network username and password.
2. In the upper right, type library.southernct.edu into the Browse box and click the Go button.
3. Go to the databases and search without having to log in again!

Note: You will not be able to follow any links that go outside the databases or campus website. For outside links, open a new window or tab in your browser and copy the URL's into this new window/tab.

Accessing the Remote server on campus may provide different options than off campus access.

A Day in the Life

What does a librarian do all day? Well, today I'm participating in the Library Day in the Life Project, and I'll be updating this blog post all day. I'm the Coordinator for Distance Learning for Hilton C. Buley Library, and the Sciences Reference Librarian.

9:00am My day always starts with email and whatever problems have come up over night that I can help with. Today, that's problems with the database logins--might be something lingering from the power outages yesterday, but the servers in question are actually not on campus. Sorry folks, can't help much on that!

9:15 Email. Mostly vendor stuff, newsletter-y stuff (like Inside Higher Ed), and spam.

9:26 Not too much email this morning. Making tea to take to the reference desk for a 1 hour shift. If it's not busy, I'll be working on a new "Accessing the library databases from home" brochure.

10:20 Power out, and back, again! Just got "unproxied" database login instructions up before the power went out. I guess the patch to the campus electrical system didn't hold. (The power went out 4 times yesterday.)

10:30 Answered reference questions about database access problems, printing, and finding articles from a reference list. Pretty slow, but not surprising given the lack of power right there in the middle!

11:20 Proofread and submitted my final grant reviews (Done!) and walked through the remote login work around with a student on the phone. It's a problem because I can't see the same screens on campus. I think I need to go home for lunch.

1:00pm Updated instructions with screenshots from home. I hope this makes more sense. Time to head back to work.

1:30 Email. More email. Now can I work on my brochure?

2:00-3:00 Tea and the eduMOOC Live Panel #5: Public, Private, and Open Learning. The audio stream seems to be a little choppy today. eduMOOC is a Massive Open Online Course about online learning with over 2500 participants worldwide. The weekly panels pull experts from all sorts of online learning fields and institutions together for an hour, while the participants listen and chat via Twitter. Everything is recorded and is/will be available on the site.

Notes:

• Creative Commons is working on educational materials metadata scheme: LMRI
• CC also involved in making available the materials produced in the TAACCCT grants, which is the grant project for which I just finished a reviewing stint. 
• Cable Green of CC: open will eventually be the default, you'll need a good reason to close resources
• Jeff Newell of the Ill. Community College Board says that they are working on state-wide developmental courses that will be at least partially online
• CG: open an make efficiency--if so much financial aid and student money is being spent on textbooks (est. $5m for Eng101 book in Washington state), wouldn't it make more sense to provide cheap, open textbooks instead of extra financial aid or student loans?
• Larry Regan (Penn State): open makes for better books, improvements from future users
• JN: 25% of college cost is textbook costs (Ill CC study)
• Ray Schroeder (U Ill and eduMOOC): the split between course content (ie open) and course credit (me: and support services) is going to be a big point of discussion
• CG: "Iron Triangle" formula: access, quality, cost are all reciprocal--this is devastating especially in current budget situations; OER ("golden circle") disrupts this completely
•  LR: may need a new paradigm if content is open (me: brings up the real question, what exactly does an educational institution deliver? It's not just content/information. Isn't our strength based on teaching and support of learning?)
• OERu

4:00 Informal discussions about databases with other librarians. We are getting GeoBase on a new platform. Yay! Search widgets display differently in different browsers, and IE on Windows 7 messes up a lot of things, including our catalog. Ugh.

Good news: database access seems to be back (fingers crossed) and campus announcement says that we've got a new electrical system work around that should be more sturdy (fingers crossed again/still/more). Time to check email again and get back to work on that brochure.

4:50 Time to wrap up the day. I've got a draft of the brochure done, but it still needs some work.

What do I often do that I didn't today? Meetings (one tomorrow, but the summer is quieter in general); weeding (working on the medical sections right now--it gets outdated so fast!); collection development (buying books, etc.); helping students or professors with library research; teaching library instruction classes and demos; staff and faculty development (Web 2.0 and open access topics, mostly); helping faculty find resources for new classes or updating old ones; catching up on my own reading.

5:00pm Well, it's been nice spending the day with you. Have a good evening!

Thoughts on Google+ and the "Google LMS"

I've been on Google+ for about a week now, and I want to document my thoughts on it.  I also want to consider what Google+ might do to my consideration of using only Google products to run a course. Like the first post, this is mostly a thought experiment about what goes into a 'course' and what sorts of products and services might be cobbled together. It also gives me a concrete model to compare features and helps me think about what else I might do with something like Plus. (And if Google would like to take any of this as a suggestion, I'm happy to be of service.)

Overall, I like it. Having Circles be so prominent (as opposed to Facebook lists) really does help. I also like that following does not have to be mutual (though I've noticed a tendency for most people to follow everyone who follows them--I suspect this will wear off.) The privacy features do seem to be more self-explanatory--which, after all, is Google's biggest point against Facebook. I've seen some excellent cautionary postings about the intellectual property dangers, but those are inherent in any social network, not just Google+.

I see the main failings at the moment (and remember, Plus is still in very early development) as a lack of groups, a lack of easy posting, and a lack of something that no social network so far has really had: history.

Circles, while being marvelous in terms of communication management, are individual. A Circle is not like a Facebook Page or a Google Group, which exists beyond an individual. (This was initially confusing, as I was invited through someone's eduMOOC Circle, who was in someone else's eduMOOC Circle, etc.) Circles are like Facebook Lists or a personal email distribution list. So if I create a Circle for a class, I can broadcast to the Circle, but classmates can't broadcast to the class unless they also create Circles with all classmates in them, and we can't even check to see if everyone in my circle is in someone else's. You just know that someone is going to leave someone out, accidentally or on purpose. Perhaps Google will integrate Groups into Plus at some point--it would be a good pairing. I also like the suggestion I saw somewhere for Circles within Circles--so, for instance, I could have a Reference Department Circle within my Work Circle, so that everyone in Ref is automatically part of Work, without me having to remember to add them to both. It's not crucial (it's not that hard to add someone to two circles) but it would be an even better model of how social groups really work.

I'm now constantly frustrated at the difficulty of getting content into Plus. The only 'Add to Google+" feature that I've found so far is a 3rd party add-on to Google's Chrome browser, called Surplus. It shows me my notifications, and has a Share button that will post the URL of the page I'm on and whatever comments I'd like to make. It works great, except that I'm not in Chrome all the time. A simple bookmarklet would be fine! But until I can get content into Plus as easily as I can into Facebook or Twitter, Plus is going to have a distinct disadvantage. I expect this will be solved quickly, but it's frustrating at the moment.

I thought at first that I might be able to use Google's +1 (their 'like' button), but there doesn't seem to be a way of sharing the things I +1 to my Google+ stream.

The history issue is a problem I have with Facebook and Twitter, too. Sometimes I can't find my own old posted links! In some circumstances you could +1 pages (did I say I really want a Plus bookmarklet!), and see them in your profile, but you can't organize them there (at least not yet). Something like the Notes feature in the Google Reader would work--you can tag and share (or not), so you could save links to articles, blog posts, files, etc. Just a tagging feature on +1 would be great or the ability to save to Reader right in Plus. Right now, I'd do something like: see an interesting link in Plus, go there and save to a Reader Note (actually I save to Delicious or Evernote, mostly, but this is a Google post).

To sum up the previous post about Google as courseware: Sites for a course page, Calendar for due dates and scheduling, Docs and possibly Books and Scholar for readings, Blogger for student blogs and journals, YouTube for video lectures and class projects, Docs for papers and presentations, Docs spreadsheet for grading, GTalk/Chat for office hours and study groups, Groups for discussions, Gmail for individual communications and announcements, iGoogle for students' personal learning organizers/networks. This was based on a traditional course model, with grades and office hours and all, so obviously if you're doing something less formal, you could use less--and there definitely are better, non-Google tools for much of this. But still, it's a pretty impressive inventory.

So what does Google Plus add to the 'courseware' mix? Mostly networking and communication convenience. Students can easily self-organize into study groups. It's easy to share something with one or more Circles, or just one person. Plus currently has photos (Picassa) built in, and I bet videos from YouTube and files from Docs will get added at some point. Office hours can use the video chat in a Hangout or the Google Chat. You could even do small lectures in a Hangout (I think the limit is 10 people at a time).

The Sparks feature seems a bit like Google Alerts, so that could make a nice addition to a learning network. Students could also follow people outside of the class doing work related to their courses, and since you can create as many circles as you need, creating 'Follow' circles for different subjects would be easy, so you don't get your history mixed up with your English lit. If Plus takes off, and once Google allows institutions to create Plus accounts, there should be all sorts of interesting things to follow.

So, it's early yet, but Google+ has a lot of potential. Like any social network, the value to the user is in the network. So, please feel free to 'circle' me! http://gplus.to/delibrarian

First eduMOOC live panel

I wanted to get my thoughts on the live panel down as soon as possible.

Every time I attend an online panel or conference I'm reminded of a lecture in grad school (education degree) where the speaker mentioned "mature technologies". A toaster, he said, is a mature technology. Computers and the Internet are not. About a week later, my toaster died an untimely death. Personally, I think a chair is a mature technology (though maybe not my desk chair). You don't need that much familiarity with one to use it, they generally work, and breakage usually has to do with the quality of the materials, not the quality of the design. Online conferencing is definitely not a mature technology. I'm not sure it's in kindergarten yet. This was an interesting setup --a live screencast of a virtual conference system (Elluminate?) such that we were watching a video of someone's screen and hearing the panel discussion, with a Twitter widget for back channel and questions. Unfortunately the Twitter display wasn't picking up the hashtag, and there weren't many slides (which was actually a good thing, in the end) so I think most of us ended up following the Twitter feed on some other system and just listening to the audio. All and all, that was fine, but not quite what was planned, I think. Ah, technology.

For content, the panel consisted of a number of administrators of various online programs across the country. (You can see the list on the eduMOOC week one page.) (One comment via Twitter was that we needed more international coverage.) They spent some time at the beginning introducing themselves and relating how they got to their current positions in online learning. I did miss a few minutes at the beginning, so I'll have to go back and listen to the recording, but I would have been more interested in hearing why they were chosen for the panel. What difference in perspective does someone from a community college system bring as compared to someone who directs a regional system of online programs or who someone who works with continuing education programs. They didn't seem to have many philosophical differences (they agreed with each other a lot.)

The Twitter backchannel (once I got somewhere I could see it) was most interesting in what we picked up on. "The access war has been won" brought some disagreement (I'm not sure I agree with that myself, though I think I would agree that the tide of battle has finally turned), but also brought up accessibility--not only for physical disabilities but also learning disabilities and learning styles. We also touched on evaluation and assessment, and how the models for f2f classes don't usually fit online or hybrid. (Related note--I attended an online conference recently where the evaluation survey asked, after asking whether I had attended online or in person, how I had liked the lunch. And it was a required question to finish the survey.)

I'm wondering how much of the online vs. "traditional" (whatever that means) education debate is really about a shift in education, especially higher education, from a select population to general. It used to be that education was essentially self selecting--if you learned well in schools, you progressed; if you didn't, you found something else, like a trade, an apprenticeship, factory work. There were other things to do. Now it seems that it's impossible to get a good job without a reasonable amount of education, and that's happened at the same time that online education has become feasible. So we (educators) are having to learn to use a new medium at the same time that our learner population is changing. We (and I'm speaking mostly about higher ed now) no longer have the luxury of only teaching those who had already figured out how to learn.

I've read that the reason that SAT scores have "declined" is not that the student body has gotten dumber, but that those students who might not have done well (because of flaws in the tests or in their educational backgrounds) didn't take the tests. Or why it's so hard to tell if autism is really more prevalent--most of it wasn't reported before. It's hard to know what the real issue is if your baseline measurements have changed--you no longer have anything to compare current conditions to.

Basically, I'm not convinced that, as some people in the panel asserted, that online or at least blended learning is better than f2f. I think any learning where both the instructor and the student are forced to think about what is actually happening will be better. It's so easy to think you know what you're doing in f2f, both as an instructor and as a student. We've all done it before. The challenges of dealing with unfamiliar technologies, especially with non-mature ones, bring all the issues up front. Why are we doing it this way? This isn't working for me. Why did we spend 15 minutes of valuable synchronous learning time on introductions that I could have read?

But there are still the same issues--having the misfunctioning Twitter widget distracted me in a way that reminds me of a professor who always played with a neon green plastic keychain while lecturing. It was completely useless, but really hard to ignore. So today, I stared at Twitterfall; back then, I stared at the my notebook. And is it better to spend class time, synchronous time, in explanation, in demonstration, in elaboration, in discussion, than in merely presenting information? If so, isn't that true f2f and online? If learning styles (or preferences) do affect ease of learning, wouldn't that be true in any medium? Could it just be that it's easier to translate a digital text to an audible one, for instance, and so it's easier to accommodate both aural and verbal/visual learners online? (I'm a kinesthetic, according to most AVK tests, so I have a different perspective on that anyway.)

I'm really looking forward to the Research next week!

Consolidation of info streams and a MOOC

This is a brainstorming, trying-to-figure-out-what-I-actually-think, probably irritating-to-read type post. You may see several of these in the next few weeks. I've signed up for a MOOC, a Massive Open Online Course, on Online Learning. Dubbed eduMOOC, it's now got over 2000 participants, all over the world, mostly online instructors and instructional technologists, but also includes students, librarians, and other interested parties.

It does really bring home an issue I've been working with lately--how many streams of information can I actually follow, from a practical standpoint. For eduMOOC, there is the Google Sites homepage, the Google Group, a Twitter hashtag, a Twitter list, an etherpad, several wikis, Diigo and Delicious tagging, and participants' own blogs (like this one) using tags like #edumooc. (And more, some of which I haven't found yet, I'm sure.)

The problem is I can only seem to work with a limited number streams of information at a time. Right now those are Facebook (mix of personal and professional), Twitter (mostly professional and local info), and Email (separate accounts for work, personal, and non-work professional). I used to use an RSS reader for most of my professional reading, but that's mostly been moved to Twitter and Facebook when the blogs/sites/people I've been following have Twitter or Facebook accounts. I'm still missing a few RSS feeds that I'd like to follow. (Suggestions welcome.) I used to use the news reader in Outlook (effectively combining RSS feeds with my work email), but the Outlook 2011 for Mac doesn't have that feature. I may have to figure out how to integrate an RSS Reader back into my schedule.

What I'm trying to do is consolidate my streams. This does run the danger of turning the steam into a flood, which is what happened to my RSS reading originally--too much info and I can't follow any of it, then get the dread 'unread anxiety'. But I've found if I don't consolidate, I simply stop checking things. (This is essentially why I don't watch TV: as soon as I start missing shows, I stop watching at all.) I also have different roles (personal, professional, etc.) in which I have different networks and information needs. So the trick is to find a balance.

(How ironic. The writing of this post was interrupted by a phone call about a new social networking site for academics and researchers.)

That balance is limited by the technological and policy decisions of the services. For instance, while I can get my own tweets to post on my wall in Facebook (so that my Facebook friends can see my Twitter posts), I can't get my Twitter timeline (the tweets of those I follow) into my Facebook news stream. Or vice versa. If I want to read those together, I need to investigate one of the third party social network aggregators, which are limited by what the various services will allow you to do outside their own site. Some allow you to read but not post, or only post certain types of things, etc. After all, Facebook really wants me to be on their site, seeing their ads, not on some other site seeing someone else's ads. Also, with some services I could have multiple accounts, like I do for email, for personal and professional, but Facebook forbids this (and will cancel a second 'fake' account if they find out.)

The MOOC has really brought all this home to me. I've been thinking about it vaguely for a while, knowing I'm loosing control over my info stream, again, and not sure what the most effective thing to do about it. But the MOOC! How in the world do you work with a network of over 2000 people? The answer, of course, is that you don't; you work with only a portion of the network. How do you choose? I think the answer ends up being a combination of research and serendipity (like many things in life). Find out what you can, and then trust your networks (the setting up of which is part of research) to find out the rest.

And that's why I want to manage my info streams better. My networks are a valuable, perhaps the most valuable, part of my personal and professional development environment. Cultivating them is worth spending time on, but not so much time that I can't get anything else done.

To any who read this far, how are you dealing with your info streams, personal learning networks, or whatever you want to call it?

Frequently Questioned Answers

As you've undoubtedly noticed (anyone who is still following my blog) I've not been posting much. I always said that this was an experiment in distance learning communication, and I think so much has changed that I need to change the parameters of my experiment. Or maybe that's scrapping the whole thing and starting new.

My intentions for this blog was to provide a newsletter sort of thing, with resources, explanatory articles, news, etc. I think there are better ways of doing that now. I post to Twitter and Facebook (and none of that content requires an account to view), collect links in Delicious, and post content for the library in LibGuides. There is a Library Facebook page for library news (again, viewable without an account). The Library will probably experiment with other methods of "getting the word out" too. I also have a separate blog that I've irregularly collected reviews and information about online tools.

So what do I do with this blog?

Well, the first clue is the title. I'm changing it from Frequently Answered Questions to Frequently Questioned Answers. I want this space to be a place where I can speculate about issues regarding distance learning, and, hopefully, question some of the assumptions that we make regarding distance education, distance library services, and probably education in general.

So, yes, I'm going to get all philosophical on you. At least sometimes.

If that's not what you want to hear, please feel free to follow some of the other links I've listed above. If you're interested in occasionally hearing about something intriguing, that might make you think about education in a different way, please stay around. I'll also try and post more often, and to post the updates to my Twitter and Facebook accounts, so there's no real reason you have to actually visit this blog (as those who will read this on my Facebook Notes will already have realized, assuming you even noticed that I was importing the posts at all!)

What topics might I write about? Given the previous Facebook example, the interconnectedness of networks and resources will be a topic. Personal Learning Networks. Open Education and Open Educational Resources. Things that aren't capitalized.

So, another experiment. Let's see what happens.

to iPad or not to iPad

My home computer is getting a little weird, odd shutdowns and other irregular performance--processor problems. I suspect I'll need to get a new computer in a while. Most of what I do at home is web surfing, a little bit of word processing and the occasional spreadsheet (mostly in Google Docs, recently). So, I'm considering an iPad.

Most of the web applications and sites that I use have iPad apps available, and some that I'd love to try out. It's light weight, cheaper than a full computer, and looks like fun, too. I can even justify it as a good professional development purchase--since I could experiment with access issues and the educational apps available.

But....the iPad business model really does go against my principles as a professional and as a person. Everything is funneled through Apple's app store, with whatever tracking Apple wants to invoke. If Apple doesn't approve an app, it just plain not available. I'm an open access advocate, considering a really closed piece of hardware. (My other computer is a Linux box.)

So, friends and readers, do you have an iPad? What do you think? What do you think of the apps, and the business model? What are the keyboards like? Do you have something else to recommend?

Open Access Textbooks

I am taking a free, non-credit course through P2PU.org on Open Access Textbooks. Many colleges, especially community colleges, are trying to deal with a crisis in textbook costs. I was down by our bookstore at the beginning of the semester and overheard some students comparing receipts. Someone had spent over $1000. Textbooks can be a real burden to some students, and financial aid doesn't always cover books and supplies.

One possible method of assistance is open access textbooks. I am hoping to learn more sources of textbooks, how instructors are using them, and how to "sell" the idea of an open textbook to faculty.

I will be giving two workshops through Faculty Development this semester, one on publishing via open access, and one on open educational resources. I've assembled an open access resource guide: http://libguides.southernct.edu/openaccess and I'm focusing my attention this semester on teaching materials and textbooks (mostly under the Books category). Some of the sites I have listed may not meet stringent qualifications for open access, but if it's freely accessible, legal, and of educational use, I'm willing to include it.

For any faculty reading this, I would be very interested in working with you if you'd like to consider open access for your courses. Just contact me.