I will be giving my talk shortly this morning at the e.Scape conference at Concordia University on the topic of :
The unexpected journey from a 60 minute lecture to a MOOC: a librarian’s mid-way report
I’ll be talking about how my use of technology has changes my professional practice.
I’ll briefly discuss MOOCs also, positioning them as the extreme end of the elearning continuum – both in terms of structure and pace. More on MOOCs here:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eW3gMGqcZQc&w=560&h=315]
Mostly, I’ll discuss my training videos as well as the development of a business information literacy curriculum as part of my employment, most of which are in various stages as pilot projects or drafts.

I am giving a “brown bag” session today for the Management Department of the John Molson School of Business about “keeping current”.

Here is the outline of my talk:
– Some warming up exercises (because we have to talk about theories)
– General information about RSS Feeds
– Subscribing to RSS Feeds
– RSS Feeds and Scholarly sources (a journal’s table of contents, filtering and Google Alerts)
– A short video explaining the process of subscribing and reading RSS Feeds

Warming up exercises (theories are useful to organise one’s thoughts)

This initially made me think of Robert Darnton’s account of the Communication Circuit as well as Beaudry’s theories on relationships between authors and other agents in digital publishing (see images below). These models present how authors interact with others in scholarly communication.

Darnton, Robert. “What Is the History of Books?” Daedalus, Vol. 111, No. 3, Representations and Realities (Summer, 1982), pp. 65-83
See also an updated account:
Darnton, Robert “What is the history of books? Revisited” in Modern Intellectual History, 4,3(2007), pp. 495–508 2007, Cambridge University Press
doi:10.1017/S1479244307001370

Beaudry, Guylaine. La communication scientifique et le numérique, Paris : Hermès science publications / Lavoisier, 2011, p. 250

But enough with theories, let’s talk about keeping current with RSS Feeds !

The best tool I can offer to stay current are RSS Feeds (see this great Wikipedia article for a summary). Essentially, RSS is a technology which focuses on the structure of information and eliminates the formatting. Once this happens, you can simply obtain the address of the RSS feed and aggregate content with special software. So, instead of having to browse to multiple websites, you can configure a system to compile content for you.

Here is a video explaining what RSS Feers are:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t28_PGSYZPU&w=480&h=360]

To locate RSS Feeds on a website, one needs to locate the address of the various feeds available. These are either located in a special section of the website or readily available from a page you are browsing. Usually, the RSS feed link is next to a bright orange icon with white waves, as is illustrated here.

A good place to start is by looking for RSS feeds from your favorite media outlets, such as the CBC, the BBC, Le Devoir or other sources. Some media sites also have featured blogs which one can subscribe to via RSS feeds.

Subscribing to RSS Feeds
In order to read these RSS feeds, one should use an RSS feed aggregator. This is a special kind of software which simply compiles all new content for you to read at your leasure. Think of it as an email software.

Personally, I use Google Reader to aggregate my RSS feeds. I also use FeeddlerPro to optimize my consumption of RSS feeds on my iPhone. This being said, there are hundreds of possibilities to aggregate and thousands to consume RSS feeds.

This is what happens when I go on vacation for a few days, my RSS content accumulates:

Subscribing to RSS Feeds from scholarly sources

Broadly speaking, there are two options to subscribe to RSS feeds of scholarly sources. You can
1. find the RSS feed address for the table of contents of your favorite journals by looking for the publisher’s website; or
2. set-up RSS feed alerts through article aggregator systems, such as, at Concordia University, ProQuest Business Databases or EBSCO’s Business Source Complete.

For the first option, subscribing to the full table of content means that you would be getting all articles as they are published in each issue. This may be cumbersome or yeild in too many items to read. That is why the second option is interesting: you can simply execute a search and obtain the RSS feed address by looking for that option from the Search History link on the search interface.

This short video demonstrates what I have explained in this post :
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbDaRD6CjK0&w=640&h=360]
In closing, here is a list of my subscriptions I included on my other blog, Culturelibre.ca.

Tip of the had to Kipmusic2345 for her great GarageBand toturials on youtube:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MfRHiVHXsU?list=PL919D238C5B8CC8CB&w=560&h=315]
These were really useful for me – I’ve been meaning to start editing sound files for including them in my own digital tutorials.

UNESCO announces the

publication titled “Overview of Information Literacy Resource Worldwide” is divided into 42 language lists and includes selected resources – from websites, books, journals and other kinds of publications – that were provided by contributors from different countries and institutions and compiled by Dr Forest Woody Horton Jr.

The document is available in ePub or PDF formats.

On the left-hand side (from top to bottom):
– My Blue Yeti ™ microphone with wire
– Sustainable coffee mug
– Manfrotto self-standing monopod
– Black lab notebook
– Kodak Playsport camera with its carry-case (on the lab book)

Middle (from top to bottom):
– MacBook Pro laptop with power cord
– A MacIntosh apple on the laptop for the teacher (Mac-Heads will get the joke)
– A dry-erase board eraser, with a blue marker
– Remote control for data projector

Right:
– A few books used in the demo.

I’m pretty proud to say that I was able to equip myself for less than 2000$ with some decent gear !

I just stumbled on MonDiapason.ca (in French), a site I had seen a demo for 2 years ago at a conference. I’ve heard it may go “live” soon, although there is a lot of content on it already…

Last May, CRÉPUQ published the results of a study on the attitudes of university students and professors towards technology. The association of Quebec university presidents sponsored the study, which sought to obtain statistically valid information on a broad sample.

University Affairs, a trade publication, interviewed Concordia University’s own Vivek Venkatesh last November and this January about the study, in which he was involved as a researcher. For example, he mentions that:

Our study was not designed to demonstrate the effectiveness of any one (or set of) instructional technique(s) over others. We set out to – and have succeeded in creating – robust, generalizable and predictive models of factors that impact attitudes towards university course effectiveness. Prior research (for example, Wright and Jenkins-Guarnieri, 2012) has analyzed the findings of 11 meta-analyses (193 studies) on student evaluations of teaching, or SETs, with a specific focus on their construct validity, susceptibility to bias, practical use and effective implementation. Their research provides support for the use of SET measures in evaluating instructor skill and teaching effectiveness.

We strongly believe that with a large enough representative sample and a probabilistic sampling strategy, which we have used in our study, gathering students’ perceptions on course effectiveness is a valid measure because it can reflect the reality of what is happening in the classroom – or, dare we say, what should be happening in the classroom. There have been various comments, both as a response to the UA article, as well as in the larger web sphere regarding the generalizability of our results due to a purportedly biased sample and the fact that our research was designed to reach specific conclusions. These assertions are simply untrue and bear very little logic.

You can also listen to a full interview of Vivek Venkatesh on CBC’s Spark.

A further paper will be submitted to the Journal Computers & Education.

The Canadian Marketing Association announced on their website that last summer, the International Journal of Mobile Marketing ran a special issue on mobile marketing in Canada (Summer2012, Vol. 7 Issue 1). Although you can purchase single articles from the publisher, this journal is available from the Library.

A new report from the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) attempts to measure the effectiveness of various information literacy (IL) initiatives.

The study involved 500 undergraduate students at Georgian College and tested four different models for IL, including providing specific information literacy courses, embedding information literacy into existing curriculum, online tutorials and non-mandatory tutorials. As they state on the announcement,

The study calls for institutions to adopt information literacy strategies that focus on teaching styles, delivery models, human resource requirements, outcome measurements and defining the benefits to student, institution and employer. Many faculty suggested more time be allotted to skill development as well as additional resources including online tutorials.

As may be expected, students’ comfort, accuracy and ability to utilize information literacy skills increased over their two years of study. While the overall results showed no single method of delivery to be particularly advantageous, the students who had information literacy training embedded in their course curriculum did show significantly higher ability to accurately cite source material.

The full report is available in PDF format (about 70 pages), as are the appendices.

Some students and I brainstormed our favorite websites that provide good business information at the international level. Here it is:
– IMF
– OECD
– World Bank
– Doing Business
– CIA World Factbook
– Travel Guides (Lonely Planet)
– UN Data
– WTO Stats

Also a good strategy is to look for free reports from national statistical agencies. Anything missing? Let me know in the comments!