How do you help professors to remember what it’s like to be an undergraduate and guide them to respond to their students with research help that is appropriate for “beginning” researchers and truly helpful?

How do you introduce professors to the overwhelming new formats and technologies that have sprung up since they were doing their own intense library research for their dissertations?

And how do you do both of these things in a way that acknowledges faculty’s strong intelligence and deep commitment to scholarship and teaching and that cements the relationship between professors and librarians rather than straining it?

At the session, “Why do they do that? Helping Professors to Understand Undergraduate Information-Seeking Behavior (And Vice Versa)” I shared some tools that I used to try to address these challenges in a workshop for our First Year Seminar faculty. All 300 sets of handouts disappeared and at least 40 more people gave me their cards for follow-up. Thank you! Word versions of the documents are available on this site under the Toolkit tab, and I will be updating and adding other versions and materials when I get back to the campus next week.

Just the warmup we needed for the luncheon keynote address from Baltimore native son and outrageous filmmaker John Waters. What a stream. What a consciousness. What a stream of consciousness. Waters strode to the platform wearing silver sneakers, a retro polyester dude suit, and his trademark slick hair and slender mustache and launched an hour long NC-17 rated tour of his Mondo that would make Robin Williams look mainstream and slightly sedated. Too bad there were no recording devices allowed.
The takeaway? “If you can make the enemy laugh that’s the first step in negotiation.” Must be something to it, because I was whooping so hard I can’t make a valid case for having been offended . . . although even at the time I was thinking, “I cannot really be laughing at THAT!”

These sessions tend to cluster at the begining of each semester. Today I had two sessions of a Business Administration research methods class; one of an Education capstone class on legal and social issues in education; and one session for a First Year Seminar (intriguingly titled Cold Case: Mystery and History in the Theatre) on unresolved questions such as whether Thespis was really the first actor and who really wrote all the stuff attributed to Shakespeare. A very mixed bag indeed (and another thing I love about my job).

Fueled by my recent thinking about online gaming as a metaphor for Millennial learning and by enouraging comments from colleagues, I decided to try something new.

I decided to ask in each of the classes if anyone there was a gamer.

Interestingly, in the First Year Seminar, I got blank stares. Eleven out of twelve blank stares, to be exact. Since this was a group comprised entirely of freshmen, it made me wonder if we aren’t already experiencing a first wave of yet another generation. But the one guy who raised his hand was also the student had been most vocally involved in the search we had done as a group. He was the one who had caught a typing error. He was the one who had the “path” through the catalog mastered fastest.

In the Education session, I shared–as I often do with Education classes–that I was trying something new pedagogically and talked to them about the Nintendo metaphor. They were interested because they have a sense of how popular culture molds the students in their classroom.

In the Business research methods class, of all places, I hit the jackpot. I try hard, I try very hard, every semester to excite four successive rooms full of Business Administration majors about the prospect of a doing a literature review using scholarly sources. (I meet with two more sections tomorrow.) The dreaded literature review means, inevitably, that these students will be forced to master our link resolver.

In essence, the link resolver is a pop-up tool driven by a program that attempts to match a citation from an article database with a source for the article itself.

The sources are all over the map. They may be PDFs in other databases, or microfiche or microfilm in our collection, or bound journals.

The link resolver always leads to a second level . . . either to our catalog, or to interlibrary loan, or to a jillion possiblities for retrieving the article online. The catalog is standardized but the holdings information is arcane to the uninitiated. And the more than one hundred databases and electronic journal collections that the resolver draws article links from–such as JSTOR and LexisNexis and Expanded Academic ASAP–all have different interfaces and opening screens and entry points.

In the past, at the point at which I introduce the link resolver, I have warned of dragons and apologized profusely for the messy state of information in the year 2007.

Today, I asked if anyone in the class was a gamer.

“Yeah,” one startled guy replied.

“So when you have a new game, how do you approach it?”

“I just start playing.”

“And how do you learn how to play?”

“I just keep trying things.”

“Oh,” I said–and I could tell the class wondered where this was going. “You just jump in and try things.”

Heads nodded–and not because they were falling asleep.

“Well that’s what you’ll have to do with this Locate Journal Article box.”

“Do you mean,” asked another student with that light-dawning look, “That finding stuff in the library is like playing a game?”

I was so cranked up that I gave him a high five. And he was so surprised to see an old lady reliving the 80s that he graciously gave me one back.

PacMan worketh. Or PacMan work-ed in that one class. I’ll try it again tomorrow.

Even before reading the article, I had pretty well assimilated the basic point about Millennials. Millennials are here. They’re connected. They’re comfortable with technology. Why not use their own tools in teaching?

What I hadn’t gotten before was what my Gen-X colleague, Jami Bryan, manager of UMW’s College of Graduate and Professional Studies library, had been saying in just about every conversation she and I have had over the past couple of years about teaching online library resources.

I’ve tended toward providing detailed step-by-step instructions for our databases. Jami has countered that students learn by noodling around. She has encouraged me to get them to the resource, give them a little demo, and then to get out of the way and let them play.

It was the “play” part I didn’t get until I read Oblinger’s assertion that “Learning is more like Nintendo than logic. Nintendo symbolizes a trial-and-error approach to solving problems; losing is the fastest way to mastering a game because losing represents learning.”

I am not a gamer unless kitchen table poker counts. The last time I played a pinball machine, it had mechanical flippers. And the only electronic game I have ever experienced (this is not a joke) is ancient, arcade Pac-Man. But I respect Jami’s opinion, so I’ve been trying something new. I can’t do it in research classes because of the laptop problem. But instead of hogging the computer during an individual research appointment in my office, I’m learning to roll my own chair away from the keyboard and let the students drive. I’m impressed at how quickly they pick up the mechanics of the search. Once that is mastered, they have more freedom to collaborate on the intellectual content. I’ll be doing a lot more of this in the future.

My latest embarrassment was brought about by two of my stepchildren . . . ages 35 and 37.

The day after Christmas found them sprawled in front of the TV singing along at the top of their (actually rather melodic) voices to the DVD collection of Schoolhouse Rock . And I thought to myself–here comes the ketchup now–that if I could just identify the current equivalent of “Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, Get Your Adverbs Here” and “I’m Just a Bill,” and use those methods in my classes, I would be better able to help students grasp the concepts of information fluency.

Duh! Isn’t what Diana Oblinger has been saying all along?

I am a bit embarrassed to admit that our library’s classroom does not have individual computers for students to try searching hands-on.

I am not sure whether I am embarrassed to reveal that for quite some time I had considered this to be entirely a good thing. My argument was that if students’ attention was necessarily corralled on the screen at the front of the room, they would be more likely to receive? (absorb? learn???) what was being demonstrated there.

To my unequivocal embarrassment, I find that I am now not even convinced that this last is true. I’m feeling sheepish because I have just waggishly named this blog and put the finishing touches on a manifesto declaring that we in academe should be careful not to jump on speeding technological bandwagons.

(I also might as well confess right now that feeling sheepish is not a new emotion for me. I’m the woman who warns you to be careful with that hamburger and then slops her own ketchup and mustard all over herself a mere nanosecond later. At least I can laugh about it. Yes?)

In any case, since a laptop is not required for students at my university, there will be a number of participants in any research strategy session who will have to be provided with equipment. I have some very practical questions about how much teaching time it will take to distribute laptops and to be sure they are securely and cleanly connected to our network. (We do have wireless in the library.)

Pedagogically, my questions have to do with maintaining a balance between show-and-tell and experiential learning. In other words, how long do you keep ‘em focused on what you’re doing before you let them play around?

Recently Steve Greenlaw and I tried a role-play in his class in which we hoped to model the experience of a reference interview and the iterative nature of searching. These were lofty goals . . . and important. Alas, all went to Hades in a handbasket in terms of modeling when Steve said to the class (who all had laptops), “Why don’t you search for your subject along with us?” At that point, all I could offer was, “And I’ll roam around the classroom so you can ask questions if you get stuck.”

The big handwringer here is that there is really so little time and so much to learn when it comes to research strategies and information fluency. More about that later.