Sarah Houghton-Jan is the Librarian In Black. Sarah is not an academic librarian, and that is why I refer to her site so often. Sarah presents numerous technological tips, techniques, tools, and trends in normal-speak. LiB is a great way to see how some of the tools we use in our academic lives can be applied to the rest of the world. On top of that, Sarah is friendly and helpful — if you go to her site, you can chat with her via Meebo!

Librarian in Black, your blog, is full of lots of information. You constantly refresh it and add new materials. As a professional, how do you find the time to develop and present this kind of information in addition to all of your other work-related tasks?

How do I find the time? I think that is my most-often asked question. I work a full time job at a public library as a technology manager. My commute is going from 80 minutes each way to 120 minutes each way. I try to find time to read my 400 RSS feeds, post on my blog, write articles, and teach classes too. Oh yes, and a personal life . . . when I have the time . I don’t know how I find the time, but I do. I think that people believe that all I do when I go home is read professional material and blog . . . but it’s not true. I spend a lot of time vegging in front of the TV or computer (fun computer stuff, not icky librarian stuff), cooking, walking, and otherwise spending time with my husband and our cat. I figure that if I can manage to find the time to do this, anyone can. All it really takes is 20 minutes a day to keep up adequately, and if you want to push it and start writing or really reading a lot, perhaps 45 minutes a day. If the profession is important to you, if you believe in what we do in libraries, you can find the time — believe me. Now, whether or not that time is on “work time” or your own time is really up to your employer. I strongly advocate for employers to give their staff 15-30 minutes a day to “keep up,” and to reduce duties or change the schedule to allow for that. If you just say “ok, go do it” library staff won’t do it. They have a ton of other stuff to do, and will fill those minutes with those things, not with learning. I hate the sound of “enforced learning,” but it almost has to come to that.

In terms of web based applications, which have you found to be the most useful to your career? towards delivering services to customers? Please explain.

I’m going to stick to one each . . . otherwise the list would go on for pages.

Useful to me as a librarian: Bloglines because of the wonderful accessible-anywhere interface it has so I can read my RSS feeds.
Useful for customer service delivery: The free MeeboMe widget because it allows users who use IM and users on the library’s website to contact the library staff via IM.

When you work with the public, especially people who are computer savvy but new to Web 2.0 applications, what do you recommend they start with first?

I usually recommend that they read some blogs, they try starting one themselves. Then it’s on to uploading photos to Flickr and playing with tagging. From there, I tell people to take them where their interests lie — perhaps it’s in creating a wiki for their book club, or an IM account to talk to their children. Following personal interests usually leads to better learning.

Working in the public libraries, what do you think is the most under-developed yet vital information handling/locating tool people need to develop (research, the ability to verify sources, getting lost in the flash, etc.)?

I think that our users, the general public, simply aren’t aware of what is on the web and also how to locate it effectively. Many people are completely unaware of search engines or what they do. Maybe they have AOL at home, and AOL’s built-in search makes them think that is the web, the only way to get to the web, and a complete catalog of what is out there. Raising general awareness of the wealth of data that is available to people and the existing tools, and techniques for using those tools, should be school and public libraries’ primary mission in user education right now.

What do you see as the two or three most important changes in technology which impact libraries — not just academic libraries, but all libraries.

Digital rights management is extremely important for libraries to pay attention to because of the way it limits our users’ access to our materials and the long-term preservation and access issues it brings with it.

Net Neutrality is also a huge concern of mine — if the web is altered by commercial interests, then the deck for our users’ information seeking is already stacked. This has the potential to add huge barriers and frustration for educational content and resources.

Have you discovered any particular sites, tools, or mashups that you believe would be useful to young academics?

Writeboard (http://www.writeboard.com/) is a great collaboration tool, rather like a wiki, where you can work alone or with others to build a document, and roll back to previous versions at any time. It’s really easy to use and great for collaborative projects.

BibMe (http://www.bibme.org/) is also an academic-friendly tool that lets you build a works cited page in a number of styles, from websites, books, articles, you name it. Again, this one is really easy to use, and something I wish I’d had when I was still in school! I still use it to build resource lists for papers and courses I teach. It works for both teachers and students.

While scanning academic blogs, I came across Educated and Poor. I always find it useful and educating to read what adjuncts are doing, and how they are living, in other parts of the USA. This did not disappoint.

Additionally, Educated and Poor has three links–which I share now with you–to online writing labs/ programs at Purdue, Dartmouth, and Duke. I have found OWLs often provide great material for presentations and handouts. When I lack for variety or clarity in wording, images, or ideas, I know I can seek out an OWL and probably get somebody else’s explanation and definition. The OWLs have helped me teach my students more effectively countless times.

From RSA’s website: “The purposes of the Society shall be to gather from all relevant fields of study, and to disseminate among its members, current knowledge of rhetoric, broadly construed; to identify new areas within the subject of rhetoric in which research is especially needed, and to stimulate such research; to encourage experimentation in the teaching of rhetoric; to facilitate professional cooperation among its members, to organize meetings at which members may exchange findings and ideas; and to sponsor the publication of such materials dealing with rhetoric.”

Rate Your Students is a fantastic blog. It answers back to ratemyprofessor.com, and allows cloaked teachers’ voices a chance to retaliate against our sometimes-obnoxious students. Sometimes things get all afire and people get worked up; the result is often more posts and more fire. Many adjuncts post to Rate Your Students. Given that we have no protection or tenure, it is not surprising that many of us use venues like RYS to vent.

If you have had a particularly stressful or hard day at one of your schools, RYS makes for great therapy and humor. Usually, I end up laughing after one or two posts. It also helps me realize that my problems are actually far smaller than I think they are.

Not only does RYS work well for therapy and humor, it also addresses some serious issues. For example, a recent post contemplates how to help our students without crossing the line.

RYS is an entertaining and invaluable community resource.

In early October, a furious, yet friendly and empowering exchange took place on the WPA list: what could be done to persuade a new teacher NOT to spend an hour correcting each paper. Following this advice, tools and references were given. This was a very powerful and useful thread. It was so useful, in fact, that I have already referred to it in a previous post. I encourage you to go read the whole thread yourself. Below are most of the texts and tools referenced in the discussion.

Ed White’s Assigning, Responding and Evaluating. Free from Bedford/St. Martin’s.

Richard H. Haswell’s “Miminal Marking” from College English, Vol. 45, No. 6 (Oct., 1983), pp. 600-604.

Clyde Moneyhun’s “Less is More in Response to Student Writing” from Strategies for Teaching First-Year Composition (2002) edited by Duane Roen.

Doug Hesse’s “13 Ways of Looking at Responding to Student Writing.“

Whether you are doing your own research or teaching your students how to research, there are always new shortcuts to learn and teach. Tinkernut has some great hacks that show you how to conduct your Google searches — academic and non-academic — more effectively and efficiently. They even have a downloadable PDF that shows all the hacks covered in the video.

It doesn’t get much better than this.

The blog, Talk About Academe, presents Monica Jacobe’s article about contingent faculty throughout academic disciplines.

Without further adieu, the second part of the interview with Dr. David Parry!

In terms of planning class lessons and schedules, is there any software or site you would recommend?

I already mentioned this above, but first up is edublogs. This site will let you host your class blog, which takes care of your course management needs. (I personally maintain my own site, but this is just because I like to play around with the technical aspects . . . if I wasn’t doing this I would definitely use edublogs.)

A good second place to start is Digital Campus, a podcast that is done every other week out of George Mason University (you don’t need an iPod to listen you can just listen from their site). Each week they cover one specific area of interest to educators as it relates to technology, discuss education-technology news, and at the end highlight some useful tools that you might want to try. The hosts do an excellent job of presenting the material in a thorough way without engaging in “tech speak,” thus making it accessible to anyone. If you simply make the shift to using a blog and listen to this podcast, I can almost guarantee that your tech-education life will become so much easier.

Using Google Calendar can be tremendously productive as you can keep track of your schedule there and access it from any internet connection. Additionally you can share part of the calendar for students to see (say class times, office hours, and events that might interest them). This is another place where publicly available tools trump anything the campus course management software people have made (again like WebCT or Blackboard). I am still waiting for a really useful syllabus design program; I talked to someone about six months ago who was working on this but haven’t heard anything since.

One final note here: Google is a great reference for syllabi. Because “syllabus” is a rather specific term—one does not hear it outside of academia very often—it makes a useful search term. Sharing information, having access to the way that other academics have organized their class, easy and for free, this is what the web is about. For example, when I taught House of Leaves for the first time, I wanted to get a sense of both what other texts professors had used with it, and how they situated it in relation to those texts. So, I typed in “House of Leaves” plus syllabus, and got a host of useful courses that were using this novel. (You can also add .edu to the search so you only search education websites, but this can eliminate some really useful results so use it only if the first search return is too high to manage).

For academics uncomfortable or unfamiliar with most technology but word processing and email, what web-based hacks will give them the biggest bang for the effort in their research?

I talk to my students all the time about how literacy specifically, but more generally knowledge creation and dissemination, have changed, are changing. Where it used to be that those who were “wise” or “knowledgeable” knew the most “stuff,” I think this is no longer the case, or at least has begun to shift, and now the key is knowing how to manage and sort information. The amount of information that we encounter is simply too great to remember, so it is a matter of knowing how to navigate, sort, and deal with all of it. (If you are interested in this you might read Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger).

In this regard the most important technology/tool is a good RSS Reader. We really don’t have the time or space here to go into what RSS is or how it can change your life (I am not exaggerating here), but I will summarize it this way, I read close to 200 online sources a day—this includes personal blogs, news sites like CNN or the BBC, tech updates, and sites specific to my academic discipline. Without RSS this would be impossible. There is a video by The Common Craft Show that does a good job of explaining this, and Google Reader is a great place to get started. I wrote about using it for a rhetoric composition class as well, so you can read some of my longer thoughts there.

The other simple to use tool is online bookmarking. Most faculty I know bookmark sites by selecting “Bookmark” in their browser. If you look at people’s bookmarks there are often something like 300+ sites marked that are or are not sorted, but never in a useful way. There are web services that work by allowing you to collect your bookmarks online. This has several advantages, one is it makes them easier to sort, because you sort them by “tags” not by folders. So in other words I bookmark a page that has something to do with politics and technology that relates both to a class I am teaching and a conference paper. Instead of having to decide which folder to put it in I give it a tag of “politics” “technology” “undergrad” “conference,” and then when I am looking for the information I can find it by any of these terms. The second major feature of these online sites is that you can see what others have bookmarked. Now tags are not consistent across users, so searching by tags is not so useful (if I search conference I am likely to get a ton of links to Web 2.0 conferences and business meetings), but I can see who else has bookmarked a particular site, and see what else they have bookmarked in the same category. This often leads me to discover many useful sites that I never would have. Public bookmarking can also help your students, as it is a much easier way to group links for students to visit. (You can even create a tag for each class.) There are two major sites that do this: delicious and magnolia (it is really a matter of preference—although more people use delicious). As a side note Blackboard tried to copy this feature, and it didn’t work out so well, mainly because you want an open public way to manage this information, not a closed Blackboard system.

One small thing everyone can do to improve their online “experience” is to start using bookmarklets. I did a run-down here of what they are and how to use them. But basically they allow you to modify web pages in any number of ways. For example you can strip out all the ads, automatically download all the images on a page, or change the colors (really useful for sites that are unreadable due to color choice), all this with just one simple click. Trying to surf the web without bookmarklets is like trying to read books by candlelight.

I know your question asks about web-based tools but I thought I would throw in one extra here that is a desktop application, and that is DevonThink. There are many brain-in-a-box software applications out there. Devon helps me to sort, organize, and search through all the journal articles etc. that I come across (think of it as a wicked good iTunes for articles that lets you store all your information and then lets you intelligently search them). Getting a program like this is worth the investment. Devon only works for Mac (there is also Yojimbo for the Mac), but there are several similar programs for the PC like OneNote.

There is a great deal of writing about Web 2.0 and technology in teaching. What is one of the most common oversights or misinterpretations you see?

Web 2.0 is a fairly ubiquitous term at this point, so ubiquitous that I think it starts to lose meaning as people stretch it to talk about a whole host of phenomena that are so varied and complex that they are hard to group together under one term. I prefer to think about how the barrier to entry on the web has drastically changed. While once you needed a fairly high technical literacy in order to publish or change information on the web, that level of literacy is now pretty low. This goes for everything from creating a web page for yourself to making YouTube videos. What this means for teachers is that while once you would have to spend hours producing online content for class, now the process is not only simple, but making it available to your students is equally as easy. Want the class to watch a video clip? Load it onto YouTube. Want them to take a quiz? Make an online one. Want students to share work? Use Googledocs. You can make online slide shows, or host pictures . . . the possibilities are pretty endless for opportunities to supplement your class.

In the same sense I wouldn’t want to overstate the case for technology here either. There is a great deal of useless Web 2.0 applications out there — it seems that a new one pops up every day. And many people talk as if Web 2.0 is going to radically change education, dismantle the system, make education free to everyone. I don’t see this happening anytime soon (to be sure there have already been some disruptions—but not far enough yet), for the most part I think we are talking about online supplements for education. Sure these supplements make it possible to teach in ways not available five years ago, but they still require thoughtful teachers and a commitment to pedagogy. Often I see those responsible for computer technology in the classroom treating it as a magic tool that will suddenly add value to the classroom. Sean Pollock had an interesting article on Academic Commons recently about this issue that’s worth reading. This is all part of the larger discourse wherein technology is seen as the answer to all social ills, if we just have the right tools, and the right attitude things will suddenly be fixed. I don’t think it is that simple, and we should keep that in mind with “Web 2.0.”

What do you know now that you wish you knew when you started teaching?

Get the right tool for the job. Tech can make your life so much easier it’s just a matter of finding the right program. If you want to be able to do something there is probably a software program or web utility out there that does what you want. If you don’t like what you are using look around, find someone who knows the technology and ask them for recommendations. This goes for everything from word processors (you know, Microsoft is not the only choice, in fact it is one of the worst, and don’t even get me started on PowerPoint) to complex processes like monitoring and mining data or compiling and searching information. I get emails all the time from other academics who say they are having trouble because they have been using program “x” and it never works correctly, my answer is usually well, switch to “y.” Oh, and backup your data frequently (at least once a week). Buy an external hard drive and use it, you will thank me when your hard drive crashes and you discover you do not have to in fact retype your whole dissertation.

Again there is a tool for pretty much anything, and most are easy to use it is just a matter of a little experimentation (and if you don’t know where to start just ask someone who does). . . except for a syllabus creation tool, that one doesn’t exist yet . . . hopefully soon though.

Dr. Hern’s site was forwarded to me by an experienced colleague, and all I can say is wow! For a teacher new to Basic Writing, and probably other composition courses as well, there is a lot of useful information here. I urge you to go forth and see for yourself. Okay, okay, it is not a blog–still, you ought to give it a look!

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