Teaching & Learning (UO/OSU Library meeting)

Here are my remarks for the Oregon State University Libraries & University of Oregon Libraries Joint planning session, December 15, 2006. This section of the meeting was titled "What's Next - a brief look at issues that are likely to shape the research library over the next 2-3 years."

Teaching and Learning Andrew Bonamici (UO)
Technology Jeremy Frumkin (OSU)
Collection Faye Chadwell (UO)
Reference and Research Ruth Vondracek (OSU)
Technical Services Michael Boock (OSU)
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In the environment we are living in now, it is really tough to stake out the borders between the five areas we are addressing today:

• teaching and learning
• technology
• collections
• reference & research, and
• technical services

I'll try to look through the lens of teaching and learning toward a vision of research library programs and strategic directions for the next few years, but let's acknowledge right from the start that all of these topical areas are mutually enabling, overlapping, and reinforcing. Taken together, they work as a system.

Trends (very broad-brush):

Past: teaching is the domain and responsibility of the teacher

Now & future: domain & responsibility is shared & increasingly dominated by peers

Past lecture hall: teacher's role to impart well-defined authoritative knowledge set and range of expertise into the spongelike young brains of 18 - 22 year old students, predominantly white, male, relatively homogeneous in social background, and living on campus.

Now & future lecture hall: teacher's audience is anywhere in the world. Delivery may be asynchronous, via archived streaming or downloadable media. Students are of all ages, predominantly female, have diverse backgrounds, areas of expertise, learning styles & preferences.

Past assignments: problem sets, lab reports, and writing assignments were handed out by the teacher and completed by individual students (theoretically, anyway) and turned in on paper.

Now & future assignments: take the form of simulations, dynamic models, media projects completed by groups, not individuals. Even straight-ahead writing assignments are drafted, edited, critiqued using online collaborative writing tools.

Past expectations for student learning: absorb and be able to recount what the instructor told you, plus the contents of a textbook that the instructor wrote

Now and future expectations for student learning: all students participate in original research, scholarship, and service projects motivated by their own interests and community needs

Past assessment: teaching outcomes measured by student achievement on exams, individual projects, and standardized tests. Transcript is a list of courses taken and a grade point average. Record is locked in time.

Now & future assessment: more complex assessment of overall achievement. Enterprise e-Portfolios bring together student individual work, group work, evaluative feedback from professors and peers, and self-reflection and allow longitudinal tracking of individuals and student body. Portfolio remains open for alumni, allowing institution to track long-term results of educational experience (please note the opportunities this provides for alumni relations, development and outreach). Purdue, for example, is conducting a study to see if student behavior in the course management system can be used as an early warning system for underperformance.

Longer term question: At what point will it no longer be necessary or desirable to organize teaching and learning around "The Course?" Will we see teaching and learning organized around projects instead?

Implications for libraries:

• Increased need for physical and virtual environments that enable, encourage, and reward collaboration
• Increased need for librarians need to be active partners in curriculum development both at course level and in terms of overall campus instructional program. Need to maintain awareness of pedagogical trends in academic disciplines
• Increased need for libraries and librarians to support and preserve collections that can be used as flexibly as possible, in ways we can't imagine today
  

Interactions between teaching and learning, technology, and collections:
Yochai Benkler (Yale Law School) says that "the means of production are radically decentralized" and "being a creator (author) makes you a better reader (more critical consumer) What does it mean for pedagogy and curriculum when everyone is a content creator as well as a consumer, and the works can be so easily disseminated?

At the UO, selected student work is routinely added to the Scholars' Bank institutional repository, effectively blending with the wide array of assets that we acquire by purchase or license, what we reformat from existing collections, and what is freely available out on the network.

Whatever their areas of study, today's students -- often working as groups of students -- are authors, designers, videographers, musicians, editors. Just as libraries have always provided access to the literature undergirding scholarly "papers" -- whether produced by undergraduate students or senior faculty members -- we now serve as the storehouse (or brokerage) of raw material for authors of "papers" that are built as digital media productions, with embedded metadata, live links to associated works, audio, still and moving images, graphic objects, you name it. I see students -- and faculty -- in the "rip-mix-burn" era using library collections to "mash-up" their scholarly research in ever-changing ways. Which is nothing new BTW, since in a very real sense, all scholarship - past and present -- blends together, builds upon, enhances, and adds new meaning to work that came before.

Librarians and faculty need to teach students the importance of respecting and acknowledging the work of the past whenever they use it. At the same time, we need to fight against anachronistic and restrictive intellectual property laws that create barriers to use. Outside of the publishing and entertainment industries, the walls are already coming down -- witness the active solicitation of tourist photo ops in Times Square by commercial entities who want their logos and products appearing in user-driven social media sharing sites like flickr and YouTube.

In closing, Isaac Newton said "If I have seen farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants." What can our libraries do to make sure the Newtons of today have strong shoulders to stand on?

Thank you.