In the past year or so I have been thinking more about issues related to digital accessibility, particularly in the area of e-text usability and universal design. On the 20th anniversary of the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, federal plans are now underway to incorporate more comprehensive accessible technology and design guidelines into the ADA, which have to date been guided by a separate piece of legislation, Section 508 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act. A July 22 announcement by Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez outlines the rationale for expanding digital access regulations to reflect emerging technology development:

The rapid development of new technologies has made our lives more efficient, but many of these technologies from Web sites to cell phones, from ticket kiosks to e-books, remain either in whole or in part inaccessible to people with disabilities, particularly those who are blind or have low vision, those with limited manual dexterity, and those who are deaf or hard of hearing.

I have an amazing colleague at UC Berkeley, Lucy Greco, who has been instrumental in taking my understanding of accessible design to new levels – she leads the Assistive Technology Center at Cal, which facilitates successful academic experiences for disabled students. She also spearheads WebAccess, a campus group that runs evaluation clinics in web accessibility and Section 508 compliance via a straightforward rubric (Excel download). Their top ten tips for accessible design are extremely handy for anyone interested in website optimization:

1. Provide a way for users to skip repetitive content.
2. Use heading elements properly.
3. Use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to control page layout.
4. Provide alternative text for nontext elements (e.g., images) when the nontext elements are meaningful.
5. Use color with care.
6. Give links unique names and make them descriptive.
7. Use “Go” or “Submit” buttons with select lists.
8. Include a well-positioned label for each field on a form.
9. Ensure that all content can be accessed with the keyboard alone in a logical way by using tab order.
10. Instead of providing a “text-only” alternative, work to make your primary website accessible.

Lucy is herself blind, and is expert is exposing and explaining the innumerable access flaws that can exist in digital interfaces. Learning experientially from/with Lucy about various access and usability barriers thrown up by different e-text formats and design languages has helped me cultivate an increasingly strong opinion that, in the current proprietary vs. open digital text conflagration, libraries have both the ability and responsibility to advocate for an open and accessible digital reading and research experience for all users.

Toward this end, I recently wrote a short piece on e-text access for Library Journal in advance of their e-books summit (one of the keynote speakers is web access pioneer Ray Kurzweill). It outlines what librarians can already do to influence digital accessibility in their collections and websites, as well as suggests directions to focus our efforts in the future. Recognizing that this is a process  facilitated by guidance and tools, in the coming months Lucy and I will create a e-text usability/accessibility rubric similar to the one linked above that will help librarians evaluate the universal design strength of their e-text and search/discovery platforms. It is our hope that this rubric will encourage librarians and vendors alike to design and patronize accessible search and discovery platforms and commit to an ethic of more universally usable design. Below is the LJ article in its entirety, which features a series of links to 508 and ADA standards and tools.

E-Texts for All (Even Lucy)

If digital literacy is exploding, the visually disabled are taking the shrapnel. I would wager that most librarians consider ourselves committed to accessibility and make individual and organizational efforts to comply with (and often exceed) the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in our buildings and the Rehabilitation Act Section 508 standards on our websites. We may not, however, have had the sobering experience of trying to access an ebook or e-journal using screen-reading software or other assistive technology. Despite our best intentions, this limited insight can lead us unwittingly to collection development and web design decisions that make digital literacy far more difficult for the print disabled.

Over the past year, I’ve been working closely with Lucy Greco, a colleague and disability advocate at the University of California-Berkeley (UC-B). Lucy, who has been blind from birth, has transformed my understanding of the word ­access. Not only do librarians need to understand the accessibility front of the ebook wars, we have the responsibility to embrace our advocacy role in shaping its outcome. As one of the few public sector agencies charged with recognizing the access rights of all, libraries must collectively examine how we can steer the e-text trajectory-from ebooks to e-journals to any other format-in a more universally usable direction.

Ebooks and DRM
Lucy is partial to a few sayings that have helped me understand the e-text accessibility paradox. The first is that “ebooks were created by the blind, then made inaccessible by the sighted.”

Online text formats like DAISY and EPUB were pioneered in part by the accessibility movement as an alternative to expensive and cumbersome Braille texts. As ebooks have gained popularity, however, digital text became inexorably less accessible as for-profit readers like the Kindle and Sony Reader muscled onto the scene. A patina of digital rights management (DRM) has been added in order to protect the intellectual property of vendors, contrary to the open and accessible orientation libraries have long held toward literacy and learning.

Device- and interface-specific ebooks are often “locked down” to other readers, meaning that by default they block attempts to be read by JAWS and other screen-reading software. The Kindle—still the dominant hardware ereader—has text-to-speech capability, but its speech menus remain inaccessible despite a 2009 promise from Amazon. [The Kindle 3, announced last week, has addressed this particular flaw.—Ed.] Hence the recent Department of Justice letter to college presidents warning against inaccessible emerging technology use and a suit brought by the National Federation for the Blind against Arizona State University’s Kindle DX pilot.

Dollars = leverage
While we might only represent a portion of the ebook market, our organizations are the largest collective subscribers to e-journal and other e-text vendors, meaning we have the clout to acquire from publishers in a way that effects positive change. This advocacy can occur at both an individual and programmatic level. For instance, in addition to pursuing EPUB, validated HTML, and other screen-readable formats, why not specify in our consortial licensing agreements that e-text and search interfaces must strictly adhere to accessibility standards, or we will not renew/purchase them? Already 508 compliant are many major vendors, such as Safari Tech Books (Proquest), EBSCO, and Ebrary, but countless others do not focus as clearly on textual accessibility.

We hand over the funds that keep content providers afloat. And, as anyone who has ever met a hard sell with a bluff and won a discount from one of these companies can attest, suggesting you might walk elsewhere with your dollars unless an interface becomes more usable is productive leverage.

We must also be careful not to take accessibility statements at face value, as some “508 compliant” sites are so in name only. We can collaborate with our disabled users to evaluate true usability, hands-on. Lucy and I are working together to develop a usability evaluation rubric, for example.

Usability is accessibility
Our own websites are some of the worst offenders. Library sites as well as e-text platforms and interfaces suffer from an abject lack of standardization, spawning a dizzying array of learning curves, tricks, and workarounds. Lucy’s second saying is that “accessible design is usable design.” What is the good of providing accessible texts if they are impossible to navigate to and through?

Beyond buying usable e-texts, we have to make a strong commitment to usability standards in our own sites and services. The same principles that make a digital document “visible” to a screen reader are universal design best practices. Screen readers rely on behind-the-scenes coding to narrate a page’s structure to a visually impaired user. If that “invisible” underlying architecture is shoddy, the information access process breaks down-and in almost the exact same way it would for, say, a mobile device user.

Lucy’s third saying is that when it comes to e-texts, “separate is not equal.” Users with visual impairments should not have to request a separate file from a vendor, but that is often exactly what they are forced to do. More ebook and e-journal platforms than you might believe have deep accessibility flaws: Adobe Digital Editions and Flash texts have significant accessibility barriers as evinced by problems with OverDrive books; non-OCR PDF files have proven quite problematic; and CourseSmart, the largest online marketplace for e-textbooks, produces by admission what can only be characterized as dismally inaccessible e-texts (although, according to Lucy, it is working toward improvement).

Educating ourselves
There is a dearth of end user studies that evaluate the universal usability of research databases and ebook platforms. While not every librarian has the time or design expertise to evaluate individual resources, we can ensure that the tools our institutions provide and create follow core best practices: consistency, flexibility, accessibility, and simplicity. In this vein, resources like ASCLA’s Think Accessible site and the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) are invaluable. For our own discovery interfaces, the WAVE Web Accessibilty Evaluation Tool and other WebAIM and WC3 products help validate websites for sound design.

There are already accessible e-text initiatives among open access content providers: the Internet Archive recently announced it is making one million books available in DAISY talking book format, while more vended ebook platforms are coming around to their responsibilities in this area. Open access texts in general are created accessibly-the open textbook movement led by Flat World Knowledge operates on an universal access model. The (hopefully) soon-to-be-released Blio is a promising cross-platform reader that could give the proprietary device paradigm a run for its money.

By making access-positive decisions and partnering with the Lucys of the world, we can resist ereading inaccessibility and promote universal usability.

Librarians as __________: Shapeshifting at the periphery.

This week I have been laid up and largely computer-averse due to a most unpleasant eye infection. With a merciful ray of (non-migraine inducing) light, a guest post at In the Library with the Lead Pipe that I loved writing came out on Wednesday:

I admit it: I wrestled with this post for weeks. In the beginning, all I set out to do was ask and (sort-of) answer the familiar question, how do we redefine ourselves and stay relevant in this so-called “information age?” from the vantage point of the academic liaison librarian. I was drawn to this topic because I stare it in the face five out of every seven days I pass on this planet. Moreover, I am far from alone: So epic is our shared struggle to build productive connections with students and faculty that the Association of Research Libraries devoted an entire special report to liaison librarian roles not long ago. The need to diversify (if not redefine) is obvious: even a passing glance at the 2009 Ithaka faculty perceptions report shows that our image is indeed changing, but not necessarily into the tech-involved pedagogical and research partners we might fancy ourselves. Instead, we are becoming pinned down as e-stuffbuyers…

…read on: all Twin Peaks references explained, eventually.

Many, many thanks to all who helped me edit and troubleshoot: Ellie Collier, Emily Drabinski, Susan Edwards, Emily Ford, Lia Friedman, and Jen Waller.

A few months back I moderated a panel at the Next Generation Teaching and Learning Symposium at UC Berkeley, an all-day event keynoted by Social Media Classroom creator (and fellow Reed alum, how about that) Howard Rheingold. Event organizers recently posted video for each session: Having endured the singularly unpleasant experience of watching myself talk in order to vouch for content, I am pleasantly surprised through the adrenalin-induced memory wash to discover that the discussion – Social Issues of NGTL – is quite interesting.

The panelists were Ahrash Bissell, Consultant to Hewlett Foundation and Former Director of ccLearn, and Assistant Professors Brian Carver (cyberlaw) and Coye Chesire (social networks and information exchange) from the UCB School of Information: all extremely articulate gents who cover an impressive amount of challenging ground over the hour, from technology implementation in the classroom to the “pornado effect” and the the access divide’s impact on an uneven dissemination of technology literacy.

Click through to watch on the Symposium site, or see the panel summary below taken from the full symposium report if you don’t have vid or 55:53 to spare. The other event videos are well worth the watch, and feature a number of compelling exchanges on education innovation from representatives of the Open University, Blackboard, Second Life, the University of California Cybercampus Initiative, and more.

Panel Summary:

This panel, moderated by Char Booth, attempted to synthesize many of the discussions that surfaced throughout the day, namely around four issues: politics, pedagogy, culture and access. Panelists were asked to give their idea of the predominant issues in technologies for teaching and learning and share strategies for overcoming those challenges.

Ahrash Bissell talked about his experience overcoming the political and legal barriers that hamper our access to latent capacity and data through using information communication technologies.  He questioned assumptions about what our educational system is doing well. Since high school graduation rates are low, and the number of those that move on to college are even lower. He also brought up the issue of global access to information, and pointed to radio as the dominant medium of information exchange. Bissell also discussed motivation for using these systems. In education, instructors are always looking for ways to make certain things they do while teaching easier. Here, technology can provide incremental solutions, like open textbooks that students can own and mark up, that create buy-in for instructors and administrators.

Brian Carver, who teaches in areas of intellectual property and cyber law, shared his interest in issues of open source software and forms of peer production. He asked what makes these online collaborative projects successful and what makes them fail? If we rely on them for solutions to some of these problems, we should find out what makes them work.  He shared a personal experience to demonstrate school district resistance to social networks and access to web 2.0 tools. There are many people for whom these issues are very far removed, and they have incorrect assumptions about these technologies. In his view, one of the largest problems facing us today is an educational one. We must inform the public about these problems and how we intend to solve them.

Coye Cheshire spoke about social and organization issues of information communication. He discussed the myth of “If you built it, people will use it” and wants to look at not just how people use the tools, but how do people use them in ways that are different from how they were intended to be used. Cheshire also discussed the “Social-Technical gap” that exists between what we can build and what we can support socially. He stressed that the biggest assumption we can make is that we can fill or bridge the gap and that we can’t code in community and social systems into technological solutions. His goal as in instructor that uses these systems is to have a framework for understanding his role and the role of technology in the classroom. Cheshire also noted that some stakeholders expect us to fill the gap and find the right solution.

It’s well worth the watch, as are the <a href=”http://ngtl.ischool.berkeley.edu/events/2010symposium/program”>other videos</a>, which feature a number of compelling presentations and discussions among from representatives of the Open University, Blackboard, Second Life, the University of California cybercampus initiative, and more. You can read a <a href=”http://ngtl.ischool.berkeley.edu/events/2010symposium/report”>symposium report</a> for an overview.

Deep in final editing mode, I just cut a huge, redundant chunk out of one of the last chapters of Reflective Teaching, Effective Learning but couldn’t bring myself to trash it. Please enjoy and/or empathize with this particular form of pedagogical pain:

Disaster Preparedness

Just as you considered barriers to learning in previous chapters, it also pays to anticipate mistakes and malfunctions that might occur as you deliver instruction or training, particularly in synchronous online and face-to-face contexts. Part of the process of creating positive learning experiences is dodging the types of disaster that can shake your confidence, make you forget what you were saying, scramble for a solution, and generally look less than capable — any of which can instantly derail an otherwise sanguine learning dynamic.

Think about it. Have you ever watched a teacher trip or seen a presenter knock over a glass of water at a podium? What about listening to a webcaster struggle painfully through connectivity problems or some other type of technology failure? I have observed from anguished firsthand experience that when an educator does something embarrassing, it typically makes participants feel an uncomfortable mix of sympathetic pain and relief that it isn’t them up there acting the fool.

The problem is, once a snafu happens, those on the learner end of the instructional stick will either a) avert their eyes and never look back or b) finally pay real attention because they now expect you to make another mistake, which could be better than what you were going on about in the first place. “Never let them see you sweat” only goes so far during live delivery; there is little chance of ever being perfectly at ease or avoiding all mistakes, but you of course want to appear as calm, together, and collected as possible. At the same time, you should  remain mindful of not tipping the balance and coming across like a clamped-down control freak, which only hastens murphy’s law.

Lessons Learned

You can’t prevent every conceivable teaching disaster, but you can help head off the more obvious at the pass with a bit of practical foresight and/or insight. Consider lessons learned from three of my own personal worsts:

1. Wardrobe Malfunction. I often wear belt buckles. Unfortunately, one of my favorites has a tendency to come undone spontaneously and bang on whatever table or surface I happen to be standing near, which obviously is not ideal when giving a presentation. To address the issue when it happens I have to not only rebuckle but yank my belt around vigorously to prevent further undoing and banging. Needless to say, I no longer wear this particular item of clothing when I teach.

Yet another praxo-sartorial nightmare: The Bay Area is not at all cold in the wintertime, which I might have figured out had I looked at the forecast before going to my job interview at UC Berkeley. Instead, I packed like I was flying into in an Ohio snowstorm. It was literally thirty degrees warmer than expected when I arrived in California, meaning that my wool blazer and sweater resulted in a sweating bullets–style presentation.

Moral: Wear clothes that you feel confident in and can count on to not embarrass you. Avoid anything uncomfortable or dicey. Also, know something about the climate you’re walking into.

2. Tech Meltdown. Once before giving a remote talk  via Skype video I neglected to budget enough time to test the setup with the coordinator on the other end. When it came time to actually speak, we could not resolve the terrible echoing feedback caused by my amplified voice being picked up by the computer and rebroadcast through the auditorium PA, neither of which had noise-canceling software installed. This meant the audience not only could see me frowning and flustered on a giant screen, they could hear everything I said twice.

Moral: Test your tools early and well, then go back and test them again.

3. F . . . A . . . . This isn’t exactly a teaching moment, but close enough to be appropriately mortifying. Once at a highly anticipated spelling bee at a friend’s apartment I stood up in front of a room packed full of people and misspelled “fajitas” in the worst imaginable way. It gets better: not only was I literally the first contestant in the first round of the bee, I was also wearing a nametag that said something like “I’m a winner” at the time. Why did this happen? Because I absolutely knew how to spell “fajitas” and was overconfident enough to mindlessly replace my j with a g. Ouch.

Moral: Pace yourself, breathe, measure your words, and don’t be a know-it-all – it is far too easy to kick yourself in the mouth.

Graceful Recovery

We have all spent plenty of time cringing at the center of attention. The core takeaway from my account of personal teaching disasters should therefore be no revelation: It is absolutely crucial that you derive useful future strategies from the challenging instances that threaten to derail your resolve. Otherwise, they create scars and feelings of post-traumatic stress that lead to a hatred of being in the limelight.

Gaining personal insight from disastrous, embarrassing, or simply ineffective moments is an excellent reflective technique that gets at the root of experiential learning, but it is only part of the story. There is actually a great deal of power in problematic teaching moments, which, if handled gracefully, can breathe fresh humanity into an otherwise rote scenario. The old adage of falling off the horse is propelled two steps further when it happens in front of an audience: As you climb back on, you should a) determine why you bit the dust in the first place to avoid doing it again, and b) act like you fell off on purpose or make fun of yourself for the duration of the ride in order to keep the those around you interested and/or confident in your ability to make it home in one piece.

My mother, Julie Caroline Stillwell, has hilariously vivid stress  dreams. Most mornings I have been lucky enough to share with her (including this one) open with, “You’re not going to believe the nightmare I had last night….”, and end with both of us cracking up over watery Southern-style coffee. They tend to focus on one of the three most intensely performance-related areas of her life, listed in order of nocturnal frequency: 1) being head cheerleader, 2) her long career teaching university-level Spanish and English as a Second Language, or 3) being president of her college sorority.

Last night’s dream had to do with 1 – she showed up to the big game (not kidding about the ‘big’ part: we’re talking oldschool West-Texas football) and discovers that she is wearing her “ratty old junior high uniform” instead of her nice new one. I have heard many variations on this theme: the whole squad shows up to a competition wearing old-fashioned uniforms, she can’t get to the top of the pyramid, etcetera.

Last night I had the presence of mind to use my iPhone to record a chance conversation we had about her more pedagogically-oriented nightmares, still going strong a decade into her retirement. My mother was an extremely gifted instructor: I remember how much her students adored her when she taught ESL at the Intensive English Language Institute at the University of North Texas, where she worked for most of my childhood. The article I wrote for American Libraries this month touches on teaching anxiety and its exacerbating factors among library educators, namely, our lack of preparation. To dispel the notion that teaching anxiety necessarily subsides with preparation and/or experience, I thought I would share our conversation. The audio starts mid-stream, unfortunately – it was an opportunistic and surreptitious interview, and I caught her at the point of talking about what seems to go wrong in her nightmares. Like many experienced educators I have been talking with of late, she is willing to be amazingly reflective and candid (and don’t miss the TMI at the end, folks.)

mommatalksdreams.mp3 (3.5 minutes, transcription follows below)

What  I love most about her dreams is that they magnify so many common challenges of instruction itself: the need for preparation, good teaching configurations, participant ratios, and the like. It is interesting to me that in her nightmares teaching environment always seems to be off, which was actually what she seemed  most comfortable with during her career (she always says that she could “teach on the head of a pin,”meaning that she didn’t need things to be just so).

I also have amazing performance nightmares – like my mother’s they are a perfectionistic, subconscious exorcism of the real-time demons I know probably won’t come to pass (or at least will be somewhat manageable if they do). I get them especially badly before conference, etc. presentations in front of a live audience: I’ll dream that I won’t be able to talk, or that I’m trying to hold my teeth in, that the auditorium is full of feral, slouching hipsters, or that I’ll be so late that I have to run onstage (which has actually happened to me several times – a horror I hope never to repeat.) I once dreamed that the room I was supposed to be in was across an skating rink from me, and they were out of rentable skates.

PS: Happy birthday, Momma. I love you, and thanks both for your willingness to share our conversation and for endless patience with my stealth recording tactics.

PPS: I would love to hear more of these, actually. Anyone else have night anxiety terrors to share?

–

Transcription:

Julie: And it’s always, like, my environment for teaching is impossible to overcome. Like, there’s no chalk. The blackboard, even if there’s chalk, you try to write on the blackboard and you can’t see the letters. Or, there are, the room is configured so that, if you are able to talk to some of the students the other students can’t hear you. Like, they’re in two hugely different places, you know, but I’m supposed to be teaching them. Or, and there’s also, I’m always not prepared. Like I haven’t done my preparation, and I go in there and I just do something, kindof — diddly-stupid, you know. And then there’s always too many people in the room: it’s like there’s so many people that I can’t deal with how many people there are — I can’t teach them anything because there’s too many. And it’s just stuff like that. And then lots of times I can’t find the room I’m supposed to be in, I’m running around trying to find the room, and it’s just very fraught with anxiety, you know?

Me: Do you ever, like, overcome, or do you always end up anxious in the end?

Julie: I always, it always ends up frustrating. Like, I didn’t get everybody’s name down, you know, so I wasn’t’ like I wasn’t sure who was there, and everybody’s gone and I wasn’t able to give them the homework assignment, you know (laughs).

Me: You are a stress case.

Julie: …And sometimes the lights won’t turn on, and it’s just hysterical how many, how many (here I start to interrupt) everything in the world.

Me: But you loved teaching.

Julie: I did love teaching. That’s what I don’t understand.

Me: I think you had those dreams because you loved teaching.

Julie: But I always was nervous, I never got over being…

Me: Did you get up in front of the class and the nervousness would fade?

Julie: Yeah. But it was the beginning, like before I went in there was always a nervous time for me.

Me: That’s very interesting.

Julie: And the first six months, the first semester I taught in graduate school I lost about fifteen pounds.

Me: Oh my god, just from stress?

Julie: I would… I had diarrhea every day.

Me: Oh no!

Julie: Every. Day.

Me: Oh Momma, that’s terrible! I’m so sorry. But here you are, you made it through, and your students loved you.

Julie: Mmmhmm. And now, I’m getting a marvelous pension from the state government…

Me: Hear hear.

I have noticed a lot of recent interest in the TED Commandments, the list of rules every Technology/Entertainment/Design conference presenter receives (chiseled somewhat melodramatically in stone) that reinforce the high bar for which TED talks are known. Let me preface this post by admitting that I am a consummate fan of TED, which I think of principally as a non-profit institution that has developed a remarkable cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural digital knowledge sharing model. In this sense TED is a phenomenal manifestation of new media: what began as a small-scale technology conference has morphed into an institution that provides a uniquely logical antithesis to random YouTube spelunking: using the power of cultural cache,  intelligent social marketing, free digital distribution, and strategic technology development, TED has gone about spreading its series of worthwhile ideas with relentless success.

In the past week I had two TED-related conversations, one with Ben Wurgaft and the other with Lia Friedman, both of whom offered extremely insightful and interesting commentary on the socioeconomic implications of the talks/presenters that I hope they will share here or elsewhere. My focus comes from another angle: to examine the format and context of the TED commandments, and consider their implications for interpretation and application by the speaking and teaching (ahem) laity.

Evangelical Expertise

The TED presentation model is highly rhetorical, as in based in the skillful delivery of one-sided, sage/stage performances meant to educate, persuade, and entertain.  Thus, in the spirit of rhetoric’s counterpart (dialectic), I thought I would turn a critical eye towards the TED model itself. While suited to its context, the TED model to some degree discourages presenters from engaging questions or inviting audience perspectives mid-stream – digital commentary and I imagine formal conference Q/A occur only after the talk’s conclusion (and Q/A is sadly never included in the videos themselves). Despite the commandment that explicitly prohibits “selling from the stage,” most TED talks combine dynamically communicated, expressly authoritative, and highly evangelical expertise in order to make a successful pitch. Evangelism is the communication of profound beliefs of which one is compelled by calling to convince others, while a pitch is meant to raise anything from capital to awareness in order to forward a venture or approach. Pitches don’t necessarily have to sell, but evangelism definitely has to convert.

I am fascinated by the creation of a digital space in which the nerd cache of the Steve Jobs variety is so successfully replicated, time and again, through this type of pitched evangelism. TED presenters span an incredible range of occupations and subfields, from the most successful politicians imaginable to a surprising number of math teachers, and I am personally curious about how TED speakers are selected (as in, who decides which ideas are “worth spreading”?) The modus operandi seems to be to identify highly successful, entrepreneurial, and charismatic experts doing interesting work in culturally relevant and changing subfields, provided that said work is neither particularly polarizing nor conservative.

Interpreting the Commandments

The commandments are all excellent (if not relatively self-evident) pieces of public speaking advice, to be sure. That said, a few revelations about the commandments come in their contextualization: I have never watched a TED talk that was not given by someone who was a) already highly famous, and/or b) an obviously expert public speaker or performer in their own right. To my eye, the commandments are therefore less pitched to remind presenters that they need to be dynamic and interesting than to necessarily reinforce the TED formula. Which is not to say that this formula is negative, by any means: it has much to do with encouraging presenters to reveal the core enthusiasm and motivating interest behind their particular sub-genre of nerddom, so often tamped down as pollyannish in typical academic and political arenas.

People present at TED by virtue of being at the top of their respective games. I imagine, therefore, that the commandments do a number of things not particularly relevant to more modest public speaking and teaching contexts. They a) remind more well-known presenters that they can’t simply get by on their reputation and boilerplate spiels that they are typically paid thousands of dollars to deliver, (e.g., their “usual shtick”) but that they actually need to spend time preparing or commissioning a unique talk. They likely also b) to reinforce the brevity, digestibility, and shareability of the format among those perhaps somewhat more vulnerable to windbag syndrome, an absolute necessity to reliably shape pieces of content created with the express purpose of being packaged and digitally delivered to millions of viewers of every persuasion and level of education imaginable. Which beings me to the all-important c), which I believe is most relevant to the rest of us:

Use your earnestness and personality to communicate the enthusiasm you feel for the subject of your own expertise in order to  engage and educate your audience.

Inviting Interactivity

If taken at face value, the TED commandments encourage us to be engaging and accessible and refer to other presenters or the sake of controversy, but they also remind us to please not run on or invite chaos by engaging our audiences directly in a way that might interrupt our flow. Which brings me to the motivation for this post: from the one-the-ground speaker and educator’s perspective, the commandments need a few important amendments. While excellent advice for structuring dynamic and comprehensible mini-lectures, they leave out a cardinal rule of public speaking and teaching in more “normal” circumstances: interactivity. I have already mentioned the number of good reasons for this, but when discussing public speaking and the TED commandments it is important for the rest of us to remember that the TED commandments spring from a very particular, highly privileged, and strategically hyped venue.

While one can be critical of format and scale of TED talks, they are perfectly suited to their context: highly scripted and painstakingly crafted to be succinct, witty, and dense encapsulations of some of the most complex, arcane, and technical concepts imaginable. What I particularly like about TED is that it is a showcase of individuals so incredibly, contagiously engrossed in their own work, so dedicated to a particular idea, approach, or belief, that they have devoted themselves to forwarding it. It is an almost hilariously rockstarred version of professionalization, and a perfectly Americanized, lights-(digital)camera-action manifestation of the public intellectual.

TED Amendments

It is in large part the authority and cache of the institution that makes TED talks effective – by virtue of their being invited to deliver a TED talk, the audience is already positively disposed towards the presenter, and primed for a fascinating, etc. spectator experience.  Most of us who present, teach, and/or train are not going to be met with the same sort of ultra-anticipated exuberance as TED speakers.  It is, therefore, not necessarily the TED Commandments per se that we should be following. It is the cultivation of the intrinsically motivating, contagious sense of enthusiasm that can captivate any audience combined with an awareness that, without TED-esque mystique and marketing juggernaut behind you, you’re going to have to be far more interactive in order to engage people. With enough evangelical expertise and authentic interaction, literally  anything can become interesting for 18 minutes. This, I think, is the real secret of effective public communication.

In closing, in order to adjust the relatively patrician TED commandments to the public speaking and teaching proletariat, I offer these two amendments:

1) Do not assume that thy expertise or bio precedes thee, lest it be incorrectly interpreted as arrogance or lack of adequate preparation.

2) Interact bravely and often with thy audience, so that thy content is more readily pitched towards their interests and knowledge.

Today I gave a presentation at the California Clearinghouse on Library Instruction’s Spring 2010 Workshop, my maiden voyage talking about Reflective Teaching, Effective Learning book stuff (for an overview on what the book is actually about, take a look at a short article on the subject in American Libraries).

I’m sharing two components of the talk (which was amazing, by the way – 100 or so working library instructors, all super lively and interactive). The first is an old trusty-style slideshow on instructional literacy, instructional design, and tons of other concepts in teaching and learning:

The second is a personal instructional technology challenge in which I taught myself how to use Prezi over the last week in order to a) describe the USER design method I lay out in RTEL, and b) illustrate a strategy for evaluating emerging tools for their practical teaching uses. Disclaimers: I have thus far avoided using Prezi due to an unfortunate and die-hard reliance on an older version of PowerPoint, not to mention the nagging-to-overpowering vertigo I experience when I actually watch Prezis that pan and zoom frequently. Also, the below image is static (click through to the presentation) because Prezi embed code doesn’t play very nice with WordPress, apparently.

Also, the handout I used summarizes the USER method and instructional literacy in some detail:

Reflective Teaching, Effective Learning @CCLI 2010 Handout

I have a piece in this month’s American Libraries magazine on instructional literacy, or strategies and approaches that working library educators can use to build instructional design and delivery skills as they teach:

Build Your Own Instructional Literacy

Face it: Teaching is hard. It’s hard from any angle, using any technology, to any learner. Even for those enviable (and few) “natural teachers,” being an educator is as at least as challenging as it is rewarding. Not only does teaching take skills, preparation, and diligence; it demands bravery, humor, and self-awareness.

Now more than ever, librarianship has an instructional slant: From school library media specialists to academic librarians, we increasingly embed ourselves in curricula and classrooms, lead workshops and training, and create digital learning materials as a matter of course. Moreover, the librarian-as-teacher is beginning to enter the popular zeitgeist: Marilyn Johnson’s widely publicized This Book is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All (Harper, 2010) portrays today’s librarians as connected and techdactic, and a library-supported Digital Literacy Corps was among the provisions of the National Broadband Plan recently proposed by the FCC. These developments help bring the educational work we have been doing for decades—helping individuals navigate and thrive in the information society—into the limelight.

There is some irony in the timing of this development: a national debate about teacher training and effectiveness is raging, yet most of the country’s go-to digital literacy educators—e.g., librarians—were not systematically trained to teach in the first place. Sparked by the transition from Bush’s No Child Left Behind to Obama’s Race to the Top, the impact of instructor skills on student performance is an area of growing contention among scholars, instructors, and policy wonks. The economic crisis and resulting cutbacks, closures, and layoffs directly impact the digital-literacy load of all K–12, academic, and public libraries, making the education we do all the more critical as our users struggle to sharpen their skills in the face of higher stakes…

It’s essentially a super-condensed and excerpted version of Reflective Teaching, Effective Learning, the book I have coming out in the fall: read on.

As I round out the last big project I’ll have on my compositional plate for a while, I reflect that I’ve been experiencing serious bouts of writer’s block. Or at least that’s what I assumed I was experiencing, until I ran across a post by Scott Berkun that makes the rather prescient point that “it’s not the fear of writing that blocks people, it’s fear of not writing well.” In other words, my problem is more accurately described as satisfaction block. He recommends strategies for dealing with this and other common impediments, many of which involve either distracting yourself temporarily or deliberately forcing output of the something, anything sort while remembering that quality usually comes in the editing. This is excellent advice, but due to my cosmically extreme struggles with rewriting, I find that a forge-ahead approach can actually exacerbate satisfaction block when quality time is nigh (i.e., exactly now).

Self-diagnosis time.

When I write, I spit out long something, anything-style chunks of moderately related ideas and then try to string them together into a logical narrative later. I end up cutting, pasting, and reconstituting until I have completely tied myself in knots and either trampled or forgotten my own point. My nagging satisfaction block culprits are therefore discursiveness and excessive length – the only talent for brevity and/or clarity I possess is in titling. Beyond that, I tend to run on to the nth degree, which my perennially patient and heroic editor often reminds me is the readability kiss of death. Watching an idea unfold itself into words is one of the more unquestionably pleasant aspects of being an author. That said (and I speak from hard-earned experience), some thoughts simply begin so wadded that no amount of smoothing makes them presentable.

Firmly believing in the adage that every good idea lends itself to graceful abstraction, I constantly try to trick myself into getting to the point – I should be able to boil down brief and coherent summaries of anything I write, no matter how meandering it might have begun. Berkun’s best advice is of the self-flagellatory sort: when all else fails, switch to something more difficult. As penance for my deviations and to catalyze my ass into gear for a particularly demanding stint of productivity, I’ll now force myself to explain each post or publication I remember struggling with mightily over the past few years in one comprehensible sentence. Here goes:

Analog solitude is easier to glorify if one views digital connectivity as inherently hyper (and by the way, my shoulder hurts).

Dismissing a trend without keeping it at least nominally on your radar can lead to obsolesced opining.

Deep insight and broad strategic perspective (instead of easy, unquestioned assumptions) should guide local technology decisions.

Chin up, head down: words to work (well with others) by.

Productive teaching is one part foundational knowledge, one part fearless self-scrutiny, one part reflective design-mindedness, and one part enthusiastic hucksterism.

Bonus combos:

How I explain who I am informs what you think I can do: therein lies my librarian identity (rinse, and repeat).

Underrest can only sustain overwork for so long, so after twenty-nine years I think a few things have finally started to sink in.

That was very, very difficult. Wish me luck.

I recently answered a few questions for a Viewpoint/Interview piece in the upcoming Reference Services Review (38/2), most of which is now available to subscribers in pre-print. The issue is devoted to mobile services in libraries and features some of the smartest content I’ve seen on the subject thus far. Several of the articles are co-authored by collaborators and all-around library favorites of mine Joan Lippincott, Lori Bell, and Kim Griggs, and also includes an article by Andy Burkhardt and Sarah Cohen on their Skype services to study abroad students pilot at Champlain College, which they generously shared with me in draft form so I could profile it in an upcoming Library Technology Report. Said LTR, which I am currently in the throes of editing for July publication, examines the library hype/innovation cycle through the lens of a mature technology (VoIP) in order to distill lessons for emerging service development (e.g., mobile x, y, and z).

I love recycling almost as much as I love open access, so the RSR editors have kindly given me permission to share the full q/a here:

RSR Vol 38 No 2

Viewpoint/Interview

More than Tools: The Need for Support

Char Booth, E-Learning Librarian and Liaison to the School of Information, University of California at Berkeley

with

Michelle Jacobs, Emerging Technologies and Web Coordinator College Library, UCLA

Structured abstract:

The purpose of this piece is to look beyond the data and the current studies on the impact new services have on service needs and standards that are provided to users. Instructional design is a key component to almost all Library services. Char Booth, a 2007 ALA Emerging Leader and 2008 Library Journal Mover and Shaker, took some of her down time (actually up-time since she was on an airplane) to respond to questions that represent the trends featured in this special issue.

Viewpoint/Interview

Keywords: technology, libraries, mobile devices, instructional design, instructional literacy

Char Booth advocates for the integration of pedagogical training in library education, informing user services through local research, creating library cultures of experimentation and assessment, and exploring open, accessible, and collaborative solutions to library sustainability. Booth is the E-Learning Librarian at the University of California at Berkeley, her passion for librarianship and technology have earned her a place as 2007 ALA Emerging Leader and 2008 Library Journal Mover and Shaker. Her publications are widely recognized as “essential reading” work in the field of library and information studies. Through ACRL’s press Booth published Informing Innovation: Tracking Student Interest in Emerging Library Technologies at Ohio University, A Research Report. (Available as free digital download at tinyurl.com/boothii accessed 14 February 2010). This report examines Ohio University’s efforts to move towards a “culture of assessment.” It includes the findings of an environmental scan conducted at the University, focusing on the needs of students, libraries, and how emerging information, communication, and academic tools can be integrated. Booth stresses that local user assessment is essential and offers practical research strategies and methods. It also includes a foreword by Dr. Joan K. Lippincott, Associate Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), who is also featured in this issue.

Her forthcoming book from ALA Editions, Reflective Teaching, Effective Learning: Instructional Literacy for Library Educators looks at how instruction is an essential component of all aspects of librarianship. Booth introduces a series of concepts based on the USER Method. The USER Method represents a step-by-step approach to creating learner-focused instruction, building the librarian’s confidence and providing them the essential tools for their role as designer and presenter. Booth also blogs about library futures, instructional design, and technology literacy at info-mational (infomational.com accessed 19 February 2010).  Her expertise in instructional design and educational theory provides invaluable insight into where libraries are and where they hope to go and if mobile is going to get them there.

RSR: Information and knowledge are essential components of academic success. Given the ways in which access to information has changed, what do you think the best tool(s) for accessing this information is/are?

Booth: I feel like I first need to take this question apart a bit. Academic success is highly subjective, and access is only one aspect of the cycle of information discovery, synthesis, and transformation that eventually produces knowledge in one form or another. For example, succeeding in the academic sense looks different to an undergrad rushing to finish an assignment by citing three sources their instructors won’t reject out of hand than it does to an interdisciplinary PhD candidate trying to compile a bibliography to help them prepare for qualifying exams. By extension, the knowledge that comes from these two scenarios has different degrees of permanence – like success, satisfactory learning or knowledge building in these cases depends on the individual. For the qual-taker, knowledge is comprehensiveness, and success is the discovery and understanding of canonical texts and advancement to candidacy. For the first-year, success is the path of least resistance, and knowledge is the miraculous but fleeting discovery of JSTOR or Google Scholar. The root of this difference is motivation – how interested is a given library user in wrangling the different access tools we all offer? We observe that the personally interested devote more energy and persistence towards the research process, which is a natural consequence of the growing specialization and increasing focus that is ideally built throughout the process of higher education. Librarians support people as they discover this self-interest and specialization, yet at the same time we enable those who simply want to barrel through the process.

It goes without saying that those engaged in study and/or research have vastly different information and productivity needs, and by extension attempting to isolate specific best-case-scenario access tools is a misguided strategy. Any library should be equally usable for the easy in/easy out undergrad as the in-depth faculty member or post-doc researcher. A useful means for approaching this challenge is to think beyond tools and towards supporting “personal learning environments (PLEs),” or the combination of tools an individual uses in work, learning, communication, and productivity. How well a library is able to meaningfully provide options to support the PLEs of different types of users is what is truly important, which involves everything from self-education in current technology platforms to local user research. If we enable ourselves to determine what X, Y, and Z user needs are, we are better equipped to supply said access or knowledge through usable platforms via personalized, comprehensible messages that push the information fluency envelope. Because access and success is closely tied to education and information awareness, this invariably involves a librarian mediator either as information/instructional designer or as a direct reference or research consultant. In this way, while the “best” access tools differ by context, they can all be guided by certain principles and practices that shape the character of search, discovery, support, and educational initiatives. These include usability, accessibility, simplicity, transparency, and so forth.

RSR: How do you feel about the trend of mobile in libraries?

Booth: Terrible. No, seriously – I suppose that as in many other things technological I try to take a simultaneously realistic, creative, and user-focused approach to the trend, as well as to consider it one aspect of the fixed/mobile convergence that characterizes our current state of near-ubiquitous connectivity. Defining “mobility” is also a tricky issue – do you mean web access from a handheld device or smartphone, or ubiquitous wireless coverage that makes any portable device connective in a mobile sense? Many of us think almost exclusively about developing mobile sites and services, but there’s a lot to consider on the technical backend, as well. Bandwidth, connection speeds, and media built-ins for most smartphones are still not as robust as hard-wired and wireless voice/video over IP solutions. This means that to stably support rich communication options such as web videoconferencing via Skype or another service, wired or wireless access via a desktop, laptop, or notebook is still best at present (although wireless speeds and devices will continue to improve in coming years). In this sense, equipping yourself, your users, and your organization for a range of strong and interoperable connectivity options for fixed/mobile connectivity will stand you in good stead.

One aspect of this convergence is in the differing impact of mobile tools in the library-as-workplace. Increased mobility in communication and information access/discovery is already an ingrained reality among many library users, yet it is still largely an end-user phenomenon in terms of its impact on the daily work and productivity of the average librarian. Think about it: at our actual jobs, most of us are still tied to traditional desktop pcs and fixed-location computing, even if we a) spend all day at said computers recoding library pages to make sure they are mobile-friendly or b) also have access to tablets and laptops and smartphones in one capacity or another. This fixed-computing phenomenon is not isolated to libraries, but is evident throughout academe – a 2009 ECAR report identified that while a trend towards VoIP adoption is on solid ground among of higher education institutions, there is a noticeable lag around all things mobile. The report notes that most universities only subsidize mobile tools/coverage for some staff but rarely provide them outright, and that few institutions have developed comprehensive strategies or plans for deploying mobile content and services in the future.[1]

Even if our employers are not pursuing mobile support on an institutional level, as an early-adopting set librarians are using mobile tools and devices to build professional community, stay connected, discreetly waste time in meetings, and so forth in and out of work, but largely on our dime (I don’t see many libraries planning to supply their staff with personal iPhones or Androids anytime soon, so we will likely continue to use our own). While the reality of the workplace is largely still based in fixed-location computing, we can recognize the mobile trend and build platforms and services that follow the shifting paradigm while and at the same time participating in the shift ourselves as information consumers and producers. There is a lot of evangelism going on about mobile etc. etc etc., which is fine, so long as we don’t lose collective site of the fact that it’s simply another in a long line of innovations that need to be observed objectively and strategically before being pounced upon. At my workplace we did not have a particularly successful run with a recent SMS reference pilot, whereas others certainly seem to have different experiences on that score. I always sing the library specific – you have to understand how your own community uses these platforms before you can ascertain how your services will be received via mobile apps or other service/access/ discovery initiatives.

In sum, I think that it all comes down to maintaining a graceful approach to convergence and interoperability, or the merging and symbiosis of different computing and communication platforms. Bringing together sites/systems/services that will serve users connected through different devices (or viewing things on different sized screens and/or using screen-reading software, for that matter), and learning the best ways to move from one platform to another through cloud-based computing and different connection platforms in order to facilitate seamless access when and where you want it.

Mobile devices have majestically enabled my own workaholism: take this interview, for example, which has had a totally converged life-cycle. RSR editors sent me these questions via email, which I first accessed on my iPhone. Using an app called “Documents to Go” I imported the text into a Word document, and, while on a plane from San Diego to Oakland, I drafted these answers typing on my phone while entirely offline. After landing I emailed the draft Word document to my Gmail account, which I then opened the next day at work as a Google Doc on my desktop pc, and finally sent to the editors via email. I could have done this a dozen different ways, and in terms of personal productivity and imaging mobile services it is this task-based insight into mobile research and workflows that is important to cultivate.

Finally, an example of a technology tool coming down the pike that could facilitate better convergence and interoperability between mobile and fixed devices in a library context is Blio (blioreader.com, accessed 14 February 2010), a free cross-platform eReading software product developed by Ray Kurzweil that could effectively give PDF a run for its money, which from an accessibility standpoint would be an excellent thing. If DRM (digital rights management) has been the driving force in the e-book revolution to date, Blio could shake this up significantly and allow more mobile devices provide a consistent and rich eReading experience.

RSR: In a perfect library what would your preferred portal to information be?

Booth: “Perfect library” – oh, the places I could go with that one. Again, look at it from the user perspective. Many faculty I know might say that their perfect portal would be totally invisible, comprised of unlimited resources that are extremely straightforward to access, and require no cutting of red tape. An honors thesis student who will probably end up going to library school after being thwarted on the post-graduation job market might actually want the same portal to feel like more of a learning experience (which is the way most “portals” function at present – it’s often a euphemism for “overly complicated library website”).

I think that the underlying foundation to any information portal should be that it is predicated on openness of one sort or another – code, source, access, criticism, revision, and so forth. In addition, I believe information search and discovery tools/services should be as personal and/or personalizable as the user requires. The value added of libraries is undeniably in our capacity to serve and support individuals: we are basically free research firms staffed by information altruists who care deeply about the interests of others. This is a vital, important, and absolutely unique service. Going back to the personal learning environment angle, I also think of and present myself as an academic and technology productivity consultant of sorts, as well as a resource on copyright, fair use, and accessibility – all essential points along the trajectory of learning and scholarship. The more of these topics librarians are conversant with, the better chance we have of covering the diverse needs/interests of campus constituencies in whatever portal we conceive.

RSR: Given the current budget situation at most academic institutions, where do you feel libraries are best served in relation to technology and technological developments?

Booth: We are best served by using two similar strategies to solve problems creatively and cheaply. Both are bent on using existing talent/output and building awareness of the strengths of one’s institutional and professional communities:

1) Crowdsourcing: leverage the local talent in your immediate context for everything from web design to marketing. Hire interns and accept volunteers from library schools, hold student contests for website or logo designs, go through student and faculty organizations to promote initiatives and learn about users.

2) Peersourcing: leverage organizational and professional talent in the field to build partnerships, collaborations, and social learning experiences that reduce the duplication of effort upon which library paradigms have long been built. There are many movements chipping away at the all-within-my-walls mentality that characterized librarianship through the 20th century – library-developed open source tools like Library a la Carte[2] and the Social OPAC (SOPAC)[3], organizations like Hathi Trust[4] for shared preservation, and grassroots events and collectives such as Library Camps[5], Radical Reference[6], and unconferences – all bent on sharing experience and expertise.

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[1] http://www.educause.edu/Resources/SpreadingtheWordMessagingandCo/168953

[2] http://alacarte.library.oregonstate.edu/ (accessed 19 February 2010)

[3] http://www.thesocialopac.net/ (accessed 19 February 2010)

[4] http://www.hathitrust.org/ (accessed 19 February 2010)

[5] For one perspective and information on library camps and unconferences, see Steve Lawson’s book Library Camps and Unconferences (Neal-Schuman, 2010).

[6] For a history of the Radical Reference collective, see Morrone, Melissa and Friedman, Lia (2009) ‘Radical Reference: Socially Responsible Librarianship Collaborating with Community’, The Reference Librarian, 50: 4, 371 — 396.