project curve, part seven: open access publishing for learner engagement (aka oa ftw).

A note on my recent radio silence: these days I am doing more and writing less. While it is excellent to be this active with different sides of working life, I am consistently nagged by a lengthening list of events/ideas left unexplored in this venue. As unpleasant as allowing my compositional muscles to atrophy might…

project curve, part six: collaborative instruction portfolios.

My last post described our increasingly fantastic rolling library project (check out a recent v-day Maker Break cart excursion and a alendar developed using the free version of LibCal). This post focuses on something considerably more stationary: collaborative teaching portfolios, one area discussed in a recent SCILWorks 2012 presentation given by myself and my two…

project curve, part five: library on wheels.

It’s been a spell since I wrote for the project curve series, but not for lack of inspiration: my inaugural Fall semester at Claremont was an engaging blur of teaching, trying, making, and doing, leaving me for the first time in a long while with scarce time to write. Which leads me to compose a…

love your library button templates (and more): project curve, part one revisited.

A while back I started this series with a post on ‘love your library’ buttons, maker breaks, and other handmade projects we’re working on at the Claremont Colleges Library. After about five months of trying pins out in different outreach contexts and reworking the designs to various ends, I can unequivocally vouch for the soundness…

project curve, part four: mapping (concept to curriculum).

Note, 10/12: You can see more recent work on this project at the Ubiquitous Librarian and view Claremont’s much-updated curriculum mapping template here. Finally, I’m percolating a big update post in the near future. -c — Welcome to the latest installment of project curve, my orienting-to-life-in-a-new-library series. Last on deck was the ProfDevLib; this time…

project curve, part three: profdevlib.

I don’t know about the rest of academic libraryland, but I have definitely overcome any delusions I was harboring of a summer work lull – things have been hilariously busy. Between building community and a structure of tools/strategies for the coming year at Claremont, winding down a long research consultancy for a consortium of California…

project curve, part two: research guidance rubric remix.

Continuing a project-focused series on my initial months at the Claremont Colleges Library (I first wrote about Maker Breaks, our button press goings-on), this post explores an example of one of my favorite pastimes: repurposing the good work of others in order to avoid reinventing a wheel. The wheel in question is a very well-designed…

project curve, part one: maker breaks.

In my last post I set the stage for a series: to explore my learning curve at a new job at the Claremont Colleges Library through a few initial projects and collaborations. This is part one. Several stereotypical (yet accurate) generalizations: librarians are nerds, librarians like crafts, and librarians tend to have lots of interesting…

learning curve: month one in projects.

As I have observed relatively recently, communities of practice are groups of individuals bound together by characteristics, traits, rituals, and norms that 1) distinguish them from other communities, and 2) orient their members some sense of collective purpose. The process of integrating into a new community is complex, involving acclimation on a number of levels….

open access as pedagogy.

I’ve long preached the message of open access publication/sharing of student work via platforms like OA institutional repositories and Wikipedia as an unparalleled means to engage students and turn the “banking” model of higher education on its head. I do so because have witnessed firsthand in many learning scenarios the effect that public readership can…