Category Archives: Uncategorized

How I learned to Stop Worrying about Digital Natives and love V&R

Those of you familiar with me on Twitter know that I’ve got frequent rants against Digital Natives in my feed, and I’ve been indulging in such rants more often lately, as there’s been a rash of people on the internet and in person invoking that particular trope.
I’m not going to spend time here debunking the Digital Natives thing, I’ve done actual work that helps deconstruct it, and that offers an alternative.

I think (it should be clear) that it’s important to stop thinking in terms of Digital Natives, and to stop giving an eye-rolley pass to people who do. I’m writing this at least in part to have something to link to when I don’t want to write any new rants about this. It’s not just that the Digital Natives thing is wrong, it’s about what is at stake if we continue to allow it to ease its way into conversations about pedagogy and technology. Alternatives, whether Visitors and Residents or otherwise (though I’m fond of the former), are just a more ethical way to go.

First of all, the Digital Natives construction assumes that you know 1) that people of a certain age are engaged with technology, and 2) that you know why. All that is left to do, under that model, is count how many people have what kind of tech. Framings such as V&R insist on engagement with the qualitative data, with the complex behaviors of people, so that we can understand what is going on, not sidestep understanding via quantification.

Second, the cliche, lazy generational generalizing that Digital Natives indulges in is an imagining of a seamless present, wherein the mere presence of technology results in expertise that is untaught, in fact fundamentally unteachable, and therefore pre-existing, and something to expect from students of a Certain Age. This is more dangerous than the seamless future that so many of us imagine (of education, of libraries, of ubiquitous computing–I’ve been reading Dourish and Bell’s Divining a Digital Future and am clearly influenced by it here). Future thinking is unfortunate because in part it encourages a neglect of the complicated and messy (and interesting!) present. It’s easier to think and talk about a future where the current problems with which we wrestle are fixed (jet packs!).

It’s far more challenging to confront the present.

And the present being confronted should be a finely and accurately observed and described one, not an imagined present. Digital Natives hands us an imagined present wherein Kids These Days Can Just Do Technology. It is a tailor-made justification to neglect a responsibility to the people we need to teach. The cliche suggests that we can ignore the messy complicated present where the ubiquity of computers still does not automatically (automagically, to steal from @audreywatters) produce any sort of literacy or critical thinking. We have a situation right here in front of us where engagement with technology is not pre-determined by age, but by a complex interaction of identity, economic class, privilege, power, and a host of other factors that enable or restrict people. Let’s talk about that, not about how young people Get It and older people Don’t.

I think as a construction, given all we know about the whys and hows of people’s motivations to engage (or not) with technology and information, Digital Natives is thoroughly reprehensible. It’s not borne out in the research, and it actively encourages practitioners not to teach things, because “they should already know this stuff.”

So we should dispense with it, stop referring to it, bury it deep. Move on.
Please please please.

References:

Dourish, Paul, and Genevieve Bell. 2011. Divining a digital future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Images: Wikipedia

Guest Blog: Beth Martin and Heather McCullough, Assessment Beyond Counting

Recently my colleagues Beth Martin and Heather McCullough presented at Educause on our assessment agenda in Atkins Library. I love this work, I am delighted to work with them here at UNC Charlotte. I’m sharing the poster here because I think it’s terrifically important to get as many voices as possible into the conversation about what assessment is, could be, and should be for, in Academic Libraries, and in Higher Education generally. I have blogged about the Mixed-Method, Interdisciplinary library before, and I think that this poster is a nice example of how we are going to operationalize that at Atkins, with partnerships within and outside of the library.

I’m including a summary in this post of their main points, and a link to their poster.

Click to get to .pdf

Educational Analytics and Libraries

Educational Analytics in this context encompasses both Learning Analytics and Academic Analytics.

Learning Analytics focuses on data about the learning process while academic analytics focuses on data about the institution.¹

UNC Charlotte Atkins Library is putting together an analytics initiative that will explore both learning and academic analytics through a library lens.

The Initiative

What we do now	What we want to do	How we will move forward
Count items and people	How are patrons using the library?	Discover what data we have using the Data Asset Framework Methodology²
Qualitative space assessment	Explore impact of services across gender, race, ethnicity, major, grade level, etc.	Statistical training Move beyond counting
	Impact of library on retention	Qualitative research training Make the big data relevant to our institution Context
	Impact of library on GPA	Work across the institution using data to inform policies and practices
	Compare to peer and aspirational institutions

The Tools

Measurement Information Services Outcomes (MISO)
- National Survey of libraries used to compare across institutions as well as inform internal practices
Integrated Library System
- Main library system that stores usage data
Association of Research Libraries data
- National library data
UNC Charlotte Institutional Research
- Data analysis of all institutional research
Google Analytics
Learning Management System
- Data on student usage
Library Database statistics
- How are scholarly articles/books being used
Altmetrics
- Social and collaborative nature of institutional research
Integrated Postsecondary Education System (IPEDS)

Qualitative studies
- Space use
- Classroom use
- Student Learning Outcomes analysis for library instruction

The project is in the first stage of the Data Asset Foundation methodology, which is scheduled to finish this December. Once we have a clear picture of the available data we will look at our initial research questions to determine what we can explore with the available data and what data we may need in the future.

Contact Information

Beth Martin, Head of Access Services and Assessment

Atkins Library, UNC Charlotte

sarmarti@uncc.edu

Heather McCullough, Associate Director

Center for Teaching and Learning, UNC Charlotte

hamccull@uncc.edu

Citations

Penetrating the Fog: Analytics in Learning and Education. (n.d.). Retrieved September 29, 2014, from http://www.educause.edu/ero/article/penetrating-fog-analytics-learning-and-education
Data Asset Framework | Digital Curation Centre. (n.d.). Retrieved September 29, 2014, from http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/repository-audit-and-assessment/data-asset-framework

Guest Blog: What the Hell is A Johari Window, and other Questions. featuring Lawrie Phipps and a little bit of Dave White.

Lawrie was on holiday when I posted this. He got
up to donut-eating and other mischief.

This post began with Lawrie Phipps’ curiosity about an instrument called the Johari window. It’s still mostly Lawrie’s words, with some of my (Donna’s) thoughts, and a bit here and there that is either an argument with or an agreement to something that Dave White said.

Fundamentally, we are wondering about the utility of the Johari window, and about how it might be used to reflect and elicit feedback for individuals who see their practice as being more ‘resident’ as originally defined in the First Monday paper by Dave White and Alison Le Cornu, and more recently in the Visitors and Residents Info Kit at Jisc InfoNet.

Readers may recall that I do go on a bit about the Visitors and Residents project. I agree with Lawrie that the V&R model is increasingly considered a useful way of thinking about how we behave online. Recall that in its simplest form it posits that there is a continuum of users online exhibiting behaviours ranging from ‘visitor’ to ‘resident’.

I quote below from our InfoKit:

Visitors: “When in Visitor mode, individuals decide on the task they wish to undertake. For example, discovering a particular piece of information online, completing the task and then going offline or moving on to another task…In Visitor mode individuals do not leave any social trace online.”

Residents: “When in Resident mode the individual is going online to connect to, or to be with, other people. This mode is about social presence…Resident behaviour has a certain degree of social visibility: for example, posting to the wall in Facebook, tweeting, blogging, or posting comments on blogs. This type of online behaviour leaves a persistent social trace which could be within a closed group such as a cohort of students in a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE)/Learning Management System (LMS) or on the open web.”

In Academia there are various forms of currency and value associated with practice, including publishing in peer reviewed journals, being invited to give keynotes, and a variety of metrics including those of research assessment frameworks and public engagement. These more traditional practices are now accompanied by less well-established modes of scholarly communication and networking, via digital tools, practices, and places such as blogging and Twitter. There is manifest tension between the struggle to establish one’s scholarly bona-fides in traditional ways, and taking advantages of the benefits of new modes of credibility, many of which are expressed via the web, and are not universally recognized as either scholarly or valuable. (Dave talks about shifting notions of credibility and academic currencies in the short film here.)

An emerging theme around discussions of value is the role of “presence,” especially in an academy which is being played out increasingly on a digital backdrop. Many individuals in education have changed the nature of their relationship with their host institutions or departments through stronger (and sometimes aggressive) online presences, and many others are seeking to develop in this area (Phipps, 2013). As an individual’s online catalogue of artefacts grows, such as blog posts, images and tweets, so does their network of readers, followers and where appropriate collaborators. As a direct result of their online presence the nature of building and maintaining relationships changes. In a post-digital academy, where presence may be seen as having value, understanding how an online persona is perceived is important, especially if one considers that opinions and judgments will be formed often with no direct interaction with the owner of the presence.

One method for exploring and mapping forms of presence is the Johari window. This technique was developed by Luft and Ingham (1955) and is used to help individuals understand their relationship with self and others.

The window use four sections, shown below and in the original model it also used 57 adjectives that were used by an individual to describe themselves and by others to describe the individual.

	Known to self	Not known to self	Adjectives used in the original model
Known to others	Open	Blind Spot	able ambivert accepting adaptable bold calm caring cheerful clever congenial complex confident dependable dignified energetic Extrovert friendly	giving happy helpful idealistic independent ingenious intelligent introvert kind knowledgeable logical loving mature modest nervous observant	optimistic organized patient powerful proud aggressive reflective relaxed religious responsive searching self-assertive self-conscious sensible sentimental shy	silly smart spontaneous sympathetic tense trustworthy warm wise
Not known to Others	Hidden	Unknown

Users of the window choose 7 or 8 of the adjectives to describe themselves. Colleagues or friends then also choose 7 or 8 to describe the user. The mapping and duplication will dictate the open, hidden and blind spot window size. Therefore, terms that individuals come up with for themselves that are also chosen by colleagues would go in the “Open” section, which is for that area that is known to yourself and is known others. This includes behaviours, knowledge, skills, public history etc. Terms selected by colleagues or friends but not by one’s self would go into the ‘Blind Spot’ section is that area that is known to others but not oneself. This might include very simple things, but may often bring deeper issues to the surface. Terms picked only by the individual, but not by colleagues/friends go into the ‘Hidden’ section is that area which is known only to you.

The unknown area is that area that is neither know to yourself, or others. It may also be thought of as the area with potential. It is left blank, to inspire discussion, encourage reflection.

The Johari window has uses in both individual development and team development. In these contexts, many see the objective as being to enlarge the Open area. The assumption here is that having a larger Open area means that people know more about you, and you are self-aware, and that openness should make collaborating and effective team work easier. This valorization of Openness asserts that teamwork requires self-disclosure, and personal give-and-take. The more one shares about one’s self, the more the Hidden area shrinks. In theory, more feedback can also decrease the Blind Spots. The Johari window model posits that people with many characteristics listed in the Open area are easy to talk to, communicate effectively and may be good in group dynamics. The opposite would therefore be true of those with smaller windows.

So perhaps individuals who consider themselves at the residency end of the continuum may wish to use a process based on the Johari window as a reflective tool to understand how they are perceived by peers, how they are situated within the communities they value and areas they may wish to exploit. In a workshop context, they might also come up with additional adjectives relevant to online interactions, if they find the original list doesn’t capture what they need to communicate.

I would additionally note, this model assumes benefits of openness which might bear some disentangling. Anyone who is familiar with my Twitter presence and the content of my blog here knows that I agree with the positives around open practice on the web, but not everyone does, and there are disciplinary and individual difference of opinion about the utility and risks involved in resident-style online communication. I have blogged before about the utility of mapping as a way of reflecting on practice. In a workshop context, people mapping their online practices with the help of a Johari window exercise could generate a potentially useful conversation about how people perceive the pros and cons of open practice on the web. Examining their personal practices via Johari mapping (and also via V&R mapping) can begin to reveal fears and ambitions individuals might have around non-traditional, web-based, resident modes of scholarly production.

References that are not online resources:

Luft, J.; Ingham, H. (1955). “The Johari window, a graphic model of interpersonal awareness”. Proceedings of the western training laboratory in group development

Phipps, L,. (2013) Individual as Institution. Educational Developments 14:2

Webinars, Graduate Students, Visitors and Residents

So the Visitors and Residents research team (myself, Dave White, and Lynn S. Connaway) conducted a Jisc/OCLC webinar (with the generous and effective chairing of Lorcan Dempsey) yesterday. The purpose was to introduce people to our InfoKit, and also to have a chance to talk a bit more about research results and practical implications for transforming HE (and other) approaches to digital tools and places.

In my part of the webinar I focused on graduate students, and the story that I think is emerging from our data about the potential impact that digital places and communities can have on the relative isolation of graduate students from their peers. I’m reproducing part of what I said here, and a link to the webinar and full powerpoint are available here. (scroll to the bottom, thanks to the capable skills of our colleagues at Netskills for making this available). I Storified the session here. The GoogleDoc with links to project outputs, etc. is here.

I started off talking about sources and authority, actually, going over some of the findings that we cover in the People Trust People , Convenient Doesn’t Always Mean Simple, and Assessing Non-Traditional Sources part of the InfoKit. These pieces are important background to thinking about the experience of graduate students, because they are at a moment of transition, from being those who are expected to learn about authoritative sources and use them effectively, to those who are expected to become and produce authoritative sources of information themselves, as practitioners in their fields.

This transition used to take place almost entirely in physical places, in seminar rooms, laboratories, academic libraries, and at face-to-face conferences. But the Internet is a now a place where things happen, things that used to only happen face to face. A holistic picture of academic behavior, of information seeking behavior, therefore has to include these digital places, and should pay attention to resident practices as we define them in the Visitors and Residents project.

People use social media tools and spaces like Twitter and Facebook to connect. This is not a surprising or new thing, but needs to be kept in mind, as it’s a phenomenon that is certainly not going away. We also need to collectively keep in mind that just because these digital places exist, not everyone is excited by Twitter or Facebook or Instagram. Awareness of these social media environments and the communities within them is not dependent on a generational identity, but is about personal preferences and individual motivations to engage. We cannot, should not assume monolithic attitudes towards these places and tools. Digital places like YouTube and Facebook and Twitter are not easily classed as only “entertainment” or “academic” in character or purpose, because of the wide range of activities that now occur in those spaces. Knowing that someone goes to YouTube doesn’t tell you why they are there, or what they might do, or who they might seek out there.

So these graphs are interesting to me, because they seem to point to an opportunity to help graduate students.

I’ve put a red oval around the post-graduate/ grad student category, that we call Embedding.

Notice here the purple line for face to face contact, and notice in particular how low (comparatively) the mentions of face to face contact are for grad students. They are texting with people, making phone calls, and in particular emailing far more than engaging face to face.

Notice here who graduate students are in most contact with-professors,then peers. For Professors, it’s the reverse order—they are in touch with peers and then with experts, mentors, and librarians at similarly low rates. Think about future of graduate students, of them as future (and current) practitioners in their fields. Contact with professors makes sense, of course, but contact with peers seems crucial. How else are they going to build their community, find their voice, engage in the back and forth of scholarly communication with their fellow practitioners?

The Blue line is FB, red is Twitter, purple line is Academic Libraries (physical spaces). Graduate students narrow contact that they have with people, and are also physically isolated, working in the library, offices or labs. I see this in the other ethnographic work that I do as well, the maps that graduate students, particularly in the sciences, produce of their learning landscapes are restricted to one or two places, in sharp contrast to the wide-ranging maps of undergraduates and professors.

But when we look at the places they do go, in addition to being present in academic libraries’ physical spaces (we see a radical difference in the role of academic library spaces in our interviews with graduate students, compared to other educational stages), graduate students are present in significant rates on Facebook, and Twitter.

We need to think about implications of online resident practices for grad students. Their social media presence might be an opportunity for them to facilitate contact in the isolating environment of graduate school . This is something we need to look at further—what is happening as they transition from student to practitioner in their field? How are their experiences in physical spaces like libraries related to the academic work they do in digital places like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, etc.? Where are they resident, where are they visitors? If resident practices are those that facilitate the finding of voice, and the production of scholarship (in a variety of modes), what can it look like in grad school?

Watch the whole webinar:

The Mixed-Method, Interdisciplinary Library

Huddersfield Train Station, with Taxman Mister Wilson in the foreground

So at this point I’ve given 2 different versions of this talk, once at UNC Greensboro, in the library, and just recently at the University of Huddersfield, also in the library. I talk from a combination of notes, script, and the Prezi, so this is an approximation, but I’d like to share it because it’s a relatively coherent statement of what I think is possible via qualitative work like mine, and where I think academic libraries can create opportunities for their voice to be heard within higher education generally. Special thanks to Erin Lawrimore for inviting me to UNCG, and to Bryony Ramsden and Kathrine Jensen for getting me to Huds.

In-depth qualitative data collection for policy decisions

I don’t get much chance to speak about the nature of my work in a systematic way, and this is giving me a chance to put together thoughts that I’ve been accumulating over the past year or so about the nature of the information that informs library policy. It has been changing over time, and the attention paid to things like qualitative research marks a real shift in administrative focus, and has implications for assessment, as well.

I’m speaking to you today (as I speak every day) as an anthropologist, and so an outsider to library science (but not to higher education, as I am an academic through and through). But I am also someone employed by an academic library. I was hired as library ethnographer in 2009, with arrival of a university librarian who had been at Rochester, where Nancy Fried Foster was at the time. Her hire inspired by the participatory design policy of places like Xerox, who hire social scientists, including anthropologists, to do research into user behavior, to inform their products.

Nancy’s work has certainly made participatory design a highly visible part of what qualitative research agendas can do in higher education, but I’ve been asked to take on an ethnography of academic work generally, to find projects (small and large) that illuminate the behavior of students and faculty on our campus, not just within the library.

The use of words like “disruptive” and “provocative” within library policy discussions (and higher ed generally) has become cliche, but I find them useful in trying to frame the role for anthropologists (and even other social scientists) in academic libraries. Positions like mine are a provocation, not just to library-land, but to Higher Ed. generally.

So, why be provocative? The Anthropology meetings in November of last year included a panel on liminality (included Nancy Foster, as well as researchers from Intel and Xerox). The liminal state is one of “betwixt and between,” of being poised on the threshold. Again and again the panelists made the point that the presence of anthropologists in industry and institutional settings creates a liminal space, which in turn is an opportunity for change and innovation. Qualitative research provides opportunities for change, moments to disrupt current practices, to dwell with the possibility of something else.

The researcher from Intel pointed strongly to the potential for innovation that comes out of persistent and embedded anthropological attention to technology and the processes involved in producing that technology. She worked with engineers, who were so immersed in the production of technology that they lost sight of the people who would be using it.

Likewise, anthropological attention to uses of technology in information seeking can help us think more carefully about how we use technology to engage with people in academia, students and faculty alike.

I know there are people with anthropology and sociology training working as librarians now, but the qualitative work is seldom their full time job (so many people run up to me at library conferences and confess their undergraduate degrees in anthropology!). Myself and Andrew Asher (At Bloomington) are the only two I am aware of who are employed full time by universities in the US, and I know of one anthropologist who was just hired by the London School of Economics in the UK.

I’ve blogged before about the role that we play in libraries as anthropologists, especially regarding the discussion we hosted at the 2013 AAAs in Chicago.

The idea is not to thumb our noses at current practice, but to actually provide a place for the new to emerge. Margaret Mead talked about anthropology as making the “exotic familiar, and the familiar exotic.” She is talking about the power of cross-cultural insights allowing fresh eyes on our own society, the practices of others helping us think critically about our own practices.

We are fundamentally searching for insights into why. Anthropology assumes that there is a logic to people’s behavior. It’s not enough to describe or count the things people do or interact with or own or use. And furthermore, there are things that we can observe are important that we cannot count–or there are things we should be counting that we don’t know are important. We need multiple ways of talking about what is happening–a holistic approach can include counting, but needs to incorporate other ways of observing/describing. Ethnographic practices can provide such a thing. And I would argue that they are most effectively deployed as a part of a full-time qualitative agenda, not just carved out of already existing jobs, or brought in short-term.

Qualitative methods need explanations and defense in part because they are not the norm in library-land, and are still contested outside of qualitative-centric fields like anthropology and sociology. My experience working with LIS has reflected this–I have participated in longitudinal qualitative studies that my LIS colleagues are still still very very nervous about if it’s not embedded in a survey that we also conduct. I see this concern about generalizability, etc. reflecting a general unease with actionability of qualitative data.

BUT:

Higher Ed is quantitative in part because of a policy orientation where evaluation is the equivalent to counting and measuring (think: grades). Assessment, however, should be about information that can lead to changes, and ideally, improvements. A reasonable question to ask is to what extent the massive amounts of quantitative data libraries collect every year has led to improvements

For example, UNC Charlotte Atkins Library recently participated in the MISO survey; we now have all of these numbers, what do they mean? For example, these “satisfaction” graphs from various constituencies:

All the bars are basically the same length. What can this mean? What does it mean when we ask about “satisfaction with the library?” How can that be quantified? Why would we want to quantify that?

It’s just not enough.

Qualitative data can move library improvements in a way that traditional treatment of quantitative data has not. This is the power of insights, of epiphany, of something beyond just description. Evaluation and analytics are descriptive, and not necessarily with an eye to change. Assessment should be about that which can drive change.
We cannot get rid of quantitative data, nor should we want to, but I believe it needs to be embedded in the context provided by qualitative researchers. Approaches to our quantitative data can be transformed with considered uses of qualitative research in libraries, and higher education generally.

Think of individual projects that characterize themselves as “mixed-method.” Imagine a “mixed-method.” library, drawing on both sorts of information.

What does that look like?

It can look like me: the Anthropologist in the Stacks. The permanent staff presence of a qualitative researcher means non-LIS people working within the library. Disciplinary knowledge from outside of LIS can illuminate higher education policies, not just within library, but across the university. So, I am not just talking about a mixed-methods library, but an interdisciplinary one.

(I have blogged already about examples from the Atkins library –here is the point in the talk where I use Prezi to give visual examples of the kinds of data I’ve been collecting, including Photo Diaries, observations, and cognitive mapping. If you peruse the stuff tagged #anthrolib you can get a feel for it, if you haven’t already.)

We need to know what people are doing to effectively engage. Anthropology, ethnographic techniques, qualitative research can help us learn this. There are additional implications for the position of academic libraries within their institutions, once they commit to a qualitative research agenda.

For example, at UNC Charlotte, the library is represented on a campus-wide meeting about Student Success. We are positioned as colleagues within the university, rather than as “helpers”–we are part of a scholarly community, and we also provide, in the library, a neutral ground for the coming together of scholars (including ourselves).

There is tremendous potential for libraries in higher education to be sources of qualitative research about student and faculty work/behaviors. This research can give us a voice on campus around issues that people in Higher Education are interested in: what students do, where they go, what faculty do, why.

Anthropologists and other social scientists can produce data which may be brought to bear on policy decisions at the college and university, and which has the potential to positively impact student academic success. The fact that these studies come out of the Library has implications for the role academic libraries can play in higher education generally, potentially transforming the kind of voice libraries have in university policy, because we are producing information/data that no other sector of higher education is doing. This is powerful. We need to do it more.

********************

Both times I gave this talk, I just sort of stopped there, and asked for questions, and was really gratified by the engagement and thought that was put into the discussion. I wish I had transcripts to share of what we talked about at UNCG, and also at Huddersfield.
Dave Pattern and Bryony Ramsden were kind enough to tweet some of the content of my talk, I Storifyed it here:

View the story “#qualtreats Talk: Brief takes on What @DonnaLanclos said at Hud” on Storify

For the conclusion of this blogpost, I will simply share an image of part of my speaking fee at Huds, safely ensconced in my bag, on the train back to London.

Bacon Crisps!

Into the Field

So I have been noisy on Twitter lately, but relatively quiet on this blog, and that is in part because I have been gently (and not so gently) freaking out and getting prepared for going to do six weeks of fieldwork starting at the end of February.

The project will allow me to collaborate with the estimable Lesley Gourlay at the IOE, and Lesley Pitman at UCL, and extend and expand a project that I piloted in 2011 with the help of the UCL Institute of Archaeology. There’s a .pdf of the report here.

March is going to involve me collecting cognitive maps as well as conducting interviews among students and faculty at the Institute of Archaeology, the Bartlett school of Architecture, and the SSEES. I will also be spending time doing immersive observation in each of the 3 libraries, using the SUMA tool to facilitate head-counts and also an accounting of activities within each space. Lesley Gourlay will be doing the same among IOE students and faculty, and at the IOE library.

I have collected cognitive maps from undergraduate and graduate students at UNC Charlotte already, and my graduate assistant will be conducting interviews and observations in Atkins Library while I am in London.

By the end of March, we will have a lovely comparative collection of qualitative data to play with. Even a project as small as this will generate hours of interview data, and a rich body of field notes to mine for insights that such a comparative exploration of academic libraries can yield. I am so, so excited to get to do this.

And part of my excitement comes from my strong investment in “going into the field.” The anthropologists out there know how deeply felt that trope is in our field–yes, my work at Atkins library is my primary research location, but I have been “brought up” to think of field sites as Away (however problematic that may be). And academic libraries in London are distinct in many interesting ways from the large, generalized, suburban one in which I work in Charlotte. UCL/IOE libraries are specialized places, scattered across an urban landscape, and also contain materials on some of their shelves that would rightfully be in restricted-access special collections in the US. I will acquire a new “arrival scene,” coming into the site libraries for the first time, I will have a new set of “key informants,” participants in my research, to interview, who are willing to share what they know with me so that I can learn, so that I can approach my library “back home” with fresh eyes, the familiar made exotic through the field experience.

It won’t be a completely isolated field experience, I’ve never been able to achieve that, and I think it’s probably to my benefit. When I did my research in Belfast I was lucky to be embedded in a network of Queen’s U, Belfast graduate students, colleagues and eventually friends who helped keep me grounded when I was struggling with the usual alienating cliches of doing fieldwork.

In fact, I think that field experiences in applied anthropology in particular give the lie to the Anthropologist in Splendid Isolation cliche, not just because no anthropologist ever truly works in isolation (they are working with people!), but also because anthropology is always a team effort, even if it’s not immediately visible as such. I am collaborating with colleagues in UCL and IOE, and this project began as an effort initiated by Dr. Bill Sillar in the Institute of Archaeology. The work I have done and will do in London is a direct result of the work I’m doing here at UNC Charlotte, working with my colleagues in Atkins, and with my graduate assistants (the Atkins Ethnography project has benefited from the work so far of 4 different graduate assistants, and will continue to hire graduate students as a part of its research workforce), and undergraduate researchers. My work is informed not just by what I find interesting, but what my boss needs from me, what questions my colleagues bring to me. It’s a group effort. There are no lone wolves.

I will also in this trip, have opportunities to talk about my work with colleagues old and new. I’m participating in a workshop on Visitors and Residents, along with Dave White , Ben Showers, and Lawrie Phipps at the Jisc Digital Festival. I’m speaking about my work at UNC Charlotte with Bryony Ramsden and her colleagues at Huddersfield. There will be many chances in London to talk at length about my work, and especially to listen to people engaged with work that I need to pay attention to.

I can’t put into words just how delighted I am that I am finally getting to make my ambitions for a comparative, international ethnography of academic libraries begin to come to pass. This phase of my research is funded by a UNC Charlotte Faculty Research Grant, and I hope to be able to take this project and springboard to a larger, more comprehensive treatment of all of the UCL site libraries, with an eye to informing with qualitative research much larger discussions of the role of academic libraries in Higher Education in the UK and the US.

But in the meantime, I get six weeks. I’m going to make them count.

Entangled Technology and AAA2013, or, What I did on Friday

My AAA 2013 partners in crime this year were some people I have presented with before (and was delighted to have a chance to again: Andrew Asher, Maura Smale, Mariana Regalado), and some new-to-me colleagues I look forward to working with some more (Lori Jahnke and Lesley Gourlay).

Andrew brought the donuts. We managed to wait until after our session before eating them. That is some seriously professional self-control. Yes, that is bacon on four of the donuts, from Do-Rite Donuts. The other two were pistachio.

Never let it be said I don’t blog about important things like donuts.

Our session, Embedded and Engaged In Higher Education: Researching Student Entanglements with Technology, (here’s the link to the Prezi we used as a visual aid for the discussion) was a roundtable, where we presented and then connected the work we are engaged in, picking up on four main threads of discussion.

1) How institutional disconnect from student behavior and expectations affects access to education, to information, to what they need to engage with resources they need for their academic work, but also for the life they will build post-college.

Maura and Mariana’s work at CUNY spoke most powerfully to the everyday details of this, but I think Lori’s work text-mining IT and University strategic plans was equally important. The content of those strategic plans is just so strikingly distant from the priorities and realities of students and faculty members in higher education. We need to pay more attention to those sorts of documents, and in particular the urgency with which they need to be informed by social science research results.

2) How cultural, political, and social values are embedded not just in search, but in Higher Ed institutions generally. And again, the impact that has on #1

Andrew is doing such important work with this. Search is a cultural construction. Higher education is a cultural construction. Libraries are cultural constructions. They are not free from the values of wider society, and need to be observed critically if we are to truly concern ourselves with access to higher education, and the benefits, privileges, and problems inherent in the system.

3) The use of anthropological research to ground higher education policy (macro and micro) in the behavior of people, and the potential of the applied anthropological approach to improve outcomes of educational agendas broadly written, where ultimate goal of education is an engaged and informed citizenry.

I think this second theme is also linked to the underlying themes of the Liminality session that NAPA sponsored the previous day. My own work at UNC Charlotte is a nice example of what can happen when administrators are on board with a social science-informed policy perspective. Lesley is also trying through her work to effect change at the University of London. But not all administrators are sympathetic. It can be challenging to inform policy beyond quantitative metrics, if qualitative approaches are not valued. Our challenge as anthropologists is to insert ourselves into institutional conversations, to become part of organizations that need more qualitative approaches, to provide perspectives that are currently all-too-scarce.

4) Our positions as professional outsiders in higher education contexts, but also as sort of native ethnographers, as we are all products of and participants in the kinds of systems we are studying.

My boss told me today that he values me at least in part because I am an outsider to the library. On the panel, our positions as people both within our institutions and tasked with thinking critically about those institutions can be personally and professionally challenging. And also, terrifically worthwhile.

Andrew, Maura and I live-tweeted this session, and I Storified it rather than put it here, because it’s kind of long.

I also quite liked our session abstract, and since you can’t see it without being a registered AAA member, I am going to reproduce it here:

Abstract: Embedded and Engaged In Higher Education: Researching Student Entanglements with Technology

“In this roundtable we propose to explore our status, research, and findings as we work as interdisciplinary collaborators with non-anthropologists in academic settings. Our projects initiate and facilitate scholarly as well as policy discussions about the nature of information, the configuration of digital and physical spaces in academia, and the changing state of academic work and scholarly communication in the 21st century. Some of us, employed in academic libraries, are positioned as native ethnographers, as we are tasked with observing and analyzing the thoughts and behaviors of our own communities: the students, faculty, and staff in the practical, everyday spaces of academia. Our outside eye is valuable in pinpointing not just ways that academic institutions and libraries can reshape themselves for the 21st century, but also in illuminating the nature of scholarly work among our peers and the relationship of that work to the world outside of academia. This roundtable provides a forum for sharing our work and our perspectives on anthropology in higher education settings.

The panelists represent a variety of ways that anthropological knowledge and research are presented and conducted. Through a range of methods, including mapping, time logs, drawings, photo diaries, and research process interviews, we have examined how students and faculty engage with and are constrained by technology as they navigate the spaces and systems of academe. As researchers we are diversely engaged, bringing not only anthropological methods and theories to our projects but also the methods and theories of library and information science, science and technology studies, education, sociology, and user experience research.

Our research actively explores the role of technology for students in their academic work at colleges and universities. At this moment when educational technologies are very much a part of the broader, global conversation about the cost and value of higher education, we examine how these technologies constrain and enable students, and how they fit with the essential learning mission of college, especially in the academic library, a traditional locus of student use of information technology. As social scientists embedded in academia, we leverage our research to bring student voices to these discussions. Our studies produce data which may be brought to bear on policy decisions at the college and university, and which has the potential to positively impact student academic success.

As researchers who are well positioned to observe the complex interactions between digital technologies and the social organization and practices of students and faculty member, this roundtable will speak not only to how technologies are used within higher education, but also to broader cultural transformations within and outside the academy. For example, how do political and cultural values embodied in digital tools and technologies constrain or empower students? How do the social contexts of students’ communities and universities affect their technology use? By examining these questions, anthropologists working in higher education can contribute both to improving the learning environments of our universities, but also to better understandings of the meanings, effects, and lived experience of technologies and technological change. “

Playing with Cognitive Mapping

I am messing around with cognitive mapping instruments, stolen with Andrew Asher’s blessing from the ERIAL toolkit (I know, I know, I don’t need anyone’s blessing because hey, that’s what toolkits are for! Especially those posted on the web). I am doing this in part because photo diaries, while useful and capable of yielding rich information, are really really time consuming and difficult to get students to do. I am still very much hoping to get back to University College, London, to continue the work I started there in 2011, and when I am there I’d like to use cognitive maps as well as structured interviews and immersive observations to get a sense of how and why various learning spaces are being used by UCL students and faculty.

So, I’m doing some here at UNC Charlotte. At the very least, such an exploratory exercise can give us a sense of what our undergraduate and graduate students’ spatial networks look like when they are written down. The data I’m collecting can also begin to serve as a comparative set for the data that I hope to be able to collect in the UK.

I just want to put some of the maps here because I think they are really interesting. I am of course far from the only one doing this–Lesley Gourlay at the IOE and her colleagues have done some mapping exercises, and of course there is the aformentioned ERIAL work, among other ethnographic projects in the US. The students were given 6 minutes to complete each map, and were asked to map all of the places that they go to/inhabit in some way for their academic work. I was specific in saying that the spaces could be on- or off-campus. The maps posted here are undergraduate maps–I have maps from graduate students that we are still processing. In general, undergraduate space maps indicate the need for them to be in places that make it easy for them to get to the other places they need to go to. If they have class in a particular building, they are more likely to study in the Student Union than the library, because the former is closer. If they live away from campus, they might be likely to have off-campus cafes, etc. on their maps as work spaces. The choices they make about where to settle in to study are not made in a vacuum. There is a similar diversity to the spaces they find themselves in, however, in part because undergraduate classes occur in a variety of buildings in different parts of campus, and are not necessarily taught in the building that house their major programs. Graduate student maps (in process) have less diversity of spaces, because they are much more tied to the departmental labs and spaces of their degree programs.

The students worked for 2 minutes in each pen color, beginning with blue, moving to red, and then ending with black. Some students finished before the 6 minute mark, resulting in some maps in just 2 colors (such as #7 shown here).

This undergraduate lives on campus, and has drawn straight lines connecting all of the places he needs to go. The library is one place in a larger network, of course. Several of these building are classroom spaces. This senior lives in an on-campus dorm. There are no off-campus spaces shown here.

This sophomore lives in an off-campus apartment relatively far from campus, but her boyfriend’s apartment (the building in the upper left corner) is closer in. She has mapped campus buildings such as the Student Union and various classroom buildings, but also included important spaces such as where her youth group meets, and the 24-hour cafe Amelie’s. The library does not figure in her mental map of learning spaces.

This student lives close to the South Carolina border, nearly a half an hour from campus. She has included several cafe or bookstore spaces, all of which have free wi-fi, but not all of which are open 24 hours. “School” is the university campus, and she has not differentiated places within the campus, because she has so many other places she inhabits. The library on this map is the public library closest to the university.

This junior has sketched only the places within the library he inhabits on the left hand side of the drawing. He has put in study rooms, and indicated where the study rooms are in the building by their proximity to round tables with computers on them (these are on the 1st floor). His other learning spaces are in his close-to-campus apartment, on the right hand side. He has sketched his living room furniture (comfortable chairs as well as desks), and his bedroom.

EDUCAUSE 2013: Finding our Way in Anaheim

My second attendance at Educause, and this one was in Anaheim.

I had a full Wednesday of presentations. One presentation was with my Visitors and Residents collaborators, Lynn Connaway and Erin Hood from OCLC (but sans David White, who was with us in spirit even as he stayed in Oxford). We talked about our analysis of the data we’ve been collecting since 2010 on modes of engagement with digital places, people, technology, and information. I was gratified that the themes revealed in our work, and in particular our conclusions about how important people and relationships are to the choices people make when engaging with technology and the web, were so well represented in other presentations at Educause, including Sir Ken Robinson’s keynote, and Mimi Ito’s presentation on her work regarding Connected Learning. As an anthropologist, I am of course a big fan of researchers (like fellow anthropologist Mimi Ito!) pointing out to Education Technology specialists like the ones who attend Educause that that they need to pay attention to people, their behavior, and their motivations, and not get distracted by the specifics of the shiny tools that people are using at any given moment.

I also presented a poster session with my colleague Bob Price, Director of Digital Initiatives at UNC Charlotte. We were focusing on two primary things: the wayfinding tool that our Digital Initiatives department built, and the research processes that helped inform why we wanted to build the tool (not just because it would be shiny!), and the plans we have for it going forward.

Our poster was in two parts, designed by our fantastic colleague and web graphic designer Maggie Ngo)

Click to see larger version of Posters 1 and 2

Thanks to all who stopped by, the conversations were wonderful, and the interest in our work truly gratifying) was that this sort of project was inspired in part by the open-ended exploratory research I’ve been doing among our students. The photo diaries I have been having undergraduates do for the last 3 or 4 semesters have been a way to evaluate and observe the habits of our students in terms of where and how they do their academic work, regardless of whether they are in the library or not. Some of the prompts ask library-specific questions, and some ask much broader questions about their practices, without cues to talk about the library (I adapted the photo diary instrument from a similar one used by Nancy Fried Foster and her team, in her research at Rochester). The photo diaries from our UNC Charlotte students revealed a deep level of ambivalence about some library spaces, in particular the stacks, and the corridors. Valuable resources are in the stacks, and along the corridors–the latter is how you find study rooms, classrooms, and our reference librarians, in our physical building.

We saw leveraging digital tools to give students a way to become more familiar with our building as a way of encouraging them to become comfortable with the building before they even walk into it. In the same way that people use Google Maps to figure out where they are going in an unfamiliar place, our students can use our digital wayfinder to plan their route, to see what lies where, and to generally get a feel for the physical spaces, before they are even there.

The campus population at UNC Charlotte has many first-generation college students, as well as transfer students who were accustomed to buildings and resources at their previous institution. Even traditional first year full time freshmen might have mental barriers to entering a university library building, which can seem large and intimidating to someone not used to these sort of institutional spaces. It is our responsibility to try to respond to the need for students to access our useful spaces (like libraries), by making them navigable, familiar, friendly.

In future iterations of our wayfinding tool, we hope to go beyond the physical building, which is just a part of what our library has to offer. Linking our digital resources and spaces in with the wayfinder will give our patrons a more holistic vision of what we contain: electronic resources, booking software that allows students to connect with each other in study groups, connections with liaisons via chat, text, and email, and other tools we haven’t built yet.

We welcome comments, and those interested in collaborating with us on future versions of the Wayfinder.

Sleeping and Successful Library Spaces

.@DonnaLanclos have you read the ‘learning aviary’ paper yet? Fave quote so far is if students fall asleep in 1 area then design success 🙂
— Bryony Ramsden (@librarygirlknit) August 27, 2013

So the article my colleague Bryony is referring to is this one :

Legerton, G. (January 01, 2013). Encouraging choice, serendipity and experimentation: experiences from Griffith University library (G11) extension and Gumurrii Centre. Journal of Interprofessional Care, 27, 51-62.

I am interested to read it further, but her tweet reminded me that I had never pointed out one of the fun facts uncovered by the behavior mapping that myarchitecture grad student, Alison Schaefer, carried out last semester. First, I want to show you a typical circulation pattern through our ground floor collaborative space. This map was generated not long after the space opened, but this primary pattern has yet to deviate substantially. Then look at the next two maps, in black with beige highlights.

The dotted lines show the circulation paths. This map was made on Jan 24th, representing the pattern at 12.40PM.


Sleeping map, January 2013

Sleeping Map, April 2013

Notice, in the two maps above, where people were sleeping

While some of the sleeping is indeed happening away from the high traffic areas, some of it is certainly happening right in the middle of relatively noisy and active parts of the ground floor.

Another thing to note is that these maps were not created during finals week, a time when it is assumed there will be lots of sleeping in the library, along with studying (and, avoiding studying).

In short, making assumptions about where students will sleep in the library based on a) where we think they should be sleeping, or b) where we would prefer to sleep, or even c) conventional wisdom about where students sleep, will not get you very far.

Our students sleep anywhere, as they need to. They are working hard, and sometimes need to recharge. If sleeping students are symptoms of successful spaces, then Atkins Library is doing very well indeed.

Donna Lanclos

Researcher, Speaker, and Writer: Once an Anthropologist Always an Anthropologist