The Mixed-Method Library: Qualitative Research and the Future of Assessment in Higher Education

This presentation was offered as part of the CUNY Library Assessment Conference, Reinventing Libraries: Reinventing Assessment, held at the City University of New York in June 2014

Visitors and Residents mapping workshop

A detailed guide to running a Visitors and Residents mapping workshop. The workshop is designed to make visible individuals' online practice and approaches. It uses a mapping process which acts as the basis for discussion

Precarious Voices: The Shared Hopes and Dreams of those Teaching and Supporting Learning in Digital Contexts

University staff in learning technology related roles are critical to the capability of the institution to effectively enhance the student experience, deliver an engaged curriculum and achieve significant pedagogical change. However, their perceptions of identity, precarity, status and capability and the locations and roles they are located in within many institutions can challenge that capability. Drawing on data gathered about the hopes and dreams of over two hundred learning technology related staff at three workshops held in the United Kingdom, Australia and Germany, this paper will explore the contradictions and paradoxes that impact on the capability of staff in learning technology related roles to influence and shape pedagogical and technological change

Sociomaterial texts, spaces, and devices

Work on students' study practices posits the digital and material as separate domains, with the ‘digital’ assumed to be disembodied, decontextualised and free-floating, and spaces in the material campus positioned as prototypically ‘traditional’ and analogue. Libraries in particular are often characterised as symbolic of predigital literacy practices and forms of meaning making. This binary oversimplifies student engagement, particularly in relation to their creation of and interactions with texts. Two studies illustrate this: an investigation of student and staff textual practices that explored the complex and emergent networks they created, adapted and maintained; and one that explored perceptions and use of library spaces (digital and physical). A sociomaterial analysis shows the ongoing importance of institutional, personal and public spaces. This demonstrates that in order to enhance the student experience, a more nuanced understanding of the complex, emergent relationships between digital and print, device and user, and author and text is required

Mapping Student Days: Collaborative Ethnography and the Student Experience

Research on students’ educational experiences demonstrates the importance of a holistic understanding of the complexity of students’ lives in developing library programs, services, and resources that effectively address undergraduate needs. The “A Day in the Life” (ADITL) Project investigated a typical day for over 200 students at eight diverse higher education institutions in the US. Examining the local and individual expressions of student taskscapes – the ensemble of interrelated social activities across time and space – placed each student’s relationship to their library in a larger description of their academic and personal lives. By exploring the whole student experience, this multi-site ethnographic study mapped out a more complete, complex, and diverse cartography of college students’ lives and the library’s place in it

Listening to teachers: a qualitative exploration of teaching practices in higher and further education, and the implications for digital

To bring about lasting changes around the use of technology to support teaching and learning in colleges and universities, we need to understand the practices that teaching staff undertake and the challenges they face. Effective, sustained change comes from a place of working in service to pedagogies. This report captures the findings of our recent work to develop a thorough understanding of the practices of teaching in colleges and universities. Our starting point A Jisc co-design project in 2016 was the starting point for a consultation to gain a richer understanding of what next generation digital learning environments might look like. In a wide-ranging and in-depth consultation we asked questions that focused on the potential of technology, the range of activities that staff currently undertake and what activities they would like in the future. The resulting report, next generation [digital] learning environments: present and future focused on many of these areas, providing a baseline of current and emerging technology-based practices. During that consultation many contributors raised questions about how behaviours of staff working in learning and teaching have changed since the first widespread deployment of virtual learning environments (VLEs) and other educational technologies in the 1990s. As it’s our mission to continue to provide solutions, advice and guidance on the use of technology to support learning and teaching we must remain focused on what the sector needs and wants from digital learning environments. This imperative is the driver for the current report. We wanted to develop deeper understanding about practice around learning and teaching with the aim of gaining insights beyond the technology-led. We’ve captured the voices and experiences of teachers in higher and further education, drawing on senior and junior teaching scholars across a broad range of academic disciplines. From more than 22 hours of interviews and several workshops we’ve distilled a series of themes and ideas for future development. The authors have provided indicative quotes from interviewees in the text rather than a comprehensive catalogue. We used a contextual inquiry approach. This is a process whereby individuals are interviewed about their practices in an open-ended format and within a particular frame designed to find out what they do, what their motivations are, what personal history contributes to these practices and how they are impacted by current macro- and micro-contexts. This is standard practice in user experience research, especially at the beginning of design processes, and it is valued in particular for being distinct from ‘lab’ investigations of behaviour that are distanced from the context in which people habitually do their work. In what follows, we describe the motivations for the contextual inquiry project and the themes that have emerged, and then explore the implications of some of those themes for Jisc’s next generation digital

Mapping Student Days: Collaborative Ethnography and the Student Experience

Research on students’ educational experiences demonstrates the importance of a holistic understanding of the complexity of students’ lives to developing library programs, services, and resources that effectively address undergraduate needs. The “A Day in the Life” (ADITL) project investigated a typical day for over 200 students at eight diverse institutions in the US. Examining the local and individual expressions of student taskscapes – the ensemble of interrelated social activities across time and space – placed each student’s relationship to their library in a larger description of their academic and personal lives. By exploring the whole student experience, this multi-site ethnographic study mapped out a more complete, complex, and diverse cartography of college students’ lives and the library’s place in it

Making Space for the ‘Irrational’ Practice of Anthropology in Libraries

In this article, I extend the argument for open-ended exploratory, anthropologically informed, qualitative work in libraries that Andrew Asher and I began with “Ethnographish” (2016) and further explore and explain the paucity of open-ended exploration in library assessment and engagement work with the frame of rationality. I argue here that open-ended, exploratory anthropological work could be the kind of irrational work that can help library workers escape the neoliberal cage of rationality. If libraries are to be institutions that do not just mitigate but actively fight marginalization and inequality, we need to deeply interrogate the structures that insist on rational approaches to libraries and library work.Dans cet article, j’argumente en faveur d’un travail qualitatif ouvert, exploratoire et anthropologique dans les bibliothèques qu’Andrew Asher et moi-même avons commencé avec « Ethnographish » (2016). J’utilise le cadre de la rationalité pour approfondir et expliquer la rareté de l’exploration ouverte dans le travail d’évaluation et d’engagement des bibliothèques. Je soutiens ici que le travail anthropologique exploratoire et ouvert pourrait être le genre de travail irrationnel qui peut aider les bibliothécaires à échapper à la cage néolibérale de la rationalité. Pour que les bibliothèques soient des établissements qui ne se contentent pas d’atténuer la marginalisation et l’inégalité, mais qui visent plutôt à les combattre activement, nous devons interroger en profondeur les structures qui insistent sur des approches rationnelles vis-à-vis des bibliothèques et de leur travail

Mindfulness and Mapping of Digital Practice: The Visitors and Residents Workshop

Visitors & Residents – the concept Visitors and Residents is a way of describing the range of ways we engage with the Web. In particular, V+R encourages us to think about the social traces (rather than data traces) that we leave online. In Visitor mode, you might access an online resource in a purely instrumental way, i.e. simply to get some information. In Resident mode, you view the web as a series of spaces or places; you engage with people – not just with information. As a Resident you typically have a profile, and at the extreme end of residency you are visible to others on the open web, i.e. you will show up in search results (e.g. your Twitter profile, your blog, etc.). We are never wholly Visitors or Residents, however. Our behaviour depends on our choices and our context, i.e. what we are doing and with whom. V+R is a continuum. Somewhere in the middle of these two poles, Visitor and Resident, is where a lot of online activity happens – behavior which is “resident in character but within bounded communities”, i.e. resident behaviour which is not visible on the open web. This would include interactions within Facebook groups, within members-only wikis or discussion forums, or in module discussion boards within VLEs, for example. V+R mapping Visitors & Residents mapping is a useful exercise for “making the virtual visible”, and thus for reflection. The metaphor helps us to talk about the digital as a space or a place: “the web is a place where we do stuff… mapping helps make it more visible.” In this workshop we will map our practices to spark discussion around the implications of the digital, not just as a set of tools, but a series of spaces in which teaching, learning, and other social interactions can and do take place. Outcomes: Participants see their peers’ online engagement and reflect on their practice. Starting point for thinking about future activities around engaging students/staff online, open practice, digital capability, credibility of online sources etc. Participants leave with a clear idea of the areas of their own online practice they intend to develop further, and why. The workshop can be used as a starting point to explore areas such as Digital Literacy and Digital Leadership at an institutional level, going on to inform policy/strategy. Links from Pre-conference: https://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/evaluating-digital-serviceshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Visitor_and_Resident http://daveowhite.com/vandr/ http://www.donnalanclos.com/ http://www.oclc.org/research/themes/user-studies/vandr.htm

Re-imagining the users' experience: An ethnographic approach to web usability and space design

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to describe the process and work undertaken by the library anthropologist and the Usability Task Force (UTF) for reconfiguring the library's physical and virtual spaces to meet the educational needs and expectations of users, including students, faculty, and community patrons. Through formal usability studies and ethnographic research, the paper describes the process and work undertaken by the library anthropologist and the UTF. Through surveys, focus groups observation data were obtained about the current study and web habits of undergraduates and faculty. This paper presents an ethnographic approach to policy development and implementation to re-orient the physical and virtual library environments at a large research library. Libraries and library administrators will find value in the policies established and processes outlined for the development of user-centered learning spaces. -- ______________________________________________________________ Donna M. Lanclos, Ph.D. | Associate Professor for Anthropological Research UNC Charlotte | J. Murrey Atkins Library 9201 University City Blvd. | Charlotte, NC 28223 [email protected] | @DonnaLanclos on twitter phone number: 704-687-0480 http://www.donnalanclos.com