Researching research

Photo Credit: futureatlas.com via Compfight cc

Although I was a research student many, many years ago (before online journals, that's how long...) I don't have much spare time for research at the moment. Part of my job is to support our researchers - how can I do that if I don't do any myself? It's not about subject knowledge, it's about understanding the process and using the systems and tools. So when little jobs come up that require a bit of digging around I'm always grateful for these.

So I have been looking at the literature on whether providing lecture notes in advance affects student attendance (short answer = it doesn't). This didn't need to be a full-on literature review but I wanted to round up the best that was out there. As it's an "Education" topic, I used ERIC plus our resource discovery system (iFind Research). I spent a little time on Scopus and Web of Knowledge. It was actually Google Scholar which really turned up the goods with least amount of effort and maximum amount of results.

1. Access to Full Text
I ended up with 12 good papers that were most relevant. Of these 12....
3 = no full text available to me
3 = full text only via our university subscriptions
4 = full text freely available on the web via Google Scholar but not via iFind Research
2 = full text freely available AND we have access via our university subscriptions
The Google Scholar PDFs seemed to come from reputable sources (institutional repositories, the HEA) yet I would not have found them if I had stuck to our official university systems. They also required me to click a link - no login hurdles. This ratio of availability may vary per subject perhaps but, for me, a combination of iFind Research and Google Scholar worked best.

2. Working with my results
I have been using Mendeley to collect my results. This works well for me because it is accessible over the web, plus has a full desktop program and a good iPad app. I can store my PDFs in Mendeley and in the full desktop version I can work really well with them - highlight text, cut and paste quotes, make notes both alongside the PDF and also general notes about each one. I found it a really effective way of reading without having to print out everything. I'm generally not one for reading things on a screen but this worked for me.

I didn't find it the easiest thing to get my references into Mendeley without a fair bit of tweaking. I used the web importer button but this was patchy. I also didn't make a note of the full text URL so had to go back and do that. You can import PDFs and it will try to work out the details but, again, I found this patchy. Google Scholar results can only be imported one-by-one (download file, upload file) so that didn't work so well for me either. I suspect our institutional tool, EndNote, may work better for this.

3. Sharing my results
I can make a set of results public on Mendeley but it's a bit more fiddly than I would like as you have a create a Group. It's also a fairly easy business to cut and paste my set of references and I can choose the style (APA 6th) but it still needs a fair bit of tweaking to get it looking presentable. To share my references I therefore put them in a Word Document / PDF and shared it via our Blackboard Content Collection. Google Docs would have been the best option perhaps.

Trying all this out has raised more questions for me on methodology and tools for the job. I get the feeling there isn't one tool that will do all the things I want. At the moment, Mendeley wins out but I wish they'd develop better sharing functionality - I'd like to embed a list of references for example.

"Managing your online presence" 2013

Our library-led session for students on managing your online presence has been updated once more. It is never going to be a static topic! That's what makes it fun...but also keeps us on our toes as it needs a thorough check each time before running it. The benefit of this is it forces you to revisit the session and - hopefully! - make some improvements.

This time we were running the session as part of the University's Employability Week. It followed on nicely from a separate session on personal branding so I have a new branding slide where I discussed creating a consistent image and thinking about how you could bring out your personal brand online.

I have uploaded the latest version of the presentation onto Slideshare. Contact me if you'd like more info on what was being said but you'll get the gist.

Managing your online presence from Samantha Oakley

There is also a link to the worksheet (Word document) on the first slide which has links to additional resources. I did give out a paper version but the students worked off live links in the online version to save them typing in URLs too much. The original presentation used clicker questions but I had to omit those slides. Questions asked were dotted throughout:

1. Which social networks do you use? (FB / Twitter / LinkedIn / Other / None = multiple selections allowed)
2. What did you find [after checking FB & Google]? (Something worrying / Mostly harmless stuff / Nothing / Something you're proud of)
3. What sector are you currently aiming for? (Commercial/Business / Public sector (health, civil service, teaching etc.) / Academic / Arts/media )
4. Does an employer have the right to monitor what you do online? (Yes / No / Sometimes)

Let me know if you have suggestions or thoughts or comments!

Reading Lists: Challenge or Opportunity? London, 17th Jan 2013

Early daffodils in Russell Square

I'm hugely relieved I managed to get to London and back for the most excellent CPD25 event last Thursday (17th Jan), given all the snow that's fallen since. It was a long day from Swansea but well worth it for such a comprehensive programme of everything reading-list-system related. As we are in the middle of getting one, I was keen to glean as much as possible from the other presenters as well as having a chance to say where we are with our own pilot project with the very shiny new Rebus:list.

The event was a great chance to get a feel for the different systems that are out there. Sadly I missed the opening talk - Hannah Young's session on their Refworks and Moodle connection but my train just couldn't get me there on time. There were two speakers (Anselm Nye and Richard Cross) who have Talis Aspire - no surprise as it has dominated the marketplace for some time. Alison Sharman probably made of all of us feel jealous of Huddersfield's in-house "MyReading" system! I came on at the end to say where we've got to with our Rebus:list implementation - our shiny new Blackboard widget was ready just in time for me to snap a screenshot!

I also very much appreciated two sessions that looked at the issue of encouraging academic reading beyond just a system. Gary Brewerton showed the results of Loughborough's surveys into the use of reading lists. Funnily enough, I had been looking at their Academic Reading project report (PDF) on the train and wishing we could run a similar survey. The fact that they got such a high response rate suggests that the topic strikes a chord with students. Emma Delaney and Jacqueline Chenin from UWE then outlined their strategic approach to student reading. This highlighted ways of engaging with the academics to get them to consider their reading strategy: looking at how many books a student was expected to buy across a programme (not just one module), asking them to make an explicit statement about what reading they expect. They have been using their NSS comments very effectively as ammunition when engaging academics and as a rough check to see if they are improving satisfaction with access to books.

Certain topics and themes ran through all the sessions: strategy to back up any implementation, engaging academics, improving the student experience, purchasing decision calculations... I learnt much but these were some of the finer details that I'd like to follow up on:

• Any system or approach to reading lists must embrace the diversity of pedagogical approaches that the academic bring to list creation. There may be some weird and wonderful lists out there but we need to cope with all varieties. To this end, I really like Loughborough's suggestion to their academics that they include a statement of purpose with each list, to say how students are meant to use it. I'd like it if any reading list system made that easy to do - almost to enforce it. I also liked how Huddersfield had renamed their categories to make their meaning explicit e.g. "Essential" was "You must read this".
• Something we haven't decided to implement is allowing students to rate or comment on lists yet Loughborough and Huddersfield were very positive about this social aspect. The issue of inappropriate comments having to be policed is a little daunting but I liked the idea of allowing a thumbs up or down on a book or letting students tag them as they wish. However, we have had tags in our library catalogue and they don't seem to have been that widely used.
• Loughborough also had a feedback dashboard for academics where they could access stats on their lists and see how it related to borrowing activity. 
• Richard Cross described how their library made a clear statement to the academics when the system was launched about what support they would offer: "we will do this to help you". 
• Links to purchasing options? Amazon or a local bookshop?
• I liked Huddersfield's main project aim: that "the provision of reading lists is a positive, managed experience for students". Says it all really!

I'm glad to say I've managed to fulfil a pledge from Thing 15 from CPD23 to get more, even if I STILL haven't managed to master Prezi...

Improving reading lists

We are currently in the pilot year of a brand new reading list system. Not just new for us, new to the world - we were one of the first to sign up for PTFS' Rebus:list system. I'm going to be presenting on our experiences so far at the CPD25 Reading List event on 17th January - apart from worrying that I'm going to be the weakest link, I'm excited about this as the rest of the program looks very interesting and I hope to learn a lot.

Reading List systems are one thing - and they can be just that, a system - but the key aim for us is to improve the student experience and that means also keeping an eye on the wider picture: what sort of list is most helpful to the students? How do they use a reading list? What *is* a reading list? I have lists that vary from one book to 12 pages (reduced to 9pt font!) of references for one module. What's a student supposed to do with that? There's no clue on the list.

We have started a literature review to gather evidence for some of these questions but it became clear that this is also an issue being tackled at other universities. Here are some resources I found:

• A project report from Loughborough University (PDF) which looked at the reading habits of students. p26 onwards is particularly useful for reading lists, with the wish for more guidance and better organization emerging as a key issue.
• An excellent presentation from Northampton University (PDF) includes some great quotes from students. This one in particular is oh so very true! “It does make me chuckle when I get the odd reading list and I look and I think: typo, spelling mistake, error, and then we get penalised!” (Year 2 student)
• Trinity College Dublin have some good advice on reading lists on their website but their 2008-2009 audit results are also interesting, with comments again about prioritization and annotation. I liked their emphasis on accessibility/inclusion concerns too.
• It also sounds like there is a project going on at Edge Hill - look forward to hearing about that hopefully at some point!

Does anyone have any more examples or know of research been done at their institution?

The big question for me is how to widen this debate to academic staff and engage them in looking at how we can best help students to get hold of and read the right things. I think gathering evidence from the students could be a key persuader. I am hoping we can find a way to incorporate this into the launch of our new reading list system.

"Managing Your Online Presence" update

We ran this course again this term, this time with much more success (i.e. it ran!) and it was a fun class. As well as those who attended, I had a lot of email enquiries about future dates and we are running it next term as part of Employability Week.

Before the session ran, I checked the content and found that Facebook has altered its privacy tools, removing the extremely handy interactive tools that we used to recommend. The URL still works (annoyingly) but if you click on the link to "Preview your Profile" you now get a page not found error... The way to preview your profile is now done from your Timeline. There is a little settings icon which has a "View as" option.

You can choose the Public view or the view of a specific friend - you have lost the ability to view as "Friend of friend" which used to be handy. I can see that this must have become unwieldy as the greater levels of customization for items and lists but it's still a great shame to have lost this option.

"Preview your Public Search Profile" also takes you to a Help page with fresh instructions on the (much more complicated) way to do it. Having followed those instructions, the resulting page has a very plain URL:
https://www.facebook.com/samantha.oakley?p
Perhaps one can just use that URL as a short cut, replaced with your own username? Maybe someone can try it and let me know!

Anyway, all this meant re-vamping our teaching materials and I noticed today that another change to Facebook's privacy settings is being rolled out imminently so that will mean another update. The ever-changing Facebook privacy mess is a pain - it's tough to help our students monitor their online profile on a regular basis with inconsistent tools.

Thing 23: What next?

Wow I've made it! The final Thing! Enough of being giddy, I need to get on with it...

Gaps in my Skills:

• Management experience: see my Thing 21 about this. I have no real idea how to get any additional experience - I have done some managing staff but the bit I need is the real serious stuff: appraisals and the like - the sort of thing you can't get outside a real management role. Yet every manager must have started somewhere so I live in hope!
• Cataloguing skills: I'm working on this one! I'm doing cataloguing so technically I am getting experience but I definitely need to get some foundation of knowledge about what I'm doing!
• Welsh: always important for any job in Wales. I have just re-started learning Welsh, mostly motivated by my children going to a Welsh school, and this would also be useful at work. The uni is trying to strengthen its Welsh language provision so it is quite a hot topic right now.
• Social Research skills: I'd like to work up to doing some evidence based library research one day. For this, I need social research methods - a total blank in my current knowledge but something I can read on, maybe even find a MOOC... No time at the moment but perhaps something for next year.

We do have an appraisal process once a year where this kind of thing gets logged and I do have some of the above down for the current year so hopefully will make some progress. 

Reflecting on the programme:

Short answer: it's been good!

The best things for me have been...

• Starting this blog: I will try to keep it going now it's already 6 months old!
• Connecting with people: I've really enjoyed the cross-commenting on blogs & having a common purpose shared by so many at (roughly) the same time. It has encouraged me to comment more on blog posts generally.
• I've tried some new tools and revisited ones I've been using already - it's also reinforced my conviction that some of the tools ARE worth persevering with (Prezi - I'm going to get to you one day soon!)
• The whole series of Things is very useful in terms of the training we do for researchers - many of the tools we have used crop up in our teaching too.

I don't have any negatives really. Perhaps some of the Things were not so relevant to me right now - I'm mid career, not seeking to change job any time soon, for example. It's always good to refresh one's thoughts on these things but I preferred the Things that pushed me in more relevant directions. 

Thing 22: Volunteering

I have been reading around this Thing for a while before I actually tried to write anything. I find myself sitting on a fence: I think the idea of volunteering for experience is a good one but it excludes those who can't manage to sustain themselves financially while they do it and that is a very bad thing. I hate the idea of cutting back on paid librarians to staff libraries with volunteers but if that is the only option on the table, isn't it better than nothing? When do you accept defeat and seek damage limitation? No easy answers to these questions for me.

I have only done a little volunteering in recent years (I did a lot as an archaeologist back in the 90s!) - at the moment I do a few bits of work for our local community woodlands society. I do that because I like the woods and want to contribute something to the local community, however small. For me, the important thing with any volunteering is to be realistic about what I can manage and only offer to do things that I can fit into my limited spare time. I find it easiest to do web-based stuff - not attending meetings or events so much unless the kids can come along too.