Blood on the Stacks

Immersive Marketing for Libraries: ARGs and Library Orientations

Trinity University in San Antonio, combined elements of ARGs, their traditional scavenger hunt, and other aspects of the library orientation to create an engaging, interactive, library orientation experience for incoming freshmen. Their ARG was heavily inspired by Perplex City.

The theme needs to have a sense of adventure, exoticism, and some element of discovery, self or otherwise. They settled upon Egypt as fitting the bill perfectly, and future orientations would always incorporate the these three aspects.

They also needed to be sensitive to the sterotypes associated with Egypt as in the wacko who stumbles upon a secret society or some such element. Also needed to be sensitive to their audience; an audience that views shows like Veronica Mars and Supernatural. So they needed to shift the mystery element to a modern setting.

Considerations for the initial plot:

• Dynamic
• Tie in with the audience/demographic
• Make it engaging.
• Branding/marketing look for the Library

Challenges

• A lof the library patrons were experienceing the library as a digital space, in addition to it’s physical orientation.
• 30 minutes attention spell
• Students already have a rich information diet, the goal was to set the Library as an additional resource.

Student focus groups provided a range of voices that allowed them to get their audience really well, not just in terms of the orientation experience itself, but also in terms of the library itself.

Solutions

• Immersive marketing
• Go where they go – be a part of their world
• Cash awards – incentives

For next year:

• Students want to be able to contribute content to the game
• Include RefWorks, the institutional citation resource
• Make it a part of the student orientation week

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Leadership – A Decision, Not A Position

The first official track session at Educause SWRC 2007.

Leadership is: purpose, mission, vision.

Branding and tag lining: The concept that goes along with this is the notion of promise. A strong brand makes a promise to you as a consumer. Questions in the context of leadership:

What is my brand and what does it say about me?

What would my tag line be?

The single best question you can ask your colleagues: What can I do to help you succeed at work?
Helps turn on the oscilloscope and see what problems your colleagues face at work.

Motivating exceptional behaviour calls for exceptional rewards. Question: What motivates me? What does my exceptional reward look like?

Acceleration Pools: Identify people in the organization that have the passion/desire to step up to additional leadership and accelerate their development.

When working with the best, the vocabulary shifts from obligation to opportunity, what you get to do, not what you have to do?

In Summary:

• You lead when you act to make things different.
• Interview each day: why do you want to keep this job?
• Think about what’s rewarding to you.
• Think about what you reward.
• Find your acceleration lane.

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Educause SWRC Pre-conference:

What do Faculty Do With Technology Anyway? That’s the theme of the pre-conference, led by Patricia McGee (UTSA) and Veronica Diaz (Maricopa Community Collge System).

Some interesting anecdotal evidence just came to light: Students consider IM an important technology for learning, but prefer email to IM as a communication tool. CMSs ranked 17th on their list of top technologies and students couldn’t even articulate what faculty were really doing with it in terms of learning outcomes.

Another idea: Use Bloom’s Taxonomy Framework to create a faculty support model. One suggestion is to shadow the instrutors to see what really happens in the classroom. That does call for larger reserves of instructional techs and support staff than the single-person model more prevalent in smaller institutions.

A support idea: Keep one-page faculty profiles that includes information on their instructional materials that they use in their classroom and use that to provide tailored support. Question is: how do request a faculty member to provide their syllabus or their teaching scores, when their question is: How do I add my syllabus to “insert CMS of choice here”?

Maicopa Community College Systems prodacasting training: Podcasting Theory & Practice http://drcoop.pbwiki.com/PodcastingTheoryPractice

Teaching Style Taxonomy
Based on Grasha, a psychologist.

Five different types of styles, most of us ahve more than one combined style.

Expert: Know all, and here to transmit info to the learner, who becomes more competent under their tutelage. May not reveal the underlying processes/procedures that actually produce the knowledge. Learning objects, DBs, FAQs, can be ways for the learner to seek out more tahn is being probided.

Formal Authority: knowledge expert but provides feedback in a structured and standardized environment. Very specific and clear about their expectations.

Personal Modal: Serves as a role model. Provides personal examples and models correct behaviour. Downside is that often, students beleive they can’t live up the expectations being set.

Facilitator: Into teacher-learner interaction in a probing and interactive learning envrionemnt. Constructivist. Gets overwhelmed by the integration of technology if they start using many deifferent types.

Delegator: Desires that learner act autonomously with little input. Want the learner to be independent, but often misread student’s ability or desire to be independent.

Another thought that emerged: Higher ed is pretty resistant to change, and has survived as an instution, but should we adopt change theory to lead faculty/administration from resisting to wanting change, be it in the form of technology adoption, the way they design their syllabus, et al. A resource for change theory is John Carter’s eight steps.

DyKnow: Collaborative environment that is web based for tablet PCs and laptops.

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