LSI and MBTI and Pedagogy

Sounds daunting, right?  Well it is, in a way.  I mentioned in my last post (which was ::shudder:: almost two months ago... abject apologies!) that I did some seminar work on Kolb's Learning Style Inventory (LSI).  I've also done a good bit of work with the MBTI - the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator, in the abbreviated form of the Keirsey Temperament Sorter.  I was thinking this week about the correlation between the two and how it could make for an interesting workshop at the right conference.

The MBTI looks at your personality type in several directions: Introverted-Extroverted, Sensing-Intuition, Thinking-Feeling, Judgment-Perception.  (There are several online versions of the survey... here's one if you're interested.)  It's interesting to see how your personality "scores", and makes you think about how you react to different situations... and how you teach!  I generally score as an INTJ, but I'm right on the line between Thinking and Feeling so depending on my mood when I take the survey, I will sometimes come out as an INFJ.  Heh.  If you're not familiar with the MBTI, here's a good place to visit for an excellent description!

So that's all about personality preferences.   (Note I say *preferences* - the survey doesn't give you hard-and-fast results that means That's What You Are Forever.  It's a moment in time, and indicates your personal preferences.)

The LSI looks at learning styles, specifically the one developed by David Kolb.  I talked about that a little in my previous post, so I won't bore you with the details again.

So why do I bring this up?  I'm working on a workshop proposal for a library conference next June!  It will look at these two instruments and then relate them to pedagogical styles in the classroom.   Thoughts?  Comments?  Am I certifiable, or just slightly nuts?

Learning Styles, Learning Outcomes, and Learning to Teach

At the end of July I had the incredible opportunity to attend the ACRL Immersion 2011 program in Seattle; the track dedicated to helping librarians become better teachers.  It would be impossible to blog about everything I learned in that five-day period, but it was amazing.  I won't say I agreed with everything I learned, or that I'll put every idea into practice.  But it did tell me a lot about myself and how I interact with students in the classroom, and give me some good ideas on tweaking my pedagogy in order to be more effective as I teach library instruction sessions.

So, what three most important things did I take away?

1) Just like there are different personality styles, there are also learning styles.  (This wasn't really *new* information for me, but it got unpacked in a way that helped a lot.)  Most folks are familiar with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (ISFJ here!).  The Kolb Learning Styles Inventory is similar, giving you clues as to how you best learn.  (I'm an Assimilator - is that a surprise to anyone?)  Of course none of these types are set in stone, but they do help understand how you - and your students - learn.  It's also no surprise that you tend to teach to your preferences.  So what do I do?  I lecture!!!  But now I know I can tweak my class, and create more hands-on type stuff for my students.  It might not be what I'd want to do, but hopefully it will be beneficial to them.

2) We also spent a good bit of time on learning outcomes - how to write them, how to design them, and how to build a class around them.  "Focus, focus, focus!" is the mantra - decide what you want your students to learn, and then tailor the outcomes to those goals.  I struggled with this, and it's likely I will continue to struggle.  As one of the instructors said "designing outcomes are an art, not a science - you'll always find ways to tweak and improve what you teach!"  But it did help me to realize that I can't teach everything in one 50-minute class.  I need to focus on the two or three critical skills I want students to learn while I'm there (in conjunction with the course instructor's goals, of course).  Then if the faculty member wants me to do more, I can either add that info into a LibGuide, or schedule another time to visit their class again.

3) Really, though. the most important thing I will take away from the experience is all the connections I made to other librarians doing the same thing I do.  I met several librarians from Georgia, and I hope we can meet again at other state events.  I also made connections with folks from as far away as Ontario, San Fransisco, and Vermont - each of whom offered something really interesting to my experiences in Seattle.

Here's my cohort, just after we finished out teaching presentations.

Kate, Melissa, me, Amy, Emma
Katie, Julie, Erica, Amanda, Karen (our instructor), and Kelly

A great group of ladies, and I'm delighted to call them friends and colleagues!

An Update

As anyone who has moved and changed jobs both at the same time knows, you have little time for anything else in those few weeks.  We got moved in (with only minor problems) and I've been working for nearly a month now.  The folks I work with are fantastic, and troopers to boot.  I came onto the scene in the midst of an enormous renovation project.  Not one aspect of the library facilities was to remain untouched, and not one aspect of the project to date had gone smoothly (nor has it yet).  Contractor and subcontractor problems on top of just general utter chaos and not being able to find anything anywhere... you can imagine.  But to be honest, I think the best way to get to know your colleagues is to be thrown into the same chaos they're dealing with and work together to get things done.

A week into my new job we got to attend the Atlanta Area BIG (Bibliographic Instruction Group) day-long conference, and that was a good opportunity to get to know other folks in the area as well.  I am also looking forward to an excursion to Seattle next month for a week long immersion program on teaching, run by the Association of College and Research Libraries.  Since I'll be spending a good bit of time in the classroom, this opportunity comes at the perfect time.  I'm sure I'll have lots of thoughts on that once I return home!

In the meantime I'm going to rest up on the weekends, because there's lots of shifting and moving shelving to be done - and all this *before* I have to start working on the campus library where I'll be permanently located!

To Boldly Go....

Starting June 1, I will have a new job. (!!!)  My husband and I have been frantically looking for a house (and trying to sell our current one) for the last month, and it looks like that part of the process is coming to a close.  Yes, literally.  May 2 is our current closing date on our New House.  We're only moving about 80 miles, across a state line, and we will be Much Closer to a metropolitan city that offers lots of opportunities for an itinerant philosopher and a librarian.  I'll be running a branch campus library of a medium-sized community college - I'm very excited, but as always with a new job, approaching the change with a bit of fear and trepidation too.

The other librarians I've met seem like great folks, as do the folks on the campus where I'll be.  Even more fun and interesting?  I'll be working to set up the Brand New Library.  The campus is actually housed in a historic building downtown, and the new library will be a floor of the historic courthouse next door.  So the renovations are running apace, and I will get to be part of the set-up and implementation.  This will be the fourth such venture I've been a part of, and I'm hoping the last.  We would really like to settle down in one spot and finally take root in a community.   This one seems like a really good fit - for both of us - the location is good, the timing is good, and so as Julian of Norwich said; "All will be well and all will be well and all manner of things will be well."  Amen!

Why Books Are Not Dead

HarperCollins bites the big one.

Yes indeed, they want to LIMIT the number of times an eBook can circulate.  Can publishers do this for print books?  Not on your life. As long as a library can repair the binding, a book can circulate.  (And the software will never have to be upgraded... but that's another issue entirely, right?)

Long live the BOOK!

Google Metadata and Librarians

I went to an amazing library conference last November - the Charleston Conference.  During the last plenary session, we got to hear Jon Orwant, a Google engineering manager, talk about the Google Books project.

Now, you've probably seen old-fashioned librarians like me reel and hiss at the very idea, nay, the very notion, of Google presuming to scan books and make them wholly or partially available online.  Yes, there are plenty of lawsuits out there.  Yes, of course, having Google send a very charismatic speaker to a premier conference is self serving and in their best interests.  And yes, there are issues about intellectual property rights and access and digitization, and the fact that so many cataloging mistakes have happened, and all that other stuff.

But this guy was COOL.

I won't go into the more technical aspects of his talk.  But I do want to tell you about one thing he shared with us.  One of the reasons for this project is to facilitate research, and Google gives academic scholarships and access to their databases for various projects.  Back in the 1950s, a definitive book about the Victorian era was published.  To write it, the author basically read every book he could get his hands on that was written during that time, and mined them for data about language, and custom, and culture, and so forth. 

Google gave a grant to a group of scholars who wanted to recreate this guy's work, but digitally.  Since so many books from that era have now been digitized, keyword searches can be used now instead of tedious page-by-page reviewing.  So this group of folks (I think they were from George Mason University, though I may be wrong on that) gained access to the Google databases and used a set of 50 keywords - words like "leisure" and "work"- then tracked their usage over time to see how common they were.  And in fact, the word "leisure" started to disappear over the era, and the word "work" increased exponentially.  Ok, so that's cool already, right? 

Well, this Google engineer went one better to show us how digitization could expedite research.  He created a graph of every book published by date and subject, that could then be zoomed in on specific periods.  So at the dawn of the printing press - BOOM - a spike in books.  Zoom in on French literature from 1650 to 1750 - BOOM - you see a spike because of the French Enlightenment.  (It was really funny - he zoomed in on that quite by accident, and said "Huh - I wonder why there's a spike here?" And the room of 1000 librarians all started shouting "It's the French Enlightenment!"  Heh.)

COOLEST THING EVER.

I wish he'd put that chart online so folks could play with it - heck, for those of us at his talk we'd probably be willing to pay!

Reading and Writing (but no 'rithmetic)

I want to do a social research project.  Anyone who's been a librarian, or a teacher, or even a parent has heard the notion that "people who read a lot are better writers than those who eschew reading".  That just sounds completely true, right?  It's a no-brainer!  But there have been very few empirical studies done to prove that fact.  And really, it would be nearly impossible to do - you'd have to get permission from the students you surveyed not only for the survey about their reading habits, but you'd need to get other data about them - from their professors - on how well they write.  That's the only way you can get reliable data.  But research projects these days are very, very sensitive to the participants' identities, so I just don't know how you could do it so that the results are actually meaningful.  You absolutely HAVE to be able to compare the two, and that can only be done if someone working with the study knows the identity of the participants.

Technically, it would be very simple - ask a series of questions like "How often do you read material that is not course-related?" and "What kinds of materials do you like to read {books, newspapers, magazines, blogs, etc)?" and "Now that you are in college, do you find you read more for pleasure or less?"  Then you take those students' answers, and compare them to their writing ability (preferably judged by someone who has experience grading and evaluating writing).  Then see if there's a correlation between those who read more for pleasure and those who are better writers.

Still, I can't figure out how to get around the privacy issues.  Maybe if I partnered with English or Composition faculty who worked that in somehow as part of a course?  What if you took blind surveys of students taking one of the many "fun" classes universities offer now (like mini-semester courses on Tolkien, or other popular authors) and compared that with a blind survey of the same level of student in a regular comp class.  You could make the assumption that the students interested in Tolkien are probably "readers", but I still don't think that would give you reliable data in the long run.

If you have any good ideas, let me know.  In the meanwhile, off and on as I have time, I'm going to continue to look for work others have already done on the subject. I've seen several on reading and general academic level, but I want a more granular study targeting writing ability!

Was Frodo a Calvinist?

Another post from my other blog, this one from way back in 2007.  Still, I think I have a point (and still, I think just about anyone with a philosophical or theological background could pick my argument apart) but here it is, for what it's worth. 

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Have I admitted recently that I am a Tolkien nerd? If not, I humbly admit it now. {{grin}}

I recently re-watched The Lord of the Rings (LotR), and was having a conversation with someone that made me stop and think. First of all, I don't despise the movies as some die-hard fans do. I think Peter Jackson did all right most of the time. The Faramir thing, tho, and the Sam/Gollum/Frodo thing on the stairs in Mordor, are almost unforgivable. I do confess to fast forwarding through the latter during my last viewing. (And I probably will again, next time I watch!)

But here's my biggest beef, I think. I'm just not crazy about the way Elijah Wood plays Frodo. Or at the very least, how he was directed to play Frodo (not sure if that was an actor or a director failing). In the books you get the sense that, yes, Frodo was "pulled" into this adventure through no design of his own. But once he gets on the Road, he is determined to see it through to whatever bitter end may come. You read about his fighting against the power of the ring, resisting it at every moment. For me, that internal struggle is very important. He knows what he has to do. He's fighting every step to do it, despite incredible pressure to surrender the ring to Sauron.

In the movies, Frodo seems much weaker. Sam saves him from surrendering the ring to the Nazgul in Osgiliath. Aragorn saves him on Weathertop. The few times you see him "fight" with the ring's power, he simply looks like he's about to barf (You know that look on his face - it's more reminiscent of indigestion than determination!). You just don't get that same sense of deep and abiding struggle that you read page after page in the books. Now, I do know that there are some scenes where you do see him fight... at least twice (off the top of my head) I can thing of Frodo and Gollum locked in battle. But in these cases, Frodo isn't fighting against the ring, Frodo is fighting to KEEP the ring. But I'm digressing....

Anyway, as we were talking about this after the movie ended, my conversation buddie said... "In the movies, Frodo is a Calvinist. In the books, he's a Thomist." First I must say that I am neither a theologian nor a philosopher, so what follows here can probably be picked apart by just about anyone. But I thought I'd throw it out for further consideration anyway! Why is he a Calvinist in the movie? Because everything that happens is external to him. Sam saves him from the Nazgul. He's mainly just going with the flow - you don't see him initiating or changing events, but reacting. Yes, I do know he's changing events by destroying the ring in the end, and changing events by saying he'll take the ring in the first place!) But on the whole, you don't see any internal motivation. In the books, he has an inner grace (I'm thinking here of the Anglican phrase: "The sacraments are an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace") that gives him strength and courage to keep up the struggle. That's more of a Thomistic (or Augustinian) attribute. You are given grace to draw upon in daily (or dire) struggles. The grace comes from God, but it is held within yourself. Calvinism would have that grace being from "without."

Tolkien even speaks of it outright in many cases. After Boromir tries to take the ring and Frodo has put it on to escape, he is seen/felt by the Eye on Amon Hen, which calls him to Sauron. We find later that Gandalf fights on his behalf, and the ensuing (internal) battle reads like this:

He heard himself crying out: Never, never! Or was it: Verily I come, I come to you? He could not tell. Then as a flash from some other point of power there came to his mind another thought: Take it off! Take it off! Fool, take it off! Take off the ring!

The two powers strove in him. For a moment, perfectly balanced between their piercing points he writhed, tormented. Suddenly he was aware of himself again. Frodo, neither the Voice nor the Eye: free to choose... (Fellowship, p. 404)

This deep internal struggle doesn't come across very well on screen. The force of will (the grace) he summons to defy Sauron is seen in the movies as events imposed upon him as opposed to through him. At the most, when we see Frodo make decisions, we get no sense of struggle when the decision is made.

So there's my foray into theology for the night. A pitiful attempt, I am sure, but that's all you get from a librarian dabbling in things beyond her ken.  ::grin::

Is Print Dead?

Ah, the ubiquitous question.  Will print books go the way of the 8-track, or see a fall like that of Betamax and more recently, VHS?  Will everyone own an eReader, and will libraries be filled with computers and eschew bookshelves?

I'd like to think not.  And I'll go beyond the whole "digital divide" argument. (Yes, I just linked to Wikipedia - it is not quite the evil behemoth that some make it out to be, but that's another post entirely!)  I can say with perfect clarity - and plenty of anecdotal evidence - that most of the students I see here on a daily basis want to read print, and will actually WAIT for a copy of a print book to be returned rather than turning to an online version of the same text.  I do need to qualify, though, that I am speaking only of books here, monographs, not journals and magazines and newspapers.  (Again, a whole other post.)

But more scientifically speaking, *statistically* it appears that younger adult readers, far more than 30 to 50-somethings, prefer the experience of reading a print book to a digital version.  In fact, the percentage of young readers (under 20) and the percentage of older adult readers (over 50) are about equal when asked their preference for digital vs print - 85% "prefer the experience of a printed book."  That blows away issues like cost concerns, privacy concerns, and digital restrictions by a huge margin. 

How do I garner this information?  From a study done by R. K. Bowker (specifically table 31 on page 39).  It was commissioned by an international organization which promotes reading - mysteries, specifically - designed to see where the market was headed for that genre.  But the one table I mention is very, very telling.  I would love to see a broader survey done that focuses more on print vs digital.  Mystery readers are often considered "old fashioned", so I wonder how sci-fi fans would respond, or folks who don't do much reading "for pleasure".  And if the sales of Nook and Kindle and all the others are spiking dramatically, why is that happening?  The ereader industry would have us believe that ebook sales are through the roof, and they are, but who is doing the buying?  And will that trend continue?  If the bulk of the buying follows the trend in the Bowker study, then as younger readers start having more disposable income (as they get older and get established in the workforce) will we start to see a decline in digital books and an uptick in print sales again?

Something interesting to ponder, and watch.

Here's Something Interesting

It's actually something I wrote and published about five years ago, stored now meticulously in Florida State University's institutional repository.  Yes, indeed - it's my thesis.

Information Professionals and the Intelligence Community

Come to think of it, it might actually bore you to tears.  So venture forth at your own risk!

Of Prunes, Pumpkin Juice, and Stewed Rabbit

I posted this essay back in 2008.  Like Lewis and Tolkien, though, I continually come back to exploring the idea of a "good story".  So I think it's appropriate to start off with this re-post especially since our book group here at the library has recently decided to read some of the best classics for children.  We've definitely gotten off to a good start by reading The Hobbit and Voyage of the Dawn Treader!  ::grin::

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This is one of my favorite quotes from Lewis, as he talks about how the author of children's stories needs to connect to his audience, not as a teacher or a parent, but beyond those types of relationships. He writes:

"Once in a hotel dining-room, I said, rather too loudly, "I loathe prunes." "So do I" came an unexpected six-year-old voice from another table. Sympathy was instantaneous. Neither of us thought it funny. We both knew that prunes are far too nasty to be funny. That is the proper meeting between man and child as independent personalities. ("On Three Ways of Writing for Children")

Which leads me into my main argument - that Good Stories have a universal appeal. And part of that is because the authors don't try to act like a teacher or parent to the reader. The reader is an equal, regardless of his age, and that must certainly makes any story more accessible and attractive. But I think there's something more to it, and that's where I'm headed...

I've been reading C. S. Lewis's collection of essays called Of Other Worlds, which is about writing and fiction and fantasy and fairy tales. I was having a discussion with someone here in the library about Harry Potter, and we were debating about whether or not Rowling's work should be considered in the same breath with Tolkien (and Lewis, and Le Guin, and all those others that seem to come up as comparisons). The ultimate question then, is "What makes a fantasy novel 'good'?" (Philosophers, feel free to chime in!) Lewis makes the comment:

If good novels are comments on life, good stories of this sort [the marvelous and fantastic] (which are much rarer) are actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience. ("On Science Fiction")

Which reminds me of a quote by Frederick Buechner:

... faith is like the dream in which the clouds open to show such riches ready to drop upon us that when we wake into the reality of nothing more than common sense, we cry to dream again because dreaming seems truer than the waking does to the fullness of reality not as we have seen it, to be sure, but as by faith we trust it to be without seeing. (Sacred Journey)

So according to Lewis, a good fantasy story "expands our horizons", and I would say it also gives us a longing to return to that world. Admit it, you Tolkien and Potter fans, how many times have you read the books??!? Yes, I know Buechner is talking about Christian faith in this passage, but I might argue that our faith in the Story (to borrow from Tolkien again) has the same effect. Good novels and good stories open doors for the reader, and we are free to wander in and take up residence for as long as the story lasts. Indeed, once there we can take what we learn within the story and apply it to our own Story when we return to the world of the mundane.

And you know what's really interesting to me?  Many of the best stories are stories for children. Pooh. Wind in the Willows. Narnia. Grimms' and Anderson's and Aesop's fables and fairy tales. And (in my humble opinion) the best of these stories are not the mundane, but the fantastic - those that take us out of our everyday world and plop us down in the middle of Someplace Else. I enjoy children's stories much more as an adult than I did as a child, and that's a good thing, according to Lewis. "... a children's story which is only enjoyed by children is a bad children's story. The good ones last." ("On Three Ways of Writing for Children")

Maybe as adults we are attracted to these stories, not only because we better understand the deeper narrative, but because they connect us to an age of innocence amd remind us how to "do nothing". In the final chapter of The House at Pooh Corner ("In Which Christopher Robin and Pooh Come to an Enchanted Place, and We Leave Them There") Christopher Robin tells Pooh that he won't be able to "do nothing" anymore.

"I like that too," said Christopher Robin, "but what I like doing best is Nothing."
"How do you do Nothing?" asked Pooh, after he had wondered for a long time.
"Well, it's when people call out at you just as you're going off to do it, What are you going to do, Christopher Robin, and you say, Oh nothing, and then you go and do it."
"Oh, I see," said Pooh. "This is the sort of thing that we're doing right now."
...Then, suddenly again, Christopher Robin, who was still looking at the world, with his chin in his hands, called out, "Pooh!"
"Yes?" said Pooh.
"When I'm --- when --- Pooh!"
"Yes, Christopher Robin?"
"I'm not going to do Nothing any more."
"Never again?"
"Well, not much. They won't let you."
Pooh waited for him to go on, but he was silent again.
"Yes, Christopher Robin?" said Pooh helpfully.
"Pooh, when I'm --- you know --- when I'm not doing Nothing, will you be here sometimes?"
"Just me?"
"Yes, Pooh."
"Will you be here too?"
"Yes, Pooh, I will be, really. I promise I will be, Pooh."
"That's good," said Pooh.
"Pooh, promise you won't forget about me, ever. Not even when I'm a hundred."

Sitting down and getting drawn into a good book, for me, is the best and most beloved time of "doing nothing." Good novels, good Stories (whether they're about pumpkin juice or stewed rabbit) will always be there, and we readers won't forget about them. And that's the thing, I think, about children's stories. We read them as kids and they stick. We re-read them as adults and return to them, even if we're a hundred. Our childhood and our adulthood are made better because of them.

More about this blog

In his essay “On Stories” C. S. Lewis recounts a conversation he had with a bright American student.  Lewis told the man that what he liked about stories wasn’t primarily the plot and the characters. Of course you need the plot and the characters to further the story, but for himself, Lewis said, it was the portrayal of the world itself that excited and intrigued his imagination, and drew him into the tale.  The student replied that he cared not “one brass farthing” for all that – he just wanted to know what happened in the end.  Lewis goes on to talk about storytelling and imagination, and I find myself in complete agreement with him. Indeed, any story must have a world in which to set the characters and further the plot. But a great story is all about what stirs the imagination, and that is the critical key. 

So this blog will be my “two cents” on reading, and learning, and education, and imagination – and how all those things tie into my vocation.  As an "old fashioned" librarian, I want all my patrons to enjoy reading - how could it be otherwise?  But I also know that my profession is a bizarre combination of the timelessness of print and the cutting edge of technology.  So a post on Google Books or open source digital publishing is just as likely as a bit of literary musing on Winnie the Pooh or The Lord of the Rings.

C. S. Lewis, On Stories and Other Essays on Literature (New York: Mariner Books, 2002), 4-7.