CJARL Meeting Notes – 12/07/07

Location: Ocean County College Library Room 101D

In Attendance: Brookdale Community College – Amy Clark; Monmouth University – Lisa Coats, George Germek; Ocean County College – Catherine Pontoriero, Gary Schmidt; CJRLC - Amy Kearns

Announcements:

• CJRLC Fall Membership meeting is Wednesday, December 19 at the Peddie School in Hightstown.
• CJRLC is hoping to have "Gaming Kits" available for lending to all types of libraries by January 2008. See the CJRLC Newsletter for more information.
• There is a job opening for a Reference/Government Documents Librarian at Ocean County College. Application deadline: 12/12/07.
• The Reference Section of NJLA is sponsoring a tour of the Newark Public Library on Wednesday, 12/12 from 10 - 12.
• If anyone knows of someone who could speak on intellectual freedom within the context of Web 2.0, please contact Gary Schmidt.
• If anyone is interested in contributing to the CJARL blog - with interesting articles, blog posts, etc. to keep our discussion going between meetings - contact Amy Clark.
  
• If anyone is interested in taking over as chair of this group, effective summer or fall 2008, please contact Amy Clark.
  

Spring Meeting Dates:

March 7, 2008: Central Jersey Regional Library Cooperative Headquarters, 4400 Route 9 South, Suite 3400, Freehold, NJ 07728-1383

May 23, 2008: Location TBA

Discussion:

The group discussed the recent NEA report on reading and several responses to it. Many in the group agreed with a number of the points Matthew Kirschenbaum makes in his December 7 essay in The Chronicle. The group also discussed a post and some of the comments about the NEA report, which referenced Kirschenbaum's piece, on the if:book blog, (A Project of the Institute for the Future of the Book). (For the physical-book lovers among us, here's another fun piece about reading from Laurence Musgrove, at insidehighered.com.) Nancy Kaplan, a contributor to the if:Book blog, also posted about some problems with how the NEA used and reported the data from the study. (The graphics provided (NCES (primary data source) vs. NEA interpretation/manipulation) are particularly telling.) This is definitely worth a look, and is a great lesson in information literacy! From here, the discussion segued into how to get students to read and think critically about texts and data such as this. We acknowledged that the reading and thinking involved in gaming is one example of this "reimagining of reading" exemplified by many of our students. But how do we teach students to transfer the kind of thinking and reading required by many video games across contexts, so that students might employ them in their coursework? No clear answers on this one yet, but here are a few citations for thought-provoking articles about critical thinking:

Halpern, Diane F. "Teaching Critical Thinking for Transfer across Domains: Disposition, Skills, Structure Training, and Metacognitive Monitoring." American Psychologist 53.4 (April 1998):
449-455. PsychArticles. Ebsco.
van Gelder, Tim. "Teaching Critical Thinking: Some Lessons from Cognitive Science." College Teaching 53.1 (Winter 2005): 41-46. Academic Search Premier. Ebsco.

Our next area of discussion centered around Steven J. Bell's article in the July 2007 issue of Library Issues, "Who Needs a Reference Desk?" Librarians from different institutions talked about the pros and cons of Bell's argument. The concept of having librarians available for on-demand consultations (instead of sitting at the reference desk) led to a discussion of the article in the November 2007 issue of College and Research Libraries, entitled "Assessment of Student Learning from Reference Service," which (in part) concludes that reference consultations better lend themselves to the type of deeper student learning we're trying to enable. This study was an interesting attempt at measuring student learning as opposed to materials' use and gate counts, (which is one of the points suggested in Danny Wallace's editorial in the September 2007 Journal of Academic Librarianship.) Might be worth some of our libraries giving it a try...

Other titles mentioned during our discussion:
Everything Bad is Good For You, by Steven Johnson
The Cult of the Amateur, by Andrew Keen
Also, somewhat related is: Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, by David Weinberger, which is an interesting read (possibly for your winter-break reading lists:)

Other blogs mentioned during our discussion:
ACRLog
Annoyed Librarian
Gypsy Librarian (Angel Rivera is an academic librarian. He often blogs "Article Notes," which have led me to a lot of great journal articles.)
if:book
Library Garden