Studying history is one of my great passions and I always find it interesting to learn more history. It seems like every year finds me learning more about different parts of history. Recently, I’ve been reading about the history of finance (The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson), but my other interests include the history of communications, the nineteenth century and other topics. I wasn’t always this way though – I once found history boring way back in elementary school. That started to change with my first visit to the United Kingdom in the early 1990s. In addition to getting to see castles, the Tower of London, Bath, Stonehenge and much more, I read the Horrible Histories series. Writen by Terry Derry and illustrated by Martin Brown, the series promises “history with the nasty bits left in.” What counts as nasty bits? Everything from the Black Death, wars, revolutions, feuding royal families and much more! The first books focused on British history, but it is has since branched out to cover the Romans, Aztecs, the USA and many other places. In addition to the many good books, there is also a BBC TV adaptation and a musical. These short books introduce young readers to history including politics, ordinary life and everything else. The “Horrible Histories” books – and that delightful first visit to Europe – are part of the reason that I am so interested in history.

Why am I blogging about this? As the video embedded below will show – “The Four Georges” – video is a communicaitons tool that educators and librarians have to master better. The “Horrible Histories” approach sometimes uses old fashioned approaches to history, such as a heavy emphasis on royal history and a bias toward the violent and messy parts of history. Then again, documentaries sometimes have a similar bias. History is complex and fascinating, but one has to start somewhere and these books (and later adaptations) may be a good place to start. That just means we use video with other things like primary documents, journal articles, maps and other tools. Today’s students have a variety of learning styles and text is not going to be the only tool we can use. Librarians may want to think about including videos in information literacy more heavily. That will involve thinking through where videos can be useful and what their limits are. I think a Horrible Histories clip could be a good way to begin a history class, for example. Videos like this could also be an interesting way of asking questions about how contemporary Britons thinks about its past.

There are quite a few clips from the TV program Horrible Histories on YouTube, one of the first examples below: “Born 2 Rule” by the Four Georges. Enjoy! I’m going to be humming this for a while.

The Horrible Histories clip on Roman Emperor Caligula is also well worth seeing.

Published in March 2009, Brian Matthew’s book Marketing Today’s Academic Library: a bold new approach to communicating with students has informed my thinking about marketing and how librarians think about their services and users of those services. As I was eager to read it, I had the order the book directly from the publisher which doesn’t make international orders easy (i.e. I had to send a fax using Skype – if Amazon can easily ship to Canada, I don’t see why the ALA can’t). With the main text of the book coming to 162 pages, the book is a fast read with an emphasis on the practical details of marketing the academic library to students. The focus of the book is very much on undergraduate students and grapples with that challenge well. If you are mainly looking for a work about marketing the library to faculty or administrators, then you should look elsewhere. That said, assisting students to excell in their studies can’t make you look bad no matter what. The “big picture” aspect of the book that struck me as particularly insightful was the idea that ‘marketing’ in this context is really about satisfying users and making the environment, products and services of the Library meet those needs. I also very much appreciated the research-driven bent to the book: no campaign should be launched without some research to support it. The book’s prologue and the biographical element of the first chapter also proved an engaging opening to the world of marketing and what it means for academic librarians – the publisher (or author? I’m unsure how the rights would work for this) would do well to offer the prologue and first chapter for free.

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In both courses and conversations, I’ve started to explore the digital humanities field and what it means for scholarship and education. Although there are examples of using digital technology to process texts for scholarship dating back several decades (the first known case was in 1949 – using an IBM machine to support religious research being undertaken by an Italian Jesuit, Father Busa), the Web offers more. For example, there is the Internet Shakespeare Editions project based at the University of Victoria. Among other things, it makes it easy to compare texts and seek out differences. The project combines powerful digital interfaces with access to The Illuminated Text. The tension between these two modes of accessing these texts are a useful tension. One can both see texts as they were made (or get close to that process) and manipulate them digitally. Offering multiple means of using such resources is part of the promise of digital humanities. If you’re interested in a general introduction to the field, I recommend (free!) Blackwell’s book, A Companion to the Digital Humanities.

When I first started to learn about digital humanities, it looked like it was largely dominated by English scholars and the occasional computer scientists. In fact, there are many more working in the field, including librarians who are exploring it such as the Chief Librarian of McMaster University and the Chief Librarian at the University of Toronto Mississauga. This is a good trend that needs more encouragement. In addition to connecting users with existing information resources, this is another kind of work I would like to work on – participating in the creation of new tools and supporting the development of new types of scholarship and learning. Just as humanities scholarship is moving beyond using books and print alone, libraries need to make that move as well. It looks like there is much potential to do innovative work in this field. I do wonder about the longevity of some projects which are often funded by short term grants. Libraries and archives may have a role to play here in providing institutional support (along with R&D) to keep these projects online and evolving.

Distance education has always struck me as promising idea, especially at the post-secondary or tertiary level. Part of that appeal lies in the fact that it is flexible in timing, allowing students to hold full time employment while they study (no doubt this is stressful, but worthwhile). While I did all my degrees at traditional universities – the University of Toronto and the University of Western Ontario, I still think there is merit and potential in distance programs. At the university level, there are a few places that I tend to think of as specializing in distance ed: Athabasca University (Alberta), the Open University in the UK or Thompson Rivers University in British Columbia. In addition to all of that, many professional associations offer courses on a distance basis to help professionals learn new skills and expand their competencies.

If the benefits in scheduling flexibility and geography are clear, what are the drawbacks? The affective aspect of learning – connecting with an instructor and fellow students – becomes more difficult. I would also surmise that making friends (and building networks) is likely more difficult. There’s something to be said for the experience of working on a campus newspaper or running the History Students’ Association (both of which I’ve done) that would appear to missing from distance education programs. That non-academic but fun and worthwhile aspect of education should not be discounted. For many, it will likely be one of the enduring merits of seeking a traditional university education. Arguments against distance education (e.g. a 2000 article against online MBAs or a blog post decrying the merits of online education generally) should prompt educators to think more deeply about their programs.

For librarians, the challenge is clear: how do you reach these students and offer them advice and support? These students are not going to walk in the door, after all. The first idea that comes to mind is very tight integration into online course systems such as Blackboard or Sakai would be valuable, as well as referrals from instructors. We need to ask questions like, “How can we make using the Library easier for distance students?” or “What keeps instructors up at night?”  On the latter count, it might be a combination of research skills and low engagement? Even if you are not in a distance education setting, these are questions that need to be grappled with. More and more users will be seeking service on a distance basis – the case of distance education may offer some ideas that others can use. Librarians serving distance education students may well be the canary in the mine for the rest of the profession.

The latest episode of the iSchool Podcast has been published tonight: Open Education Round the World. This open education concept shares some common ground with other notions of open (e.g. open source and open access) that have been very important lately. One of the most thought provoking examples offered here is the notion of open source textbooks for K-12 (and maybe even higher education) schools. That would certainly be a major departure from the way that I experienced K-12. There is plenty to learn and think about here. I found it very interesting to see how educators think about and approach these questions as well.

Yesterday, the Toronto Star newspaper published an article on the research and information behaviour of first year undergraduate students in Ontario (Profs blast lazy first-year students, April 6). The premise of the article – or, if you prefer, the punchy-if-misleading summary of it – is that today’s undergraduate students are incapable (or unwilling) to undertake research at the university level, preferring to rely on sources such as Wikipedia. Tellingly, the author of the article describes the present cohort of students as “the Wikipedia generation” and appears to consider this a slight. The possibility that an admiration of (and use of) Wikipedia could indicate worthwhile values regarding cooperation, open access and writing does not appear to be considered here, sadly. To paraphrase Clay Shirky, isn’t better to spend half hour an hour a day or week improving or creating a Wikipedia article rather than watching TV? Wikipedia itself also encourages some good work habits for contributors, such as the importance of citing sources.

There are two points I wish to comment on from this article; one on Wikipedia and one regarding post-secondary education more generally. When it comes to Wikipedia (or indeed, the Internet more generally), attacking a specific resource is not very useful. Likewise, simply praising a source as utterly reliable is not very useful (everyone, I’m sure, is aware of the 2005 Nature study comparing error rates between Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica; an interesting claim, though subsequent commentators have critiqued the study). As a former teaching assistant, I can tell you that simply creating lists of banned and approved sources does not get you very fair. Ultimately, students need to learn information literacy skills to evaluate information (. That is what educators should focus on in my view. It is the information equivalent of teaching a person to fish (i.e. how to evaluate a source) instead of giving a person a fish (i.e. here is a list of trustworthy sources). If a person is starving for lack of information, then sure, start them off with some good resources. But after that has passed, teaching evaluation skills is next. That is more difficult than it sounds to do well, but librarians and professors need to work together to get students on that path. Insulting students for being lazy might embarass a few into doing better, but that should not be the only approach.

Moving on to the study’s main conclusions (as summarized in the article), I continue to be skeptical and curious about it. The article’s summary of the article does make some interesting economic points however. If universities are largely funded on the basis of per capita student enrollment  (i.e. each additional enrolled student bring X dollars into the institution), then such a system creates incentives to retain those students and weakens the incentive to fail or expell students for weak performance. However, this set of incentives should also encourage universities to provide better support – and we do see cases of that all over such as writing labs, math clinics and the like. Where the article gets both more interesting (and more controversial and provocative) is the following section:

James Côté, a sociology professor at the University of Western Ontario, says the survey confirms a lot of recent research, and that the decline in student preparedness began years ago but has more recently accelerated.

“It’s a wider societal issue, where leisure is very much valued and work habits are not necessarily reinforced in the way that they were in the past. The work ethic is not what it used to be … no pain, no gain doesn’t seem to be prevalent any more.”

Côté co-authored a book, Ivory Tower Blues: A University System in Crisis, that in part chronicled the issues professors have with today’s students and he writes a blog where he hears from professors all the time.

With the current focus on stemming high-school dropouts, discipline and punctuality are not longer reinforced, and students come to university expecting to continue that, he added.

I’ve read Ivory Tower Blues and found it interesting though I cannot recall all of its points now. Has punctuality declined? I’m not so sure.  Is youth cultre (or “Canadian culture” in general) become more fixated on leisure? That’s an interesting question for a wealthy society to consider – in a rich country, there is simply more time for leisure and leisure becomes much more important to people once all their more fundamental needs are satisfied. What about Work habits? Depends on what you mean. I know plenty of students who work part time while they study, in addition to organizing conferences, editing journals and so forth. In quite a few cases, they are working (academic, extra-curricular and paid) more than forty hours a week. My observation might be flawed as I tend to meet highly motivated students. While I am inclined to view this kind of claim skeptically, I was happy to discover Professor Côté’s blog which I have just started to read. My early impressions of that blog are positive and it is the sort of blog where even when you disagree, you still come away having learned something.