Monday, April 28, 2014

Call for Proposals: ALAO Conference 2014

2014 ALAO Conference
The Academic Library Association of Ohio (ALAO) Conference Planning Committee invites you to submit proposals for the 40th Annual Conference, which will take place on November 13-14, 2014 at the Kalahari Resort & Convention Center in Sandusky, OH. The submission deadline for full-length sessions is May 30, 2014. Applicants are encouraged to develop sessions that show thoughtful consideration of this year’s conference theme, “Engagement, advocacy and outreach: Empowering our communities,” which seeks to explore how academic libraries and librarians empower our communities in all the ways that we do. We would love to learn about your ideas, experiences, solutions, and best practices – even those that yielded results that were different than expected!

Presentations may take the form of contributed papers, demonstrations, workshops, research results, panel discussions, etc. Topics may include, but are not limited to:

Engagement
  • Library contributions to student retention and success 
  • Rethinking our work and services to meet the needs of our communities
  • Using spaces, exhibits, displays, and/or social media to engage users in new ways
  • Creating innovative librarian/faculty partnerships in support of curricular initiatives

Advocacy

  • Partnering with stake-holders and decision-makers to develop effective messages regarding library value
  • Using data to inform academic library advocacy efforts
  • Influencing higher education policy and legislation at local, state, and national levels

Outreach

  • Collaborating with community and institutional partners
  • Reaching special student populations (veterans, international students, distance learners, etc.)
  • Programs and initiatives that have worked (or not!)

You may submit multiple proposals, however, no more than two will be included in the final program. Proposals are blind-reviewed for content, relevance to the conference theme, and overall appeal.

  • Submit your proposal online.
  • A concise, clearly written description and abstract will help the reviewers in evaluating your proposal.
  • Need help? See our presentation guidelines web page for tips.
  • Exclude the name of your institution, department and any personal names in the abstract to expedite the blind review process. You do not need to exclude this information in the brief description.
  • Presenters will be contacted regarding your AV/technology requirements when your proposal is accepted.
  • All presenters are responsible for their own registration and travel costs.
  • The conference planning committee recommends you print a copy of the completed form for your records before submitting.
  • Email confirmation from alao.cpc at gmail.com will be sent to each presenter - or lead presenter - upon successful proposal submission.
  • If you do not receive confirmation, or have questions about your submission, please contact Diane Schrecker (Ashland University Library) via email: alao.cpc at gmail.com.

ALAO encourages library support staff and library student growth, career development, and participation in conference activities, and awards two presenter grants, one for support staff and the other for students. These grants (up to $150 each) are intended to assist with the costs incurred in preparing the presentation and modest travel costs associated with the presentation. Please note that only presenters of full-length sessions and posters selected for inclusion in the conference will be eligible for final consideration for the grant.

Additional information is available on the ALAO 2014 Conference website.

Friday, April 25, 2014

Weekly Reader

From NASCAR Slides to "Any Questions?": 8 Kinds of Slides to Delete Right Now
"Lately, I've been coaching several speakers getting ready for industry conferences--hired either by their companies, or the conference organizers. As a result, I've spent an enormous amount of time telling speakers to ditch slide after slide after slide." -- Denise Graveline, The Eloquent Woman, 4/23/14

As Researchers Turn to Google, Libraries Navigate the Messy World of Discovery Tools
"Many professors and students gravitate to Google as a gateway to research. Libraries want to offer them a comparably simple and broad experience for searching academic content. As a result, a major change is under way in how libraries organize information. Instead of bewildering users with a bevy of specialized databases—books here, articles there—many libraries are bulldozing their digital silos. They now offer one-stop search boxes that comb entire collections, Google style." -- Marc Parry, Technology: Chronicle, 4/21/14

Multimedia Assignments: Not Just for Film Majors Anymore
"Millennials are often called "digital natives" because their familiarity with new technology seems to be in their DNA. Whether we like it or not, the "screen age" is here to stay—and with it has come a much more media-rich information ecosystem. Students are exposed to thousands of images a day. They share their own visual content via social-networking sites on their mobile devices, and orchestrate their own daily soundtracks with a portable music player and headphones. Yet too often their scholastic output more closely resembles that of their parents’ generation: a series of written words on a page." -- Danny Ledonne, The Digital Campus, 4/21/14

Confronting the Myth of the 'Digital Native'
"When Kaitlin Jennrich first walked into her communications seminar last fall, she had no idea that the professor already knew of her affinity for pink cars and Olive Garden breadsticks­—and that she planned to share that knowledge with the class. It hadn’t taken much sleuthing on the professor’s part to uncover those inane nuggets. The 18-year-old freshman at Northwestern University had herself lobbed them into the public sphere, via Twitter." -- Megan O'Neil, The Digital Campus, 4/21/14

Friday, April 11, 2014

Weekly Reader (part 2)

The Heartbleed Hit List: The Passwords You Need to Change Right Now
"An encryption flaw called the Heartbleed bug is already being called one of the biggest security threats the Internet has ever seen. The bug has affected many popular websites and services — ones you might use every day, like Gmail and Facebook — and could have quietly exposed your sensitive account information (such as passwords and credit card numbers) over the past two years." -- Mashable Team, Mashable, 4/11/14

The 'Heartbleed' Bug and How Internet Users Can Protect Themselves
"Security professionals working in higher education are updating servers, reissuing certificates used to guarantee secure Internet transactions, and encouraging students and faculty and staff members to take a break from the commercial Internet following the discovery of a programming flaw in a widely used Internet tool." -- Megan O'Neil, Wired Campus, 4/11/14

A Gentle Reminder About Security
"There are a lot of benefits to doing much of our work online. Collaboration with far-away colleagues is easy, we can have ready access to our work no matter what device we’re using, and having our work backed up in the cloud can be reassuring." -- Amy Cavender, ProfHacker, 4/10/14

How to Protect Yourself from the Heartbleed Bug
"A major new security vulnerability dubbed Heartbleed was disclosed Monday night with severe implications for the entire Web. The bug can scrape a server's memory, where sensitive user data is stored, including private data such as usernames, passwords, and credit card numbers." - Richard Nieva, CNet, 4/8/14

LastPass Heartbleed Checker
"With news breaking on Monday, April 7th that the Heartbleed bug causes a vulnerability in the OpenSSL cryptographic library, which is used by roughly two-thirds of all websites on the Internet, we want to update our community on how this bug may have impacted LastPass and clarify the actions we're taking to protect our customers. LastPass recommends everyone with a Yahoo.com account, OkCupid.com or Github.com account changes their password." -- LastPass, 4/11/14 [accessed]

Heartbleed: Serious OpenSSL Zero Day Vulnerability Revealed
"New security holes are always showing up. The latest one, the so-called Heartbleed Bug in the OpenSSL cryptographic library, is an especially bad one. heartbleedHeartbleed OpenSSL zero-day vulnerability. While Heartbleed only affects OpenSSL's 1.0.1 and the 1.0.2-beta release, 1.01 is already broadly deployed. Since Secure-Socket Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) are at the heart of Internet security, this security hole is serious." -- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, ZDNet, 4/7/14

Wednesday, April 09, 2014

Weekly Reader

The Problem is Not the Students
"Last week I posted what I considered to be an innocuous and mildly interesting post about a proposed formal definition of flipped learning. I figured it would generate a few retweets and start some conversations. Instead, it spawned one of the longest comment threads we’ve had around here in a while – probably the longest if you mod out all the Khan Academy posts." -- Robert Talbert, Casting Out Nines | Chronicle Blog, 4/8/14

How to Run a Group Authored Blog
"Independently of each other, a small number of people have recently asked about the workflow involved in publishing a group-authored blog like ProfHacker. Now I don’t pretend that the way we do things is the best way possible, but I’m happy to describe how we go about publishing 2 posts a day, 5 days a week. If you’re involved in a similar project that uses a different workflow, feel free to share the details in the comments to this post." -- George Williams, ProfHacker Blog, 4/3/14

Toward a Common Definition of Flipped Learning
"We’ve seen a significant ramping up of interest in – and exposure to – the flipped/inverted classroom over the last few years, and it’s been nice to see an uptick in the amount of research being done into its effectiveness. But one thing that’s been lacking has been a consensus on what the flipped classroom actually is." -- Robert Talbert, Casting Out Nines | Chronicle Blog, 4/1/14

Love on Ice: What Tonya Harding Teaches Us About the Academy
"I’m not much for proxy wars among nation-states or for feats of heroic athleticism, so the Winter Olympics largely escaped my notice—except for one thing. At the moment, we’re avidly revisiting a range of cultural phenomena on their 20th anniversaries (right now, for example, Gary Sinise is on my television, talking about playing Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump). And at the intersection of nostalgia and Olympic fever, much attention has been given to an anniversary of dubious distinction: the 1994 U.S. Figure Skating Championships." --Jacqui Shine, Chronicle Vitae, 3/31/14

Campus Stung By Controversial Video Moves to Ban Recordings in Class
"The Faculty Senate of the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater has responded to a controversy over a surreptitiously obtained classroom video of a guest lecturer lambasting Republicans by moving to bar students from recording and disseminating such footage." -- Peter Schmidt, Faculty | The Chronicle, 3/28/14

6 Scaffolding Strategies to Use with Your Students
"What's the opposite of scaffolding a lesson? It would be saying to students something like, "Read this nine-page science article, write a detailed essay on the topic it explores, and turn it in by Wednesday." Yikes -- no safety net, no parachute, no scaffolding -- just left blowing in the wind."-- Rebecca Alder, Teacher Leadership Blog | Edutopia, 1/24/14