Enabling Knowledge Creation: An Organizational Development Approach for Advancing Academic Library Centrality

Supplemental Materials

Living The Future 6

Tucson, Arizona

April 6, 2006

Presented by:

Mary M. Somerville, Ph.D.

Assistant Dean, Information and Instructional Services,

CaliforniaPolytechnicStateUniversity

San Luis Obispo, CA

805-756-1398

Learning Commons Vision, Outcomes, and Context

CaliforniaPolytechnicStateUniversity

San Luis Obispo, California

Vision

The Cal Poly Learning Commons supports new ways of educating and supporting students through creative approaches to teaching and learning with technology and information resources. This experimental environment for professors, librarians, instructional designers, pedagogy experts, and technologists enables collaboration on active learning projects within student learning communities.

Goals

  • Provide technological infrastructure, pedagogy and technology expertise, and information resources and consultation to enable faculty innovation and curriculum revitalization.
  • Encourage application of constructivist principles to advance students’ information, communication, and technology proficiencies for life long learning.

Context

Universities are shifting from teaching approaches that emphasize faculty transmission of knowledge to approaches that emphasize student construction of understanding. The Cal Poly Digital Teaching and Learning Initiative (DTLI) advances student success through faculty development that:

  • Promotes instructional experimentation, curriculum renewal and transformation.
  • Encourages faculty and staff to develop and demonstrate innovative approaches to teaching and learning that use technology and electronic information resources.
  • Enables faculty, staff, and students to develop information, communication, and technology capabilities for successful learning in the Digital Age.
  • Fosters and disseminates research and scholarship that encourages the rigorous assessment and evaluation of technology and information based teaching and learning.

The Digital Teaching and Learning Initiative (DTLI) represents a partnership between the Learning Commons Partners (Information Technology Services/ITS, Robert E. Kennedy Library Digital Teaching Library/DTL, and Center for Teaching and Learning/CTL) and Cal Poly faculty and students. For further information, contact: Mary M. Somerville, Convener, Learning Commons Partners, 756-1398, or go to:

A Shared Conceptual Model of the CaliforniaPolytechnicStateUniversity, San Luis Obispo, LearningCommons

For more information, go to:

DRAFT Plan for Advancing Campus Information Competence

Robert E. Kennedy Library

CaliforniaPolytechnicStateUniversity

San Luis Obispo, CA93407

805-756-1398

Concept: College Librarians will advance students’ success through collaborative partnerships with academic faculty that integrate information literacy and information resources into learning experiences.

Toward that end, College Librarians will:

Maintain or develop their individual skills to be able to:

  • Create curriculum-aligned digital research portals, course research guides, and other digital learning objects to ensure ready access to research advisement, anytime and anyplace
  • Offer one on one research consultation during regular office hours
  • Educate faculty about specialized databases, so faculty can teach their students
  • Deliver on demand instruction and consultation to ‘first contact’ RISE staff at the reference desk
  • Deliver research navigation instruction to (student) Learning Commons Consultants to enable knowledgeable peer-to-peer coaching
  • Develop general education and discipline orientation course materials on information literacy for faculty (and teaching assistant) implementation

Work one on one with individual faculty to:

  • Encourage curriculum integration by providing information literacy assignment templates, which can be aligned with course learning outcomes, for embedded implementation by academic faculty
  • Populate Learning Management System (LMS) course document and course assignment spaces with information resources and information literacy

DRAFT Plan for Advancing Campus Information Competence (con’t)

  • Enable student-centered Learning Commons’ projects, which are information resourced, technology enabled, and pedagogically sound, in cooperation with Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) and Information Technology Services (ITS) colleagues
  • Explore information literacy delivery strategies as principal investigator or co-investigator in externally funded research projects
  • Deliver face-to-face course outcomes-aligned, active learning sessions, reinforced by course research guides

Note: No credit generating, stand-alone course is offered and there will be a concerted effort to eliminate ‘50 minute stand’/’one shot’.

Work with departmental chairs to:

  • Participate in department level curriculum planning activities to meaningfully integrate information literacy and information resources into student learning experiences
  • Participate in assessment activities that result in development of instructional products and educational approaches that advance students’ information, communication, and technology proficiencies

Work with associate deans to:

  • Assess library’s contribution to achievement of college-level student learning outcomes and evaluate various instructional approaches within that context
  • Contribute information literacy and collection resource content for department and college accreditation and program review reports

For further information, contact: Mary M. Somerville, Assistant Dean, Information and Instructional Services, 756-1398,

Enabling Knowledge Creation: An Organizational Development Approach for Advancing Academic Library Centrality

Selected readings about the CaliforniaPolytechnicStateUniversity Library experience, as presented by Mary M. Somerville at Living the Future 6, Tucson, Arizona, April 6, 2006

Davis, H. L., & Somerville, M. M. (2006). Learning our way to change: Improved institutional alignment. New Library World, 107 (3/4, April). (In press).

Elrod, S. (2006). Learning Genetics with Case Studies: A Guide for Students. (Unpublished).

Gillette, D., & Somerville, M. M. (2005). Faculty and student usability and focus group findings inform Digital Teaching Library interface requirements. In Proceedings of the 12th Annual Syllabus Higher Education Technology Conference, Los Angeles, California. (Online). Available at:

Gillette, D.D., & Somerville, M. M. (2006, June). Toward lifelong ‘knowledge making’: Faculty development in the Cal Poly Learning Commons. In Lifelong Learning - Partners, Pathways, and Pedagogies: Proceedings of the 4th International Lifelong Learning Conference, Yeppoon, Australia. Rockhampton, Queensland, Australia: CentralQueenslandUniversity. (In press).

Maybee, C. (2006). Undergraduate perceptions of information use: The basis for creating user-centered student information literacy instruction. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 32(1), 79-85.

Mirijamdotter, A., & Somerville, M. M. (2004). Systems thinking in the workplace: Implications for organizational leadership. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Systems Thinking and Management (ICSTM),Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. (CD-ROM).

Mirijamdotter, A., Somerville, M. M., & Holst, M. (2005). An interactive evaluation approach for the creation of collaborative learning commons. In Proceedings of

Enabling Knowledge Creation (page 2 of 3)

the 12th European Conference on Information Technology Evaluation (ECITE-12), Turku, Finland. (CD-ROM).

Mirijamdotter, A. & Somerville, M. M. (2005), Dynamic action inquiry: A systems approach for knowledge based organizational learning, in Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction,Las Vegas, Nevada. (CD-ROM).

Rogers, E. (2005), Student usability project recommendations define information architecture for library technology, in Proceedings of the 12th Annual Syllabus Higher Education Technology Conference, Los Angeles, California. Available

Rogers, E., Somerville, M. M., & Randles, A. (2005), A user-centered content architecture for an academic digital research portal, in Proceedings of the ED-MEDIA - World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia & Telecommunications, Montreal, Canada. (CD-ROM).

Somerville, M. M., Huston, M. E., & Mirijamdotter, A. (2005), Building on what we know: Staff development in the digital age, The Electronic Library 23 (4), 480-491.

Somerville, M. M. & Mirijamdotter, A. (2005), Working smarter: An applied model for ‘better thinking’ in dynamic information organizations, in Currents and Convergence - Navigating the Rivers of Change:Proceedings of the 12th National Conference of the Association for College and Research Libraries (ACRL), Association of College & Research Libraries, Chicago, Illinois, pp. 103-111.

Somerville, M. M., & Mirijamdotter, A. (2005). Soft systems methodology results transform professional roles in the digital teaching library. In Proceedings of Syllabus 2005, Los Angeles, California. (Online). Available at:

Somerville, M. M., Mirijamdotter, A., & Collins, L. (2006), Systems thinking and information literacy: Elements of a knowledge enabling workplace environment, in Proceedings of the 39thHawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS 39), Kauai, Hawaii. Los Alamitos, California: IEEE Computer Society. (Online). Available at:

Enabling Knowledge Creation (page 3 of 3)

Somerville, M. M., & Schader, B. (2005). Life after the reference desk:

Co-creating a digital age library. The Charleston Advisor, 7 (1), 56-57.

Somerville, M. M., Schader, B., & Huston, M. E. (2005), Rethinking what we do and how we do it: Systems thinking strategies for library leadership, Australian Academic and Research Libraries, 36 (4), 214-227.

Somerville, M. M., & Vuotto, F. (2005). If you build it with them, they will come: Digital research portal design and development strategies. Internet Reference Services Quarterly, 10 (1), 77-94.

Somerville, M. M., & Vazquez, F. (2004). Constructivist workplace learning: An idealized design project. In P. A. Danaher, C. Macpherson, F. Nouwens, & D. Orr (Eds.), Proceedings of the 3rd InternationalLifelong Learning Conference (pp. 300-305 plus errata page). Rockhampton, Queensland, Australia: CentralQueenslandUniversity.