Not presenting, but teaching (or how I learned to stop worrying about which platform to use)

I don’t know about you, but I feel I’ve always used PowerPoint fairly innovatively. Way back in 1997 I remember surprising a class of executives with a PPT consisting only of full slide images overlaid with minimal text – a style which is of course now ‘PPT de jour’.  Unfortunately, as we all know, familiarity breeds contempt, so when Prezi came along, after 10 solid years with PPT, it was little wonder that I initially seized upon it like an excited schoolboy…

• A huge canvas – oooh
• A path rather than linear slides – ahhhh
• Rotation – oooh
• YouTube insertion – ahhh

Well you get the idea with that…  So, anyway, I was quickly sold on almost exclusively creating and presenting prezis. And didn’t they go down well?! For one thing,  I felt that I was having to do less work (after I’d spent the time figuring out how it worked) as the prezis seemed to be prompting more intrigued and engaged audiences and a higher appreciation of my presentations. Yes there were one or two people who complained of feeling queasy but they were very much in the minority, the majority of feedback was along the lines of “Awesome presentation!” and “What software are you using? I’ve gotta get me some of that!” I should explain that I chiefly present to MBAs.

However, a few weeks ago I found myself in a bit of a position. I’d been ill, away at a two-day course, and had a ridiculously full email inbox and simply didn’t have the time to create a prezi for a presentation to the MBA class the very next day on research methods.

The Holy Grail, yesterday.

The presentation was a big deal to me as it was one of those ‘Holy Grail sessions’ , so called by me as it was embedded into the curriculum and also involved:

• a faculty member being present giving their seal of approval
• compulsory attendance
• and, at the end of the presentation, the launch of a week-long information skills project that I’d had the freedom to devise myself

It doesn’t get much better than that does it? Well in fact it did as I had a rather wonderful extra resource on hand – the multi-talented Ange Fiztpatrick just before the end of her time as my maternity deputy (if you ever get the chance to work with Ange seize on it with both hands – she’s bloody amazing!)  I was planning that we would teach the session together. But as I’ve said, there was no time to create a prezi, so… I had no choice but to reluctantly fall back on PPT, using the tried and tested ‘full screen images with two or three words of text model’.  Between us we planned the session from scratch, sourced appropriate images and put it all together in a couple of hours or so. We felt criminally underprepared but had no choice but to go with it and sat together in my office to have a runthrough. Right from the word ‘go’ the presentation just zinged. Despite the fact that we were both tired (and my voice was steadily getting worse) we were really bringing the information alive, playing off each other, bringing in quips and asides and at the end of it we were frankly pretty confident about how it would go.

'The Loife' demonstrating stool technique

The following day we arrived for the lecture clutching stools that we’d just filched from the Computing Lab and proceeded to set-up for the session. We had decided to perch on stools, not because we wanted to look like a boyband ready to stand up at the key-change, but because when we ran through the presentation in my office it had been more like a sedentary, almost cosy, fireside chat and we didn’t want to mess with what had felt like a winning formula. Anyway, the next 50 minutes in Lecture Theatre 3 stands without a doubt as one of the most relaxed, hilarious, interactive and rewarding moments of my career thus far. It was like the scales had fallen from my eyes. This was teaching rather than presenting. And to my surprise the PPT helped with that, and not because of the fact that it was PPT but because we were using it as more of a backdrop. The focus instead was on the teaching and the conversation with the audience. I knew of course that this was the theory but had never experienced it so clearly in practice, perhaps because I’d always had too much time to prepare before and had subconsciously chosen not to be so brave.

The multi-talented Ange with her business journal of choice (photo © Rachel Marsh)

There’s no two ways about it, Ange and I were pretty euphoric after the session, we had been more loudly applauded than we could ever have anticipated, there were smiles all round, the faculty member was thrilled and many students came up to us before we left just to say a personal ‘thank you’. One of them even told us that it was one of the best lectures they’d attended on the MBA so far!

Why am I telling you this? Well not because I want to make it clear how fab Ange and I are as presenters, but because like the kid from South Park, we learned something that day: to concentrate more on the delivery, the conversation, the connection, the humour, and much, much less on which platform was the best to use and how to make it do clever things.

The fact that the session could have worked equally as well with a prezi was perfectly highlighted by the fact that one of the students came up to me at the end and said “I love the presentation software you use when you teach us. What is it?” My reply was: “Errr, that was PowerPoint, but before now I’ve been presenting to you with Prezi.” Student: “Oh, right, well, that was a great lecture anyway.” You see the platform hadn’t mattered at all.

Missing a trick? Faculty and admin staff induction

Conducting a 1-2-1 induction with a new member of faculty and talking about databases with several administrative staff who were completely in the dark about our offering has led me to question this week whether here at Judge we’re currently missing a trick when it comes to informing new (or existing) staff about our library and information services. Rather than just blogging about what I thought about this I decided to ascertain from my peers within business librarianship whether they were doing the same things as me or adopting alternative approaches. The responses I received were both interesting and illuminating…

common themes
Of the 30 or so responses I received, common themes emerged.  1-2-1 induction/initial training session with new academics and a tour of the library for those that request them seem to be the norm. The route to these sessions/tours was quite different though, being either automatically timetabled in by HR, or offered by library staff after scans of lists from HR or receiving ‘new starters’ information by email. For those faculty being offered optional (rather than timetabled) sessions this was largely coordinated via emails containing relevant links and information. It appears that take-up of this offer varies widely. Some people cited very low take-up, others cited 75%, suggesting that this may be very much dependent on choice of email wording and content.

the 1-2-1
Of the 1-2-1 session itself it seems to mainly be used  to introduce the range of e-resources and bibliographic software and tools that are available, as well as being an opportunity to highlight the teaching and training on offer. Several respondents mentioned that they made a point of establishing the faculty member’s research interests ahead of time in order to tailor the session and that finance faculty appear to be more engaged and interested. Session length varies from 20 minutes to 2 hours, but the average appears to be 30-45 minutes.

paperless?
I was interested to find that we are divided on the value of printed guides and handouts, some citing their value, others believing they are unread and a waste of time to produce. Having said that, those in favour stated that guides should be short and to the point.

the personal touch
Several respondents expressed the importance of making any contact with faculty as personal and warm as possible with a view to long-term professional relationships and collaboration. There was also active recognition of the fact that faculty coming away from the 1-2-1 feeling that library staff were helpful and could make their teaching and research lives easier was the most important outcome. Some respondents talked about happily knocking on faculty doors and introducing themselves, while others felt guilty for not knocking on doors or being proactive enough.

group inductions/refreshers
Group inductions for new staff at which library staff get a chance to introduce themselves and their services seem to occur less than 1-2-1′s. Some business librarians are also engaged in group refresher sessions for existing staff, but again in low numbers.

administrative staff
Most respondents do not offer inductions to admin staff as a matter of course, instead this only appears to be at the instigation of said staff member or if they are picked up on by library staff as particularly student-facing and therefore potentially useful in pointing students to what we offer. However, there was common agreement that we  don’t do enough for admin staff and that, as I myself felt, we are probably are missing a trick in this regard. Some respondents described these staff as more receptive and interested than faculty, others mentioned that we could be giving them help with their day-to-day work  and that they don’t know what is available or, moreover, that they are eligible to use it. This has been my experience here, with one admin staff member telling me that they had always thought “the library wasn’t for them”. I was a bit ashamed that they felt like this and I am now determined to turn that perception around by opening up and offering more to this forgotten or largely ignored user group. Not only should this assist them with their work but it should also make a difference to internal understanding of what it is we have and what it is we do – after all we can never have enough library advocates can we?

Thanks to everyone who responded to my email

The Holy Grail

The Cambridge Libraries Conference was held earlier today. My modest contribution was to the poster display. Our poster related to the phenomenal amount of teaching myself and my Deputy carried out in Michaelmas Term and our approach to curriculum integration in general. While the text is all mine, the poster was designed by our talented part-time library assistant, Dan Taylor, who also works as a graphic designer. Useful eh!

I’ll shut up now and let the poster do the rest of the talking… (you may have to squint a bit)

That same old induction problem…

Its that time of year again and that same old question of how much or how little to say in student inductions. This year here at Judge Business School with our new MBA class we’ve decided to try something completely different to the usual 45 minute lecture theatre presentation come lecture, followed by library tour. Not only are we increasing the length of the session to 2 hours (plus an essential 15-minute break in the middle) so we can demonstrate our key databases but we’re also making as much as we can hands-on.

I remain to be convinced that is the best approach given that its their first week and many of them will be quite understandably distracted by other things, but this does respond directly to comments from last year’s MBAs that they wanted more than just a snapshot of the databases at the top of the year and I’m never going to turn down allocated teaching time.

Another important change is the decision to bill the first session as ‘Business Databases’ rather than ‘Library Induction’ in order to see if the level of enthusiasm and engagement is affected in any way.

Glazed and/or pleading faces will seal the fate of this new initiative!

Andy

Inspector Morse and faculty/librarian relationships

Last week I attended CILIP’s Umbrella conference in Hatfield. It was a bit of a flying visit, with my primary purpose being to present a talk on faculty engagement, specifically with respect to information literacy and librarians teaching. I’m always looking for a hook to hang my presentations on and this time I chose the TV series Inspector Morse, because like Morse and Lewis  I’ve spent the majority of my working life dealing with the foibles and idiosyncracies of academics at Oxford University.

My rather tongue-in-cheek presentation asked whether Oxford academics were really as awkward, pompous, sex-mad, disturbed and murderous as Morse would have us believe. I also mused that some faculty I have worked with would probably have rather cooperated with a murder enquiry than with the idea of librarians teaching alongside them in the classroom! I also stopped off along the way to see how I’d developed as a teacher and how with confidence and increased freedom, arising from the trust and support I had gained from relationships with faculty, I had been able to provide ‘point of need’ teaching  to which students have truly responded.

I was lucky enough to be joined by two other preseners Carol Webb and Chris Powis for this ‘Information Skills for Life’ hour and despite the relative absence of communication between us before the event, I felt that our respective presentations gelled nicely. The main reason for this was that we all agreed on the importance of emotional engagement and the building and developing of relationships with faculty/teaching staff. One of my slides was headed ‘Relationship’ in a large point size and was there to prompt me to hold forth about the importance of putting all the theory that has been expounded about faculty/librarian collaboration to one side and just getting out there and building relationships with faculty, by: having coffee with them; passing the time of day; and essentially treating them as fellow human beings! Chris took this one stage further by getting the audience to consider in small groups how we see faculty, and how we think they see librarians, and ultimately drawing out the fact that we hold on to a mass of prejudices and preconceptions that are very effective barriers to the development of relationships. He also commented that if he had used slides – the clever sod dispensed with a presentation and got the audience to do all the work (only joking Chris!), then he would have put the word relationship in a bigger point size than even I had done.

Part of my presentation dealt with encountering a situation where you might be starting from scratch at your workplace on the faculty relationship/teaching integration front, as I had done here in Cambridge, back in Autumn 2007. At Oxford, I’d had the cushion of having known the same faculty for years, first at Templeton College and then Said Business School, at Cambridge they didn’t know me from Adam.  My main approach at Cambridge  (see slide above) was as follows:  1. To make it clear from the outset  (as early as interview) that I was seeking to teach and train not simply to curate and protect; 2. To shamelessly declare my teaching credentials by referring to the fact that I had received a teaching award from Oxford University for my lecture/workshop series on effective literature searching; 3. To engage with faculty by embarking on a faculty consultation exercise – partly to find out what their information needs were, but also to make my agenda, abilities and interests known; 4. To ensure that via meetings, email and other forms of communication that I was always ‘on message’ about the potential for the library service’s teaching role and its value and relevance; 5. Identifying latent teaching opportunities e.g. the plagiarism problems at Cambridge which strengthened importance of our provision of plagiarism avoidance lectures; 6. And finally, of course, actually proving myself to some of them as a teacher by making that initial teaching conribution so that faculty are reassured that this was something that I could do and be trusted with. The result of the above approach was that after only 18 months I was teaching on all programmes.

Returning to the question of prejudices, and indeed stereotypes, I took each of the typical characteristics of the faculty as portrayed in Morse in turn and commented on how this tied in with my own experiences. The message being that, of course, reality is far more palatable, surprising and interesting than fiction. There were a few imponderables, such as whether Oxford faculty were sex-mad. I revealed that I have only been propostioned once (a fact of which Chris was profoundly jealous!) but didn’t really like to say whether this qualified  the faculty member in question as ‘sex-mad’. However, I did conclude that as I had  not stumbled across any dead bodies during my time at Oxford we could probably cross murderous off the list of attributes!

Andy