Open Access Week 2014 Keynote: Connecting the Dots: Open Access, Open Education and an Open Future Nicole Allen

October 14, 2014

Description:

We live at a time of transition between two worlds — the disconnected, analog past and the wired, digital future. Nowhere is this transition more apparent than in higher education, where cutting-edge technologies regularly mix side by side with centuries-old traditions. Openness is about overcoming barriers and paradigms of the past to unleash the transformative power of freely and fully using information in today’s world. Considerable strides have already been made toward Open Access in the realm of scholarly and scientific research, with millions of papers now available online through Open Access journals or institutional repositories, and hundreds of institutions adopting self-archiving policies. The movement for open education is following suit, expanding the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) to hundreds of thousands of students and saving tens of millions dollars on textbooks. Open Access and OER are essential building blocks for a more open future, and they are stronger together. Nicole’s talk will connect the dots between the areas of overlap and common lessons learned from the movements for Open Access and Open Educational Resources, as well as identify strategies for moving toward a more open future in higher education.

Speaker Bio.:

Nicole Allen is the Director of Open Education at the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). She also currently chairs the Steering Committee of the Open Policy Network. Her work focuses on public policy and engaging and supporting the library community. She worked for seven years at the Student Public Interest Research Groups, organizing grass roots campaigns around issues related to open educational resources. This included a cross-country tour dubbed “The Textbook Rebellion,” resulting in 3,000 university professors signing a commitment to consider adopting open textbooks. Nicole is regarded as one of the leading experts on college textbooks costs. Nicole splits her time between her home in Providence, Rhode Island and SPARC’s headquarters in Washington D.C.

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Dr. Keren Dali – "The Whole of Life," or Why Teach and Study Reading in LIS Programs?

October 14, 2014

Please join us at the iSchool for the upcoming talk, “The Whole of Life,” or Why Teach and Study Reading in LIS Programs? on Tuesday, October 21st, 2014 with Dr. Keren Dali, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Information & Media Studies, Western University.

In her Summoned by Books, F. C. Sayers wrote: “A love of reading encompasses the whole of life: information, knowledge, insight and understanding, pleasure; the power to think, to select, to act, to create – all of these are inherent in a love of reading.” From the vantage point of 21st century LIS, this statement situates the study of reading and the practice of readers’ advisory (RA) as an integral part of information literacy, a staple of libraries’ engagement with user communities, and an essential component of LIS education. Yet, in reality, RA work in libraries is often limited to traditional reading advice, confined to public libraries, and more concerned with guides and displays than with the active engagement of readers. Similarly, courses on reading in LIS programs often focus on genre conventions and RA resources. Both the practice and teaching of RA have been governed by experience-based approaches rather than systematic empirical observations. These no longer suffice. Guiding approaches have to become evidence-based rather than intuitive and rest on rigorous research and interdisciplinary scholarship. Dr. Keren Dali discusses changes in reading-related library work and LIS education based on her published research and current projects.

Keren Dali is at the Faculty of Information & Media Studies, Western University, where she is working on the SSHRC-funded study of Spanish-speaking immigrant readers, comparing reading practices of immigrants in Toronto and NYC. She previously taught for four years at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, winning the inaugural Outstanding Instructor Award in 2013. She is an author and co-author of 22 peer-reviewed publications in the field of LIS, which focus on the reading experience, multicultural communities, immigration, readers’ advisory, and international fiction. She’s is also a co-author of a reference volume Contemporary World Fiction: A Guide to Literature in Translation. Simultaneously, Keren is leading the creation of a web-based bibliography on bibliotherapy, a project funded by the ALA Carnegie-Whitney grant, and researching the application of Carl Rogers’ humanistic approach to education in the context of LIS programs.

October 21st, 2014, 12:00-1:00 pm in the Dodson Room (Rm #302), Irving K. Barber Learning Centre. provided.

IKBLC_Blue_w_text_2014

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Assert, Defend, Take Space: Aboriginal Youth Conference on Identity, Activism and Film

October 8, 2014

Join us for an exciting daylong conference on issues of concern to Aboriginal youth. Artists from the Claiming Space: Voices of Urban Aboriginal Youth exhibition are joined by young filmmakers and activists from across Canada. Building off of the screened films, panelists will discuss themes of youth identity and politics, the objectification of Indigenous women, and environmentalism and youth activism.

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The Discovery of Franklin’s Lost Ship

October 7, 2014

Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by alumni UBC and Vancouver Maritime Museum. In 1845, the two ships of the Franklin Expedition, HMS Erebus and HMS Terror, set sail from England on a mission to explore the Northwest Passage. The following year, the ships became trapped in ice and the entire crew was lost. The fate of Franklin’s crew and ships remained one of Canada’s greatest maritime mysteries until early this September when the Victoria Strait Expedition made the exciting discovery of one of the ships.

This talk is about the UBC alumni who were involved with the 2014 Victoria Strait Expedition. They will share stories about the search efforts and will provide insight about why the Franklin Expedition has captured the Canadian public’s imagination for more than 160 years.

Aaron Lawton, BSF’07, FRCGS – Expedition Leader One Ocean Voyager
Colin Bates, PhD’07 – Expedition Staff, Marine Ecologist
Jimmy Thomson, MA’14 – Journalist (appearing by video)

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Citizen Science: Information, Technology and People

October 7, 2014

Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by the School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies (SLAIS). Citizens have been informally contributing to science for hundreds of years. One of the best known modern examples is of sightings by bird watchers. The Christmas Bird Count, an annual national count in the USA, is one hundred years old and birdwatching activities date back to even earlier times in the UK and parts of Europe. This data informs scientific studies of bird migration and behavior, which in turn provide evidence of habitat loss, and changes in weather patterns.

Citizens contribute to many branches of science from astronomy, to biochemistry, hydrology, biodiversity, personalized medicine, and more. Increasingly digital devices including cell phones, sensors, cameras, databases and associated techniques for storing, retrieving, and communicating data, and many types of social media have been integrated into citizen science and other volunteer practices. In this talk Professor Preece discusses a range of citizen science and volunteer projects focusing on the design of the technologies that support them and suggest some best practices for designing and motivating citizens to use these technologies.

Speaker Bio

Professor Jennifer Preece is a Professor and Dean at the University of Maryland’s iSchool She has researched usability and sociability design issues in online communities. Currently she has several research projects that focus on motivating participation in citizen science. She authored or coauthored three high-impact books: Human-Computer Interaction (1994), On-line Communities: Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability (2000), Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction (2002, 2007, 2011, 2015).

Select Articles and Books Available at UBC Library

Sharp, H., Rogers, Y., & Preece, J. (2007). Interaction design: Beyond human-computer interaction. Chichester; Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. [Link]

Preece, J. (2000). Online communities: Designing usability, supporting sociability. New York: John Wiley.

Preece, J. (2001). Sociability and usability in online communities: Determining and measuring success. Behaviour & Information Technology, 20(5), 347-356. doi:10.1080/01449290110084683. [Link]

Preece, J. (2004). Online communities: Researching sociability and usability in hard to reach populations. AJIS: Australasian Journal of Information Systems, 11(2) doi:10.3127/ajis.v11i2.132. [Link]

UBC Library Research Guides

Learning Technology

Library Resources for Teaching and Learning

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Photo-Poetics / Photo-Politics: Visualizing Social Transformation

October 6, 2014

Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by by Centre A and the UBC Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies (ACAM) program.

This event was held on Thursday, October 16, 2014 at Centre A – 229 E. Georgia St., Vancouver, BC. The exhibition “Jim Wong-Chu: Photographs 1973–1981: People, Place, Politics” consists of nearly 100 black-and-white photographs taken by Jim Wong-Chu during the years he attended Emily Carr, then known as the Vancouver School of Art. The photographs personally selected by the artist from hundreds of shots he took during that period include works from his Pender Street East series, various community photos and protest images from the drive to save BBQ Pork, the democratization of Chinese Benevolent Associations, and the Quebec-Columbia Connector Freeway protests. This three week long exhibition coincides with the LiterAsian Festival of Pacific Rim Asian Canadian Writing and comes on the heels of Jim’s significant contribution of fonds to the UBC library.

Born in Hong Kong in 1949, Jim Wong-Chu came to Canada in 1953 settling in Vancouver in 1961. Witness to and participant in much of the Chinese Canadian activism in the 1970s and early 80s, Jim became one of its documenters. After completing a degree in Creative Writing at UBC in the 1980s Jim published Chinatown Ghosts (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1986), the first book of poetry published by an Asian Canadian. As a persistent activist and cultural producer Jim co-founded the Asian Canadian Writers Workshop, Ricepaper Magazine, Pender Guy Radio, the Asian Canadian Performing Arts Resource (ACPAR), literASIAN: A Festival of Pacific Rim Asian Canadian Writing and the Vancouver Asian Heritage Month Festival. With the sheer girth of his activity Jim has been instrumental in creating a cultural scene inclusive of Asian Canadian talent.

Panelists:

Jim Wong-Chu, Founding Director of the Asian Canadian Writer’s Workshop

Jack Jardine, Film producer and Executive Director, SmartChange

Shelly Rosenblum, Curator of Academic Programs, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, UBC

Glenn Deer (moderator), Department of English, UBC

Relevant Books and Articles at UBC Library

Rosenblum, S., & Spark, B. (2002). A guide to lowering test scores. Leadership [H.W.Wilson – EDUC], 32(1), 30. [Link]

Deer, G., Scholars Portal Books: Canadian Electronic Library, & Canadian Publishers Collection. (1994; 1993). Postmodern Canadian fiction and the rhetoric of authority. Montreal; Buffalo: McGill-Queen’s University Press. [Link]