Three academic years, three different tools and finally a web content creation tool that paralegals can use to make an online portfolio.

First, there was Weebly– extremely easy to use with it’s drag and drop formatting. The wide variety of themes appealed to the paralegal students (especially when compared with PBwiki 1.0– the other option I gave them at the time). I thought Weebly was a winner, but after two semesters of glitches, site crashes and page freezings I knew that Weebly was too wobbly to do the job. Students would get frustrated with the slow uploads and frequent page-stalls and I’d run around during our workshops reloading pages, switching browsers and breaking a sweat. I’m sure part of the problem was the lousy bandwidth in the Library combined with the laptop computer processors, but this was the first (and often the last) exposure to this tool that the students had and if I lost them in the first 20 minutes, the whole process was a waste.

Last year, after a lot of asking around, I decided to give WordPress a go. With a little manipulation, the blogging tool could easily become a collection of static web pages– perfect for an online portfolio. If I steered the students toward the single column templates, the site would barely look like a blog at all and the custom-header option was still available.

My over-familiarity with WordPress obviously made me over-estimate the ease with which this could all be done. WordPress, even the free web-version, is a powerful tool with a lot of management options. Although any student who has ever blogged or set up a Facebook page could probably figure out how to create a portfolio using WordPress, I didn’t find many of these students in the paralegal classes. The classes are never more than 9 students, but out of those 9 the range of computer-comfort goes from digital native to digital Dorothy-just-landed-in-Oz.

Where students working with Weebly became frustrated, WordPress students got angry. There were too many buttons, too many options, too many steps. The steps, even when spelled out, were not intuitive and the process overly complicated. After the first session, I created a guide to creating a portfolio using WordPress that went through every possible action they might want to take– adding pages, editing pages, moving pages, uploading documents, inserting photos, managing privacy. But it was all too much.

I tried WordPress one more semester, using the Step by Step guide during the hands-on workshop, but the students were overwhelmed and seemed to simultaneously despair in the face of all the options and rage at the limitations. While they wondered why they would ever upload music or install surveys or solicit comments on their site, they couldn’t understand why the formatting tools were so limited. They couldn’t get their resumes to look the way they did in Word, WordPress seemed to dictate the layout of the page, there were not font options. So long, WordPress.

Today we tried Google Sites. I had used Sites for the Step by Step guide to WordPress and for teaching my Facebook workshop and wondered why it wouldn’t work for online portfolios. I was certain there was a good reason– all my other options had some obvious flaw or a significant weakness or foible that made itself evident once I got it in front of the students.  Google Sites had the advantage of already being what I wanted it to be (a website creation tool, unlike WordPress) and I had been using it, with success, for a couple years now.

Google Sites worked fairly well for paralegal students creating an online portfolio.  Over half of the students were able to jump right in and had either no questions for me at all, or had questions about advanced features.  Initial sticking points for some students included Google’s new account creation process (Google’s a little too subtle in telling you that your URL is already being used or that your password is too short.  Also, I absolutely hate Google’s Captcha tests.  I wish they would use reCAPTCHA like everyone else).

A couple students also had problems after creating their accounts– when they tried to get back to http://sites.google.com, they would get a Forbidden error.  Each of these students was using IE, and when I switched them over to Firefox, the problem was solved.  I’m not sure what the issue was, but it was the kind of hang-up that has plagued this project since the beginning– getting started with these tools is not difficult but various roadblocks make it seem so, especially to those students who are technology resistant.

Overall, however, Google Sites was a success.  It’s reliable, it never froze or failed to update changes.  Themes are many and varied and it does a remarkably good job at maintaining the look of formatted text pasted into its pages.  It even neatly solves the inevitable security/privacy concerns by allowing users to restrict access to those viewers they invite.

At the end of the session, students wanted to know when my office hours were, suggesting that they assumed they’d have questions for me.  I hope they’ll make use of the latest Step by Step guide I created, though few seemed to turn to it in class.  Next month, I meet with them again to help them insert their photos and with luck, some of them will have continued to work with their Sites.  I hope Google Sites continues to prove itself to be the tool for the paralegal students’ online portfolio.  I’m quite tired of trying something new every year.

We’re a little late hopping on the National Information Literacy Awareness Month train, but after an official announcement from our dean on the Library blog and to faculty and staff via email, I thought that de-lingofying the term might make a good Library Secret.  Nearly a decade of restaurant work (in every front-of-the-house position from host to server, emergency bartender to manager) made me fairly conscientious about industry-speak and how it alienates the customer/patron.  Using service industry lingo rather takes the dining experience– you want a cozy table by the fireplace on your anniversary, not a two-top in section 12.  In libraries it perpetuates the prickly stereotype of the librarian as guardian of shrouded knowledge– come to the altar of information and we shall make you literate.  If you’re worthy.  Meh.

It’s ridiculously easy to get caught up in the language of a profession, especially if you spend all of your free time in committees hashing out things like information literacy learning outcomes and the pedagogy of online reference instruction.  Unless you have patient friends and family members who allow you to talk about critical thinking skills and assessment practices at them, then you probably don’t talk about library stuff to people outside of libraries that often.

But, in theory, we’re talking about library stuff to non-librarians all the time– our patrons, our students, our faculty and staff.  How are we expressing these ideas– ideas that are even more important to them than they are to us– to them?  In words and phrases that make the concepts immediate and accessible or in the jargon of our profession?

As for the secret handshake…  I’ll save that for later exploration.  Of course, I’m always inspired by the freemasons, but perhaps a hand signal would be better.  Something that would facilitate across-the-room-acknowledgment of shared knowledge and perspective.   My classmates and I had developed one in library school, but sadly, it looked a lot like this:

The "L" here stands for LIBRARIAN

image:  http://blogs.smh.com.au/lifestyle/asksam/archives/2008/08/warning_signs_youre_dating_a_l.html

Our superstar student worker, Dave Hoffman, and our Resident Librarian, Karla Aleman, have managed to make a library service video that is both informative and entertaining. I suspect dark magic, but I’m not complaining. The video is ridiculously awesome.

We just wrapped up our two week, 29 session Library Orientation experiment and now it’s time to gather the evaluations, compile the statistics and report out.  Will I use a spreadsheet?  A handout?  A PowerPoint presentation?

After seeing The Unquiet Library’s August Monthly Report, I think I’ll use Animoto.

I’m rethinking Library Secrets this semester– there’s going to be a lot less paper, but I hope a lot more online content.  Perhaps I’ll even get around to that Library Secrets podcast I’ve been dreaming about?

In the meantime, the first Library Secret of the semester:  Your Library Card Says VIP on it Somewhere.

Back To School Day 2

Not a very clear screen shot– it reads :

Web site unavailable

As of Tuesday, Aug. 25 at 1:30 p.m., the college’s web site is unavailable. We appreciate your patience during this interruption.

Yesterday was the first day of classes and in addition to answering the usual “Where is is my classroom?” and “Do you have my textbook?” questions we played Help Desk for the College’s new registration/records software.

This was the screen that a lot of students saw when they tried to register for classes, check their schedules or pay their tuition:

Without the FAIL, of course. But, yes our registration/records system has a concurrent user limit.

We did a lot of hand holding yesterday.

Where’s the coldest place in the Library?

2009 Fall Orientation poster

Originally uploaded by Library Secrets

Instead of coming up with a clever name for our very first round of fall library orientations, we’re just sticking with the the straight-forward name “Fall Library Orientations” and jazzing it up with both Library Secrets and last year’s Connect with Your Library theme. Since I was in charge of general promotion and poster creation, we’ve got Library Secrets written all over this thing– public domain photos, whispering, shushing, the works. The “Connect with Your Library” bit really comes from not having a good logo.

Poster design was the easy part– though “Free Cookies” was a sticking point. I really wanted to offer free coffee, but with our library cafe plus the logistics of offering fresh, hot coffee three times a day to who knows how many (or how few) students, we decided cookies were the best option. Next step: training the librarians to teach the 50-minute orientation sessions and getting students in the door…

I’m pretty sure Dorothy Gambrell of Cat and Girl must have heard the same cringe-worthy NPR story that I did when ALA was in town.