2nd Plenary: Dr. Richard Besser
Dr. Richard Besser, a pediatrician and health correspondent for ABC News, was our 2nd Plenary speaker this year at the MLA conference. Ditching the traditional PowerPoint slides, Dr. Besser focused on the power of narrative storytelling to engage us. With a rich history of fascinating roles, his narratives were great for this session. In particular, he reviewed the unique circumstances of his 6-week stint as interim CDC Director in 2009. As the Obama Administration was handling its transition into office, Dr. Besser found himself covering this short period of time before final position appointments were made. Unfortunately, pandemics don’t necessarily abide these same timelines, so Dr. Besser found himself having to manage the swine flu outbreak. Despite the best laid plans and ideal scenarios, swine flu did not stay on a small isolated island near Java, but quickly became a serious issue that threatened the world. To help *accurately* inform the public, he choose to do as many direct interviews and debriefs with the public and with the media as possible. His approach was validated after a weird and distorted interview with Fox News (his assessment & Jon Stewart’s analysis [checkout Snoutbreak '09 series], not mine).
Returning to his original theme, Dr. Besser brought us to the present and discussed how he approaches his current role as Health Correspondent for ABC News. With segments as short as 30 seconds or as long as a minute and 30 seconds, he has the challenge of creating engaging, informative pieces about current health topics. Narrative is the answer. For examples, he discussed his piece about pneumonia in Kibera, Africa and the increase rate of ACL injuries occurring in children.
Questions about his work, use of information, etc were pretty normal from this crowd. Gasps filled the room when he said UpToDate was his first tool when working as a pediatrician. While he doesn’t have much say over ABC segments, he is happy to have a Twitter conversation about information resource issues. For those interested in learning more or engaging with Dr. Besser, you can participate in the Twitter chat on Tuesdays at 1PM EST.
Consultation as teaching space: lessons learned from the Writing Center
For the last two years, some of my librarian colleagues have served as Writing Center fellows, including completing the semester-long course and apprenticeship and serving as tutors for a year. Here are some findings from the project thus far:
- As Writing Center fellow, got to see more assignments, class work, and product
- Students sign up and fill out form describing details, such as topic, issues they think they have, etc., and tutor sees that
- Tutors also have access to see other report forms, debrief forms from all previous consults student has had in the Center
- WConline software used for appointment management and was created by writing centers
- For students, Writing Center consults are a “Show your work” opportunity
- For us in the Sciences, the latest edition of the Writing Center’s newsletter notes that 41% of UWC appointments by Major is Science – http://www.jmu.edu/uwc/site_images/newsletter/uwc_mar_apr13.pdf
- Prof recommendation is highest rate of reason for attending Writing Center, but some spikes in usage after Writing Center tutor comes for in-class presentation
- Writing 346 class (tutor training course)
- background theory about tutoring, write, research, revise
- students have to go in and get tutored
- apprenticeship to current tutor
- students do research on their own within this area
- guest speakers from overlapping services
- this class does a good job deploying peer leaders and mentors
- What does the Writing Center think of plagiarism detection tools?
- Not super useful since they are usually after submission – no time to engage learning
- Tutors are not seeing the SafeAssign reports come in to consultation sessions
- Discuss flipping that model of plagiarism detection tool usage, as noted in ILI listserv discussion. In short, students can use TurnItIn to get feedback, especially since it now offers grammar highlight support, prior to final submission, giving them time to reflect on their writing or consult with a professor or tutor to understand what was wrong
- Writing studies is doing work on how students use and don’t use sources – something we share co-curricular space/transdisciplinary space
- Writing Center has done a writing design workshop but they are only getting new faculty – have downloadable 14 point guidelines available on site about this
- Personal statements and job application essays are some of the more challenging writing assignments, but also more freeing outside of the grading model
- The Writing Ctr has a lot of writing in groups come for consultations
Countway Library of Medicine
Countway Library of Medicine, a set on Flickr.
Awesome tour of the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine and the History of Medicine Research Center. The tour was a great way to explore and understand of the unique and shared challenges of this unique space that serves Harvard Medical School, Boston Medical Library, and Massachusetts Medical Society.
Wikimapping
While not directly library related, I think my local bike path comment project is pretty sweet. I would be interested to see how people might work with the tool in a campus research setting. I also wonder how/where will this information be stored for future access.
Communities of Conscious Design: Planting and Pruning Your Way to an Effective Online Community webinar notes
Host: Steven Bell, Blended Librarian, 2012-2013 President of ACRL
Speaker: Naomi House, Founder of INeedALibraryJob (INALJ) – Twitter – Facebook – LinkedIn
Here are my notes from the conversation:
- INALJ = +1million views, 871 found jobs
- INALJ = community of +180 volunteers
- INALJ = wanting to have and share jobs all in one location
- runs 2-3 job-related articles per day, written by many
- being regular when updating a community
- need to clarify boundaries – ex: no trolling, no comment features, able to block (if/when necessary)
- surprises – started as jobs page, but has morphed into community space
- blended librarians on the job hunt
- Keywords for job searching feature (hint: it’s below the PayPal button)
- Ex: User Experience title is new for us, but also often new for the organizations looking for them
- includes many other jobs beyond “librarian” – we need to be adaptable
- Keywords for job searching feature (hint: it’s below the PayPal button)
- this is one service – you ought to be signed up for listservs or Indeed.com
- government contractors tend to just market jobs to local library school listservs, local communities
- concerns about having more tech/non-library-focused jobs may partially stem from the perceived devaluation of more traditional positions
- #Altac – alternative academic movement for those in the Humanities who aren’t able to find tenure track jobs – similarly, #altac is a growing community to help those reconsider their career path
- data is hot right now
- training, training, training – interactive design is a skill universities, corporations, and others need
My takeaways
- not what i expected, perhaps because i’ve been spending so much time considering developing online communities for online programs
- happy to find an awesome project like this – complements the broader undefined work I’ve done with doing more job posting and promotion for Health Sciences Librarianship through MAC Messages
- another resource to refer to the many library folks I end up finding throughout the funny journey that is life
Next webcast
- Open Access movement and collaboration of departments (traditional and untraditional) in mid-May-ish (don’t quote me on this)
TurnItIn – what a difference 12 years make
Back in the day, as a freshmen in Humanities Core, I first was introduced to TurnItIn. For a mass group of +400 students writing similarly themed papers, the originality check was a no-brainer effort to curb plagiarism at my alma mater.
12 years and several plagiarism conversations with students later, I find my new institution revisiting TurnItIn. There are several more bells and whistles, but here are some of the highlights:
- General notes
- option to allow or disallow students from seeing originality report
- no compulsory deposit of student papers into TurnItIn repository
- filtering options to exclude checking of quoted items, of bibliographies, or certain limits of words (don’t check things less than 5 words, for example)
- GradeMark – a more streamlined editing tool for faculty
- auto-text for common mistakes (missing commas, etc.) using QuickMarks
- voice comments (up to 3 minutes)
- standard rubrics pre-loaded
- can import custom writing rubrics
- can upload and share common rubrics across department or institution
- QuickMarks analytics can help you track frequency and type of comments provided throughout a semester
- ETS e-rater grammar feedback
- automatically enters QuickMarks before you even review the paper
- PeerMark – peer editing tool
- peers can be manually or randomly assigned automatically
- peer reviewers can be blinded or unblinded from the paper submitter
Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us
Corrections Appended: February 26, 2013
1. Routine Care, Unforgettable Bills
When Sean Recchi, a 42-year-old from Lancaster, Ohio, was told last March that he had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, his wife Stephanie knew she had to get him to MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Stephanie’s father had been treated there 10 years earlier, and she and her family credited the doctors and nurses at MD Anderson with extending his life by at least eight years.
NEJM & Open Access
The February 28 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine provides several free full-text articles about scholarly communications, particularly open access publishing. Articles in the issue include:
‘Apps for Healthcare Professionals’ collection now available from iTunes
With so many dozens of apps available, determining the key content areas can be challenging. Similar to the other developments in the Essential Apps categories, Apple has now created an Apps for Healthcare Professionals section within iTunes. iMedicalApps has done a nice overview and review of the collection.
