ALISE17 : Juried Papers (session 4.3)

Jessica Hochman - #teachertweets: This is what democracy looks like
@jessicahochman @dorisasantoro @teachertweetspi

Where can teacher talk about their moral concerns?

Q: Who are your activist allies in your school?
A: They are all on Twitter.

How are teachers developing community on twitter, per John Dewey?

John Dewey's concept of community: homophily - people in communities share traits and values. Interact if egoistic and communal tweets make twitter interesting.  Importance of strong and weak ties.

Twitter as democratic space.  Twitter is social and user-driven.  It is a place of dialogue and connection.  Twitter can be a megaphone.

Teachers use twitter for professional development and to create personal learning networks (PLN). 

They have looked at 1.2 millions tweets to date. This study uses 550K.

Looked at words used and words not used.

They found five distinctive communities including:

• Classroom as locus of control
• Intersectional and instructional justice: a lens of race, class and gender
• Civic and democratic justice
• Communicative action

They looked at the network connections between different groups, and who the connectors were.  

What practices are people using to engage with others who do not have the same values.

Conclusions:

• Teachers are creating demographic communities on twitter.
• They are talking about their work and what it means to them.
• They are using moral language.

Amy VanScoy - Listening to a diverse community to create an inclusive understanding of reference and information service

Librarians of color make up about 12% of the profession.  What is the experience of reference work for this community.  They did a small study with 8 participants with a variety of ethnic identities and library environments.  All had reference experience.

They used interpretive phenomenological analysis for their study.  Qualitative, exploratory. Interview-based methodology.

They both interviewed the participants and found it useful to have a multi-ethic team looking at the data.

Master Themes:

• Uniqueness and difference - librarians of color saw this as a positive and negative (e.g., micro aggressions)
• Broad range of professional skills - including counseling and listening 
• Messiness and beauty of the human interaction - the emotions, challenges of communication, the beauty of relationships 
• Complex job in a web of outside forces - trying to do the work in the web of outside forces, e.g., time, staffing challenges, etc.
• Learning, growth and change - excited about learning through the work and also important professionally 

 To create an inclusive understand of RIS (reference and information service):

• Role model, insiders counselor
• Comfort and trust
• User development as an information seeker

More information about this study at http://www.amyvanscoy.net/ivlc

They are interested in exploring this topic from the user perspective.

Noted that participants were not in a specific geographic area.

Kyle Jones - Learning analytics in the libraries and the emergence of professional ethics conflicts

Research with Dorothea Salo

What is learning analytics?  He used a definition from George Siemens (2012).

Why use learning analytics? Economic, political/academic,e.g.,increasing graduation rates.  There are goals for th students such as personalization, prediction, and intervention.

Learning analysitcs is a data driven practice.  Dataveillance on campus.  You look for relationships and patterns, and develop hypotheses.

Problem 1: the burden of surveillance

• All students may be equally surveillance,
• Some students may become the target of intense surveillance, e.g., student athletes.

Problem 2: the distribution of benefits

• Whose interests are served and who benefits?
• Benefits may not redound to students.
• Benefits may not be distributed equally.

Problem 3: data politics

• No data is raw.
• Data empowers and disenfranchises
• Data analytics is not a panacea

Problem 4: student privacy

• Because we can doesn't mean we should
• Privacy helps to build relationships
• Privacy provides a space for making and learning from mistakes
• Privacy is a condition that is necessary for intellectual freedom

A significant shift in library evaluation 

A shift from student experience to student achievement 

A move towards data scientism 

This means that libraries need to collect, store and analyze data.  Academic libraries are connecting their systems and data to the larger institutional repositories.

This could move us from anatomized data to data that is not, which allows for specific interventions. Do library specific interventions create more library usage that is impactful on the students?

There are important intersections with great ALA Code of Ethics: intellectual freedom and intellectual privacy.

Does this dataveillance live in harmony with our library ethics?  No.  We may see contexts/reasons that are allowing us to rational our use of dataveillance.