Association of General & Liberal Studies
September 19-21, 2013
Indianapolis

Main reason for going, to present with Cluster One Coordinator, Gretchen Hazard - The Googlepedia Grows Up:  Information Literacy Grows Up In General Education.  We were discussing where JMU's GenEd program began with IL initiatives and where we are now.  We discussed the updated Madison Research Essentials Toolkit, the Madison Research Essentials Skills Test (MREST) evolution and importantly, how we are getting a lot more sophisticated with using assessment data to make pedagogical improvements.

But, really, they loved the tutorial page and videos. I hope they are helpful beyond our campus.

The plenary speaker for this conference was Jay Howard, Dean of Liberal Arts @Butler University.  He is a sociologist and he has done much work on student classroom participation.  He talked about the significance of day one of class - if the professor is talking/the students are not.  For librarians, I took that to mean that if you do all the talking in the first five minutes of your traditional one-shot, you've probably already lost them.  He also discussed the concepts of "paying civil attention" - students are gifted at pretending to be paying attention when they really aren't and "consolidation of responsibility" which means if you have one particularly vocal student, the rest feel absolved because s/he said what I would have.  I've already used what I learned here in a class I did on Tuesday evening, it worked.  I could barely get them to stop talking.

There was much discussion here around the recently published Judging Judgements of Quality document recently published by AGLS.  I have to admit, I wish they had given us this to read pre-conference because I would have felt a little more prepared to hear the discussion.  I have a copy of that document, I'm happy to share.  It isn't appearing on their website quite yet.

The other sessions I attended had much to do with General Education program revision as we've been doing this in GE since their APR was completed in 2011.  Very useful was a panelist from Butler who described a campus-wide effort to discuss GE program revision.  My favorite line "there is a big difference between a diversity of perspectives and an exchange of good ideas."  Another session I attended discussed, GET THIS, a state-wide SHARED General Education Outcomes-Based Model.  Meaning, institutions from all over the state came together to agree on a shared list of outcomes for GE program.  Granted, it was North Dakota and they only have 18 institutions, but still.  This was driven largely by students transferring between institutions and needing successfully transfer credits for GE course work between institutions.  As the JMU transfer class gets bigger (it was up to 1000 this fall), we'll have more discussions about this on our campus.

Indianapolis is a cool town, though I didn't see much of it.  The hotel we were in was a converted train station/yard.  There were actual train cars that had been converted into "rooms," but my favorite was the station/reception room, shown here decked out for a wedding.