The Cloud and You

The idea of storing data on a remote computer rather than a local one isn’t really new, despite what some of Steve Jobs’ hagiographers might want to tell you. The idea goes back at least to the middle of the 1990s, and probably has its roots back on the old Multics terminals of the 1970s. What is new, though, is the ease with which you can take advantage of what’s come to be called “The Cloud”.

The purpose behind cloud computing is, in very general terms, to substitute the power of the internet for a local computer. For the end-user, that gets expressed in web-based applications. Instead of an application being installed on one physical device, the application is stored on a remote server, and can be called up from any web browser. The advantages are evident: as long as you’ve got an internet connection, you can connect and work. No more worrying about carrying a flash drive, or not having the right version of a program to open a document (MS office users are nodding their heads with me). Everything is centralized and managed elsewhere. It’s also easier to synchronize data between not only multiple devices, but between different sorts of devices: Macs, PCs, tablets, and even phones. This isn’t to say that cloud computing is without its problems; there are some important philosophical objections to this from, most notably, Richard Stallman. For many users, however, the convenience offered by the cloud will probably outweigh those concerns.

The B.L. Fisher Library already offers a few services which are entirely cloud-based. All Asbury Theological Seminary students, faculty and staff have access to Google Docs. Google Docs is an office suite which handles most simple tasks, like word processing, and a few more complex tasks as well, like creating presentations or making spreadsheets. It’s still not quite as fully featured as Excel is, for example, but Google is adding new features constantly. We also offer Refworks to students and alumni. Refworks is a system for managing your references and citations, and it’s also integrated with Asbury Scholar, so that when you are searching for articles, you can add bibliographic data with an extra click or two. Refworks can then export a formatted bibliography and enter footnotes for you. Additionally, since all your data is stored remotely, you never have to worry about losing your Seminary bibliographies when you change computers, even after graduation.

As technology advances, what services do you think are next to put into the cloud?

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A Leadership Thought From the Director of the Library

Flaum (2005) states that creativity rarely comes from the top, but rather from the people. People rarely accomplish this innovation "while at their computers checking emails, listening to voicemails, or in a production forecast meeting," rather it is accomplished by transcending the daily grind of the workplace (p.48). He goes on to explain that productivity is orderly and has concrete goals and benchmarks that can be measured, but that creativity or innovation is reached when the organization can imagine something that is not a conventional business strategy. To accomplish this, he suggests that leaders must tap into the people of the organization and then be prepared to put the process in motion and get out of the way. In order to accomplish this creativity, a "creative think time" must be created for the group to focus its full attention on what is out there - Selah, a pause or rest from the normal. According to Winston, Selah suggests reflecting at these think points and identifying the behaviors that emerge from these values. He suggests that leaders who engage in open communication with followers for their input work through this process of pausing and reflecting, Selah, leads to “good leaders that are accountable to their followers (Winston, p. 2).” Flaum concludes that leaders should allow "...some chaos -- just enough, anyway, to produce that special something that can make an average company extraordinary" (48).

Please feel free to post thoughts and reflections in the comments.

References

Flaum, S. A. (2005). Listen Up Leaders: Get Out of the Way! Pharmaceutical Executive, 25(4), 48. doi: Article.

Winston, B. (2002). Be a leader for God’s sake.

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What You Need to Know to be a Presenter at a Conference, Part II

The last post talked about recording the content of a presentation. Now, we'll get into what helps a face-to-face presentation be successful beyond the content.

Things to keep in mind if you are doing a face-to-face presentation:

• Bring Paper Copies of the Presentation – This will require you to guess how many people are going to the presentation, but always guess on the high side. It is always better to have extra than not enough.
• Always Face the Audience – If you turn your back on the audience, you may lose them. Instead, take small, backward steps and always face the audience.
• Control an Overenthusiastic Audience Member – As the presenter, you must take charge and let other audience members ask questions.
• Don’t Get Upset – Don’t get upset if only a few people attend your presentation. They may have had a hard choice to make in which presentation to attend. Also, do not get upset if someone leaves in the middle of your presentation. They may have just had an emergency or needed to run to the restroom.
• Be Friendly – Walk around before and after the presentation, shaking hands, meeting people, and being approachable. When you run into them later, politely smile.

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Lastly, when you have completed your presentation, you need to assess the presentation. By understanding your skills, interests, abilities, personality and values, you can prepare for the next opportunity. This is a fundamental premise of “life-long learning” and should be a part of anyone’s plans. Many people think assessment is taking a snapshot of the outcomes to prove whether it was successful or whether it failed. These same people feel they are getting too little, too late, and so do not hold assessment in much regard. Rather, assessment of the presentation can and should be used as an ongoing training tool for presenters to improve ones own effectiveness.
In regards to how to assess, one possible suggestion is to record the presentation and for the presenter to make personal notes of needed future improvements. Another way would be to use evaluations at the end of the session from the audience to evaluate the overall presentation. Making assessment is an integral part of your planning and implementation is essential to be a more effective presenter in the future.

-Paul A. Tippey, Director of Library Services

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What You Need to Know to be a Presenter at a Conference, Part I

As I begin to prepare to work on a presentation I will be giving at the ATLA Annual Conference in June, I am reminded of this document I prepared sometime ago and thought I should share my experiences.
A few months ago a colleague of mine asked if I want to participate in a joint presentation at an online conference. Though this was the first time I had ever been a presenter at an online conference I quickly responded that I would love the opportunity to do a joint presentation with them. We set up our first meeting to read the presentation guidelines and began to work out the presentation. After a few meetings and some brainstorming, we decided that we needed to create a storyboard of what we were going to say. Then we developed the PowerPoint, recorded the audio, and combined the material into a seamless presentation.
Even though there may be a few small differences between face-to-face and online presentations, most of what I have learned applies in both settings. Therefore, in the following reflection I will provide an analysis of the experience and what you need to do to prepare for the future within any type of presentation and then share a few added recommendations for a face-to-face presentation.

• Be Passionate – Be passionate and know the subject matter. It will make the entire process easier and even exciting.
• Get Advice from a few Colleagues - Run the idea of the presentation by a few colleagues on- and off-campus who will be honest with you about your ideas. In our case, we explained how Asbury Theological Seminary encourages spiritual formation through informal and formal uses of technology, but by running the presentation by a few colleagues we were able to keep from stating the obvious and frustrating conference goers who thought they were going to walk away inspired. Also, remember your presentation should not simply be about a problem, but possible solutions to the problem.
• Know Your Audience - Audiences will react to your content in different ways based on several factors. It's important to consider these factors when putting together your content.
• Try out the presentation ahead of time – Trying out the presentation is extremely important but especially when you are recording the presentation. This will allow the presenter the opportunity to expand the presentation or eliminate the unneeded parts. Practice, practice, and more practice. There are so many reasons why a presentation can go south, so make sure you have the content down cold. Know how to deal with all possible problems. Time your presentation - you don’t what to shove a 3 hour presentation into a 45 minute presentation.
• Co-presenting requires mutual respect - In your excitement, do not step on your co-presenters.
• Look and Sound Natural - I learned that when recording, your voice needs to flow and sound natural like when you have a conversation; therefore, make sure to breathe and relax. In face-to-face presentations, I have learned that I have to watch my hand gestures. I have a tendency to wave my hands around too much or to put them behind my back, but I have found that both of these can be distracting to the audience.
• Pictures, Short Texts, and No Distractions - Pictures are really the way to go, but if you have to use text use short text. If you have a lot of text, the audience will begin to read the screen and tune out the presenter. Also, have no distraction within the presentation like moving images or sounds, unless they are essential to the content. Distractions can ruin a presentation. Keep it simple. In this presentation, we used a lot of screen shots of the specific technologies Asbury Theological Seminary used to encourage spiritual formation.
• Be Original – For example, create your own background template. In this case, we used the Asbury Theological Seminary background created by the communications’ office. Using the default powerpoint backgrounds can look uncreative.
• Always leave time for questions and answers – In face-to-face, pause for questions a few times in the middle of the presentation. In the electronic presentation, everyone was given a week to ask questions.
• Always plan on back-up technology - In face-to-face settings, bring your presentation in several different formats and on several different media storage devices such as CD, DVD, a thumb drive, as well as copy on your laptop. In this case, we had to use backup recording equipment to record the presentation, because the initial equipment failed.
• Be Yourself - Act like yourself in presentations. The audience tends to recognize that what I'm saying is what I think, not what I'm trying to sell them.
• It is a lot of Work – Remember that that the amount of work you put into a presentation always shows. Therefore, if you put a lot of work into your presentation, it reflects well on you.

Part II will cover how to conduct yourself in a face-to-face presentation, and the importance of evaluating yourself after presenting.

-Paul A. Tippey, Director of Library Services

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Putting the Library into your hands

One of the most important maxims of the 20th century was something called Moore’s Law. Moore’s Law, in short, stated that two things happen to electronics (technically, to integrated circuits, but it applies elsewhere) over time: they become more powerful and take up less space at the same time. What does this mean? For many of us, it means that the phones we carry are more powerful devices than the laptops of 10 years ago. There’s a quote that arrived on the internet earlier this year that observed that the average mobile phone has more processing power than every NASA mainframe in 1969. We’re at an unprecedented era in human history: the fabled Library of Alexandria could be carried in your pocket! Even if you don’t have a smartphone, or tablet, or any similar device, the ubiquity of the internet has probably changed the way you work and research.

Unfortunately, not too many libraries have kept up with this. Some libraries seem like they’re grudgingly entering the 1990s with how archaic their website design is. We at the B.L. Fisher Library realize that a lot of these advances in technology are great steps in making knowledge more accessible, which in turn will help make you a better scholar. Let’s talk about mobile tools first: how can you grab your cell phone, your iPod touch, or your tablet, and use your Library when you’re on the go?

To begin, we’re redoing our website. It wasn’t as easy as it could have been to get to library resources within oneATS. It was even harder if you tried to browse the mobile site. (just logging in is an adventure if you have a long name!) We’ve switched to a platform called Libguides, which provides us with better styling for mobile sites. If you’ve ever browsed any site that uses Wordpress, you’ll recognize the style instantly. Libguides is also how we’ll tie library resources into the Moodle online courserooms: instead of three pages that, let’s be honest, you probably skipped in your syllabus, you’ll have course-specific pages in Libguides that show you useful tools in the library- and it’s all available on both a desktop and a mobile phone. Some of our database providers, like EBSCO, are also releasing mobile apps which we’re really excited to roll out to scholars.

Next, we’re going to do a better job with our advertising. Students get the sales pitch during NSO, but most are so overwhelmed that they retain so little of it, that they default to their basic idea of what a library is: the big book warehouse. We’re going to try to do a better job advertising what services we offer. To do that, we’re got a facebook fan page set up, and we’ve got a twitter feed which we’ll use for smaller, simple news blasts. In addition to those, we’re implementing something called Libanswers, which gives us something that’s been requested a lot by you: frequently asked questions. These, again, won’t be buried on a website, but will be available, if you want, in the places you already frequent online. Finally, we’ve got this blog set up.

This is to say nothing of the book digitization projects we’ve embarked on, and the ones we’re looking forward to. We’re experimenting with things like QR codes for the future, and potentially enabling an augmented reality experience- it’s a project for down the road, but hopefully it helps demonstrate our commitment to using technology better, as a tool that makes your studies and research easier and more productive.

So what do you think? How would having access to tons of the library’s resources on your phone change how you study and research? Professors, how do you foresee using tools like this to assist in your teaching?

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