Employers Want Workplace-Ready Grads, But Can Higher Ed Deliver? | From the Bell Tower

Posted on March 20, 2014 by Stephanie L. Gross, Librarian, Electronic Reserves & Scholarly Communication | Leave a comment

By Steven Bell on March 19, 2014 1 Comment

steven bell newswire Employers Want Workplace Ready Grads, But Can Higher Ed Deliver? | From the Bell Tower A new survey reveals a wide gap between provosts and business leaders when it comes to judging college students’ readiness for the workplace. What can academic librarians take away from the controversy?

As the cost of college tuition has skyrocketed in the past decade, students and parents expectations for a graduate’s state of career readiness have grown. And as the job market continues to offer limited opportunity for college graduates, students look to build any and every personal advantage. These factors find their way into the curriculum in many ways, from writing intensive courses that address business correspondence to the development of specialized certificates that students can tack on to their diplomas to show they have workplace skills. While there is pressure on colleges and universities to do a better job of readying students for the workplace and job placement, there is a fine line between a college education and vocational preparation. If the results of a new survey of business leaders is an indicator, then higher education if failing quite spectacularly at preparing students for the workplace. Read more…

Avoiding Career Cardiac Arrest

Posted on March 17, 2014 by Stephanie L. Gross, Librarian, Electronic Reserves & Scholarly Communication | Leave a comment

Have you heard of the new tag on the Internet? It’s tl;dr – which is Web-speak for “too long; don’t read.” While it’s most often used to describe an article that challenges today’s gnat-like attention span, the critique actually reflects a much larger challenge. As one columnist recently described it in The New York Times, “The problem is one of limited time and energy meeting limitless content.”

We all know that we have to keep up with our professional reading, but in today’s high demand work environment, there’s never enough space to fit it in. As a result, it is, to use a pre-Web acronym, almost always OBE or “overtaken by events.” Like a New Year’s resolution, we start out with good intentions and then life – or rather work – gets in the way. Read more…

Getting Started in the Profession: New Info Pros Share Their Best Career Advice

Posted on March 6, 2014 by Stephanie L. Gross, Librarian, Electronic Reserves & Scholarly Communication | Leave a comment

By Ellen Mehling, Career Development Consultant, METRO

Usually I am the one answering job search and career-related questions; this time I’m the one posing a question to some recent graduates in the first few years of their information professional careers. Here are their responses to “What is the best career advice you’ve received?” Some answers are brief, others are longer, all are excellent.

The best career advice I received was from Pam Rollo, my Pratt [Institute] instructor and SLA-NY Board President at the time. She said, “Your education in this profession does not end at with a graduate diploma from Library School. Technology and the field of Information are continuously evolving. Stay in step of what is happening and aware of what is to come in the future.”

– Clara Cabrera, Research & Reference Specialist – Team Lead, WilmerHale

Conversation by Dmitry Baranovskiy from The Noun Project The best career advice I received was the importance of gaining hands-on experience in a library, even if that means doing volunteer work. This was mentioned to me by several people, but I was helped the most by Dr. Westermann, a former professor of mine from [LIU] Post, who pointed me in the right direction when I reached out to her for advice on where to volunteer. The summer before graduation, I was concerned that, since I was in the Archives and Records Management program and my internship would be taking place in an archive as opposed to a library, I would be missing out on the hands-on experience in a public library that many of my fellow graduates would be getting.

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Left Behind by the EdTech Surge | From The Bell Tower by Steven Bell

Posted on February 20, 2014 by Stephanie L. Gross, Librarian, Electronic Reserves & Scholarly Communication | Leave a comment

By Steven Bell on February 19, 2014 Leave a Comment

There’s loads of activity happening in the world of educational technology. New startups. Dozens of websites for managing learning activities. Apps by the dozens. Academic librarians seem out of the loop.

A few months ago I subscribed to the weekly email newsletter from an organization called EdSurge. It’s subtitled “a weekly newsletter for innovators in education.” Depending on you how you feel about the phrase “innovators in education,” you may be thinking that’s exactly who you are—or maybe you’ve had your fill of innovation talk. While EdSurge does dedicate about half of each issue to the K-12 startup scene, there’s also reporting on the latest educational technology resources and utilities. Some of these are startup websites that may or may not be here for long. What it reveals is a veritable flood of new educational technologies. It leads me to question if academic librarian educators are managing to keep up with all these new resources. Are we taking time to investigate and explore these new tools or are we falling back on our old familiar standbys? Based on some time I spent listening to an instructional technology discussion at ALA Midwinter, I think it might be the latter rather than the former.

Some Old Wine

Admittedly, some of these new instructional technologies are simply variants, or even outright replications, of existing educational technologies. Coggle, for example, is hardly the first web-based mind-mapping tool, but it claims to add new collaborative sharing capabilities. Some replication is expected, because it’s well known in the startup world that the trick is not always being first to the market but being the product in the marketplace that catches on with users (think MySpace and Facebook). However, that strategy is no surefire path to success. Right now a slew of imitators are trying to move into Snapchat’s space, but so far the original is still number one with the user community. Still, while discovering some truly original utilities takes a bit of work, checking out newcomers to an old space may lead to a great new find with better options or performance (think screencasting utilities).

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