See Full Program and Speakers Here: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/LAUC/conference-2011/program

The workshop was very well attended, and the positive and constructive feedback from my colleagues is much appreciated! Click link below to view workshop PowerPoint.

The Art of Looking. Fiat Lux Workshop

Newport Boyscouts. Image from University of California, Irvine Special Collections.

Program information as follows:

Visual literacy experts and practitioners will introduce a working draft of the new Visual Literacy Competency Standards, and discuss implementation strategies for higher education.

Date: Sunday, June 26, 2011
Time: 4:00-5:30 pm

Track: User Services
Subtrack: Literacy & Learning

*Travel funding for this event was made possible by receipt of funds from the University of California Research Grants for Librarians Program.

Sponsor: Image Resources Interest Group
Co-sponsors (name-only): Arts Section, Women and Gender Studies Section, Instruction Section

Speakers:
Virginia Allison and Holly Tomren, University of California, Irvine
Jodi Kearns and Lizette Royer, University of Akron
Emily Nelson Decker, University of Georgia
Robin Miller, University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire
Shilpa Rele and Gilda Santana, University of Miami
Joanna Burgess, Reed College (moderator)

Speakers will be describing their experiences testing implementation of the draft Standards, and will provide ideas for activities, learning objects, and assessment related to the draft ACRL/IRIG Visual Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education.

ACRL/IRIG ALA Program planning committee: Joanna Burgess (co-chair), Ann Medaille, Kaila Bussert, Denise Hattwig (co-chair)

We hope you will join us!

AllisonV.-Images-Unleashed (download ppt)

Due to staff and budget cuts we had to be much more realistic in the amount of training and resources needed to carry out our mission. So we decided to start our training, just in the libraries. What has resulted is a fabulous focused initiative that has been exciting and well received. We are still creating learning objects, but they are only on our visual literacy guide (these will no longer be mirrored the Second Life).

You can read our full Second Life Obituary Below. This fall we submitted a new proposal for service that includes our new approach.

I will be discussing our progress and plans at this year’s ARLIS/NA conference in Minneapolis during a session titled Images Unleashed, Expanding Beyond Traditional Disciplines. Hope to see you there!

Anteater Island in Second Life sponsored by the UC Irvine Libraries will be closed on March 1, 2011. Launched in 2007, Anteater Island was to offer a platform for research and teaching to UC Irvine faculty, and to highlight library services. A number of UC Irvine classes utilized the island to do course projects, and one faculty used the space for highlighting journals from the American Anthropological Association. The UC Irvine Libraries created meeting spaces and access points to the online catalog and to digital reference for visitors to the island.

Several great teams have worked on Anteater Island; Kristine Ferry, Dana Peterman, Holly Tomren, and Julia Gelfand investigated Second Life, facilitated the purchase of Anteater Island, created policy and supported the faculty working in the virtual space. At the end of 2009 a second group took over the management of Anteater Island; Virginia Allison, Brian Williams, Julia Gelfand and Danielle Kane. This second Second Life group revitalized Anteater Island through branding and a re-design of the virtual space. This group brought library resources into Second Life by creating a library building and started the discussion about Visual Literacy.

The decision to cancel this virtual world software platform was made after Linden Labs, its provider, will no longer honor educational pricing and the renewal price doubled. After an examination of usage compared to costs, and a decrease in new participation by faculty and students, the Libraries have decided to no longer support Anteater Island. UC Irvine Libraries continues to be committed to monitoring emerging technologies and exploring other tools and services that have application for promoting research, teaching, and library services.
Anteater Island has been photo documented and the images have been saved to the Collections Network Drive as an archive. In addition to these new images I also used some older images of Anteater Island to create a SlideShare about the island: http://www.slideshare.net/dakane/uc-irvine-libraries-anteater-island-in-second-life.

Thank you to everyone who participated in creating and supporting Anteater Island.

On Behalf of the Second Life Team

Danielle (Co-Chair)
Julia Gelfand (Co-Chair)

Virginia Allison
Brian Williams
——————-
Danielle Kane
Research Librarian for Emerging Technologies and Service Innovation
Unit Head: ILC & MRC
University of California, Irvine Libraries
Phone: 949-824-2024
Email: kaned@uci.edu

The following text is a summary of my poster project for the ARLIS/NA Annual Conference in Boston 2010. See also Grassroots Visual Literacy Poster Handout

Background

In the summer of 2009, our Visual Resources Center was closed due to budgetary shortfalls in the UC system, leaving the UC Irvine Libraries as the sole service point for image based-research on campus. It is within this climate of transition and change that I began building a case for incorporating Visual Literacy objectives into the UC Irvine Libraries outreach mission. I reviewed literature that would help me understand how libraries can adopt and promote Visual Literacy, and also began talking with our Department of Education and Outreach to determine how Visual Literacy education might dovetail with our current Information Literacy outreach goals.

Methodology:

I. Rooting Visual Literacy in Campus Curriculum through the embedded librarian

I administered a survey designed to measure information literacy skills amongst the UC Irvine Libraries’ staff.  The survey data informed a plan for developing visual literacy training at the library.  By creating visual literacy awareness and skills within the library, the library staff will be equipped to teach and promote visual literacy awareness on campus.  A training rubric developed as a result of this initial research. (see powerpoint visual)

II. Find Partners within the Library, and on campus with a similar mission

Visual Literacy is the ability to understand and produce visual images. In my research on the topic, I have found that the UC Irvine Libraries’ current information literacy initiatives lack valuable “visual literacy” components such as how to read, describe, and analyze visual information. During the summer of 2009, I began working with our Department of Education and Outreach and our Second Life Task Force to develop library initiatives that engender visual literacy skills and that dovetail with the current outreach goals of the UC Irvine Libraries.

Currently the Department of Education has formal information literacy discovery tasks embedded within the Humanities Core curriculum at UC Irvine.  This pre-existing relationship provides a fertile opportunity for embedding new visual literacy objectives within the curriculum.  The department of Education and Outreach is providing guidance regarding how  the libraries might complement the existing HumeCore curriculum as well as guidelines for creating, developing, and assessing online tutorials.

The Visual Literacy tutorial group and the Second Life team are looking to enhance our relationship with the humanities core curriculum by creating module tutorials that will be of use to the instruction mission of this undergraduate series that is heavy in image analysis.

We set out on our goal to create visual literacy tools that specifically reflect the research interests at UCI in the Humanities Core curriculum as well as the general humanities curriculum, and the Design Alliance.

III. Determine what current tools are available to teach Visual Literacy Our next step as a team was to create a collaborative bibliography that included the current tools, literature, and resources available to help teach visual literacy.

III. Reaching out via new media

The newly minted Second Life Team team agreed that developing and launching a series of modular interactive online visual literacy tutorials was a needed and worth while endeavor.

The tutorials we are developing are designed to serve the needs of the undergraduate curriculum at UC Irvine. In order to help shoulder the weight of this tremendous task, a small sub-team has been created with a rep. from the dept. of Education and Outreach, a Library Assistant III, and the Research Librarian for Education to help get these tutorials off the ground. We anticipate launching our first module in fall 2010. You can check out our progress by visiting ANTEATER ISLAND’s  SLURL: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Anteater…and/106/160/23

Additionally, we are creating a visual literacy LibGuide which will be the central point for discovering and using online visual literacy learning objects in addition to the VL tutorials as they are developed. Librarians and faculty will be able to integrate these learning objects into their instruction sessions, lectures, and assignments.

• Learning Objects defined.
• Some the object under development:
  • RSS feed
  • Page Flake
  • Mash-up
  • Delicious page of current tools available
  • Mind map of image presentation choices

Findings:

The point of my poster is to inspire other librarians to start visual literacy initiatives from the ground up, no matter how large or small their institution.

References:

My Contact Information:
Virginia Allison
Research Librarian for Visual Arts & Dance
University of California, Irvine Libraries
Langson Library Reference 143, Zot 8100
PO Box 19557
Irvine  CA  92623-9557

949-824-0360 Phone
v.allison@uci.edu