Finding Free PD!

While we here at ALIA Sydney would love you to join us at all our events, we know that it isn't always possible. So in today's post we're going to share some great free professional development experiences you can enjoy from your own home.

Library 2.014
Conferences can be amazing events to attend. Meet new colleagues, catch up with the old and learn new things. Unfortunately, they can be ridiculously expensive. Registration fees often hit the thousand dollar mark and that's before adding up the incidental costs like flights or accommodation if you have to travel. 

Four years ago the team at Library 2.0 decided to create a conference that anyone could attend no matter of their physical location or the size of their wallets and thus the Library 2.011 Worldwide Virtual Conference was born. This year the Library 2.014 Conference will be held on 8-9 October covering multiple languages and time zones. The best bit...it's free. Completely 100% free. AND you can attend in your favourite pj's if you really want! 

This year's themes cover digital services, preservation and access, emerging technologies and trends, learning commons and infinite learning, management of libraries and information centres in the 21st century, user centered services and models, and evolving roles and opportunities. 


MOOCs 
MOOCs, or Massive Open Online Courses, have been around for a while now but they are still a great way of learning new skills at your own pace and in your own home. Even better, many MOOCs are still offered free of charge! 

MOOC list is a an aggregator of MOOCs from a range of different providers from all over the world. This aggregator covers everything from learning a language to the sciences. MOOCs provide a fantastic opportunity to branch out into new fields and many are offered from well respected universities providing accreditation for the studies you undertake. 


International Librarians Network 

The ILN is an international peer mentoring program facilitating librarians to forge international networks. The ILN pairs librarians from different countries together for a fixed term and during that period the pairs are supported by regular contact and guided discussion. While partnerships have an end date (after four months), it is hoped that librarians will have built connections that will be lasting. 

The ILN is a great way to build new relationships, learn new skills and share your own. At last count, there were 26 participating counties and this number is sure to grow. Participation can be as little as a weekly email to your partner librarian and as much as emails, twitter and blog interactions. 

These are but a small selection of free, at home professional development opportunities that you can undertake. Feel free to dd your own suggestions in the comments below. 

-Kirsty

edX offers Big Data and Social Physics

MIT in collaboration with edX, a MOOC provider, is soon to start a course on Big Data. The course will take about 5 hours to complete and will begin on 12 May. If you're interested in learning more about Big Data, and its possible uses, this is the course for you!

If you've not studied online before, this could be a great way to test it out. It's completely free, and you can even earn a personalised certificate if you complete all the activities and exercises.

For more information, see this link.

Hope you al have a great week :)

-Caitlin Williams
ALIA Sydney Social Media Officer

edX Offers Library Advocacy Unshushed

MOOC provider edX is offering a new course beginning in late February 2014 - Library Advocacy Unshushed: Values, Evidence, Action. The University of Toronto is the provider, and the course will run for six weeks.

A problem that many people face when attempting these types of courses is that they are unable to maintain their commitment for the entire course. This course addresses the problem by offering two streams of study. You can try for a Certificate, agreeing to be bound by the Honour Code and completing all activities, or you can "Audit" the course, receiving all course materials, tests, and access to the online forums, but you will not receive a certificate. If you want some proof of your participation, then you can print your progress chart from the course materials.

If you'd like to know more, please follow the link above to the edX page which describes the course and the presenters, plus gives a brief introductory video.

Of course, ALIA Sydney will be offering professional development and networking opportunities throughout 2014. Looking forward to seeing you there.

Lauren Castan

Me and the MOOC

MOOCs. Heard of them? Taken one? Wondering what I’m on about?

Massive Open Online Courses seem to be popping up all over the Internet right now. The idea is simple: using the Internet to run courses for free for large numbers of people. As one of my favourite blogs - Hack Education - puts it, MOOCs offer “… the promise of scaling a university education to everyone… well everyone with an Internet connection that is”. And it seems that when MOOCs say ‘massive', they mean it, with Inside Higher Ed reporting that over 1.5 million people have registered for MOOCs. Last year, more than 160,000 students around the globe signed up for a free online course in artificial intelligence offered through Stanford University – a class size nearly eight times the size of Stanford’s entire student body. 

I was intrigued (and always up for learning new things, especially for free) so I started looking for some MOOCs to join. 

I looked at MITx, (which has now been incorporated into the site edX - a combined project of Harvard University and MIT), Udacity and Coursera. Coursera is the newest of the bunch, run by two Stanford professors and promising a wide range of disciplines (many of the MOOCs so far have focused on computer science courses, whereas Cousera promises classes in diverse subject areas ranging from poetry to science fiction, sociology to folklore). 

I found a tempting array of courses, and ended up enrolling in a course on physics (a subject I’ve never studied), which starts shortly. 

My motivation wasn’t only to learn about physics, however. Next year some of the major courses I support as an academic librarian will be moving all their lectures online. Students will still have tutorials, but no longer will they be filling a large lecture hall to listen to an academic explain concepts to them. They will need to go online to access their lectures, and make time to listen to them before their tutorial group each week.

As an academic librarian, I often present to lecture theatres packed full of new students, and later on, to those same students in their second year and again in their third year. Many of the students in those massive lecture theatres come and find me in the library in the following weeks as they find themselves confronted with their first essay question … or their tenth. Either way, I’m happy to help, and pleased if my brief appearance at their lecture led them to the library for help. 

So, I’ve been thinking about how to move library support online. And I’ve been curious about online learning – how it can be done well, and what pitfalls to avoid. I did my LIS post grad qualifications at a London university face-to-face, so I’ve never been an online-only student. By taking part in a MOOC I hope to be able to evaluate the experience as a student learning a brand-new subject area. I want to find out what works and what doesn’t in online learning. I’m hoping that this ‘learning by doing’ experiment will enable me to understand what my students are facing as their content increasingly goes online, and how best I can support them in this environment. Oh, and I’d be pretty pleased to learn a bit about physics too. 

I’ll leave you with a final quote from Hack Education blog on the subject, which pretty much sums up what I want to find out.

"…when we switched from scrolls to books, we had to rethink how teaching and learning happened. And now again, it’s time to reconsider these things. Who do we best teach online?  How does pacing change when you move your lectures online?  How much, truly, can we rely on lecture after all?  How often should assessment happen and what does it look like? What’s appropriate feedback? How do we support and connect learners in a MOOC? How do we support faculty? 

And how does this change the university? Are these "disruptions" just online, or is the offline, on-campus experience changed now as well?

… By being able to take advantage of online educational content -- particularly lecture content from some of the best professors at the most prestigious universities in the world -- students will benefit too."

I’ll let you know how I go being one of these students. 

Sarah Fearnley 

Sarah is an Events Coordinator for the ALIA Sydney Committee. She works at the University of Western Sydney Library. All opinions expressed are her own.