 to the CNI Digital Scholarship Planning webinar series and if you've participated in previous sessions welcome back. I know many of you are working from home and some of you are back on campus. I hope you're all doing well during this difficult time of the pandemic. I'm Joan Lippincott, Associate Executive Director Emerita of CNI and I'm moderating the nine sessions of this series. Each of you is registered for all sessions. If you need to miss some we'll have recordings available for all sessions as well as a set of questions to guide planning discussions on your own campus. Both the video and discussion questions for sessions one through five are now on the website and thanks so much to the CNI staff for getting those materials up so quickly. We have two speakers for this session and we'll take questions after each. Please type your questions in the chat box at any time. In addition after the formal one-hour session is over we'll open the mics in case some of you wish to verbally ask questions of the speakers. The chat box is also available to communicate with each other or with me or our technical lead Beth Seacrest. During the presentations all participants will be muted. For this sixth session we'll learn about initiatives in teaching and learning. I'm pleased to welcome our presenters today. I've found their work inspiring. Emily Sherwood, Director of the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Rochester and Demetia Donahue, a Librarian and Overlord of the Tech Bunker at Wayne State University. Their bios are on the webinar site and I won't take any more time with introductions to give our speakers more time. So over to you Emily. Thank you Joan and thank you everybody for coming. So I'm going to start today by asking a question and I actually do want you to answer in the chat so this is a little unconventional for a webinar but please do feel free to answer the questions in the chat. So what do faculty development workshops for digital scholarship look like on your campus? And we've heard a lot of really great speakers over the course of this webinar series talk about the different types of initiatives that they've been running, what types of workshops or events that they hold, how those are tailored but I'm wondering what do they look like for you? So I'm going to give you just a moment but hopefully some people will actually type in the chat. If not I will get around to answering my own question but what do they look like? What do digital scholarship workshops look like on your campus? Or events? No one? They don't. Oh Becky I'm sorry. Well then we'll give you some ideas in just a moment. Good so training in R or Python or text analysis so we have tool focused workshops right that are training in specific tools. Philosophical discussions so we might have like reading groups or around certain topics. Oh I love this introductory content or overviews followed by a demo hopefully some hands-on so we might introduce a topic or a tool and then follow it with some hands-on topics. Oh external speakers we have those two concepts tools these are great very preliminary oh very low attendance you're actually thinking about my next slide. So we have lots of different types of programming that we run for digital scholarship right we have reading groups we have working groups we have speaker series we have conferences we have showcase events where we're highlighting a certain project or a certain tool we have a lot of tool training right lots and lots of skill-based workshops we might run some hackathons practice sessions all of those things but as we started to see even in the comments right now we also have a lot of challenges. How many of you have worked really hard to develop these tool based trainings and then you have two or three people show up to them maybe occasionally yeah right and it's sort of heartbreaking especially my new employees when they come in and they start running all of these workshops and they're like but like four people showed up to take unity and I was like I know it's okay it'll be fine so we have attendance issues. I love going to new workshops that introduce me to a new tool or a new technology but even I like a week later a month later six months later have a hard time retaining the information right so I learned a new tool I'm introduced to a new tool and then if I'm not using that tool I forget that tool anyone else maybe then we also have and maybe this isn't familiar to you faculty who email you a week before if you're lucky possibly a day before they want you to come and run a workshop in their class probably for an assignment they haven't told you about or maybe it's just a workshop they just want you to come and run a tool it's also possible that they're at a conference that day and they just need someone to come and cover class any of that sound familiar and then there's the question of sustainability sustainability is a huge issue so what if suddenly all of our faculty want to work with us how do we manage to be in all of the classes supporting all of the digital scholarship how do we manage to scale this work up or at least be able to train our faculty in a way that they can take on some of it themselves so I started thinking about these questions and these challenges and I started trying to imagine how I might be able to develop a workshop that instead of was showcasing a tool or showcasing another big project instead I wanted to introduce faculty to how I want to work with them and so it was sort of a mind shift how do I develop a workshop that isn't introducing a new tool or a new project but trying to come up with a model of how I want to work how I want to collaborate with them and so I started thinking about my goals for this type of workshop and what I wanted was I wanted them to come to me right at the brainstorming phase and that's actually true if I'm thinking about a course project or if I'm thinking about a larger digital scholarship project I want to be part of the planning I want to like brainstorm with them and I want to work with them at the outset I want to know what their learning objectives are I really don't want another digital project dropped into a course just for the sake of doing something fun I want to make sure that when we're planning an assignment it's well scaffolded and aligns with their learning objectives I want to know what works in their classroom they might have a really great written traditional assignment or a really good exam that actually models what they want to get at what they want their students to learn what they want them to be able to show at the end of that semester and so I want to know what works in their class I also want to know it doesn't work because maybe we can fix that somehow and then also I really want faculty to test run assignments and I get so much pushback on this but could you imagine how I mean and I'm putting myself in that how much better my teaching would be if I test run all my ran all my assignments first who and there's a lot of reasons for this which I'll talk about more later but I want them to have a basic familiarity with the technology so that they can answer the 101 questions when they come up and I want them to have a sample for students which becomes very important when you're talking about non-traditional projects and I also want them to be able to test run the assignment so they can surface the issues and understand where their students might get stuck how much time it's going to take and whether or not the assignment actually works to reach their learning objectives so I came up with a new form of workshop so this is the call for what I call just the introduction to digital pedagogy and one of the things that I want to point out is that this is a two-day workshop I'll talk more about that later it's a short module this is not an entire semester long project this is to come up with an assignment so I want it scoped um it is based on the learning outcome as you can see and so the end goal the tool isn't the reason it's actually in service of a learning outcome um and then I also want them to think about digital literacy that's always part of it so here's the problems with running a workshop this way one um I have to be flexible I have to have a team who can teach multiple things and I have to be able to trust that they can do that and they have to be able to trust me that will get through it because you can't over plan for this type of workshop because you don't know going in what the projects are going to be that you're going to help develop throughout the workshop so there is a level of trust that you have to have but if we can do that it actually works pretty well so so this is the sample schedule for if we're thinking about a two-day workshop which is really about a day and a half workshop um and you can see you can read through it and you can the slides will be there to review later but I've been running these types of workshops um since about 2015 and I started them at Bucknell University and now I've been running them at University of Rochester and I will admit that ideally I want to do a two and a half-day workshop and honestly I've gotten them down to one and a half day and I think they're a bit rushed but there are always people who want things to take less time that's just true so why is this approach effective well I think that there's several reasons one and the big one the one that I started off with is it introduces faculty to how we can collaborate and how we want to so it's not just teaching them a tool but actually letting me brainstorm with them at the outset and talk them through their challenges help them come up and identify the right tool for the assignment and then help them craft the assignment help them think through things like assessment um I'm asking them to learn the technology and part of that in the test running of the assignment is I want them as I said to be able to answer basic questions in the classroom because that reduces the number of times I have to go into a classroom and I want them to understand what about the technology works or doesn't work so that they can anticipate where their students might have problems and I want them to have a sense of what they're asking their students to do many times I've helped a faculty member think about running like a digital essay assignment and they don't understand it takes longer for their students than writing an essay and so we can have those conversations and they can start to see really in concrete terms how long this might take um I also want them to walk out with a win so faculty over two days develop a module and it might not be perfect by the time they walk out but they know what they need to do to get it there um I also want them to know whether or not the assignment works for their learning outcomes one of my favorite stories is we were working with a faculty member first time taking any sort of digital approach in a class and over the course of two days she developed a timeline assignment and she had run a similar assignment in a traditional paper style in her class the year before and as she started test running her assignment she realized that she was making all of the mistakes that she had chastised her students for doing the year before so she was falling into her own bad habits and what we realized is it wasn't the right assignment then for her learning outcomes now it might have seemed like a failure there was a faculty member who spent two and a half days with me and walked out and did not incorporate a digital project in the course but I see it as a success because thinking through that carefully meant she didn't fail in the first time that she tried to run a digital assignment in a class and it also meant that she still learned how I wanted to work with her and so when she came back in the fall to talk about a research project she understood how we could work together and so it was also about building that relationship and building that trust it also helps build community faculty get to learn from each other in the scenario and it's amazing to watch faculty across disciplines take a lot of joy and understanding they have the same questions about their pedagogy they have the same challenges and they like to learn from each other and get ideas from each other and then again it helps towards sustainability as we build these programs we can't be in more and more courses at some point we need the faculty to take some ownership of that technology and some of them are better at it than others and that will always be the case and asking them to learn the technology and asking them to present to their peers which they have to do at the end of the workshop they have to show they've engaged and they've thought about the assignment and that they've learned some of the technology and it allows this model allows us to reach more faculty it allows us to impact courses in a more meaningful and intentional way and it honestly allows us to have more input in how the assignments are developed so as I said there are some caveats there's always going to be people who say I want this to take less time or more time and I really just want to learn a tool and that's fine this workshop isn't probably for them but it's a good to start for a lot of people and then came 2020 so as we've heard in a lot of the webinars through this series things changed this year and suddenly we were being asked to do different things or we were changing how we worked or asked to be doing more things and so at the end of the spring semester our assistant provost came to us and she was starting to already think about preparing faculty for the fall so in the end of May she asked if we would run a series of workshops to help faculty think beyond zoom to help them imagine digital projects that might engage their students in a meaningful way and have them start thinking about it now and so in three weeks we put together five thematic based workshops and a digital assignment design workshop similar to the model that we've run previously and random over the month of June so two a week for three weeks in June and yes I realize that I just told you that I prefer assignment based workshops rather than tool based workshops and that's still true so though we have sort of thematic more tool based workshops structured here all this is the general outline for all of those thematic workshops the major activities we had within each of those workshops were focused on getting faculty to think about assignment design so we had faculty come in and you showcase and talk about assignments they had run in their classes previously that fit within the theme we had some we had an introduction to the thematic topic we had a hands-on exploration section that again was thinking about course design and assignment design I always run a how did they make that exercise which is based on the work of Miriam Posner but the questions for this sort of project assignment reflection was really about how that particular tool or method might be applied in their discipline and then in their courses and so all of our activities were still getting them to think about assignments and then we ended of course with a two-day again project design workshop and while that was a little different than we've run in the past we had explicitly asked people to have taken one of the thematic workshops in order to participate in the assignment design workshop and so they had the opportunity there to do some initial exploration and then come and really think in an in-depth way about how they would put that tool into their class and so by the numbers we had 53 faculty and graduate students register for these six workshops 43 attended so that's pretty good numbers in terms of not too much nutrition many over half of them registered for multiple workshops and we had a waitlist for three of the six workshops including over 20 attendees for three of the six workshops uh the reach was 27 departments across all five of our colleges which is pretty unusual for us and so I just want to for a moment very briefly take a look at the departments we reached so departments programs and institutes we have a mix at our university um so when I first started talking to the assistant provost the goal really was to get faculty to think through assignments that would use digital tools to engage their students more in a really meaningful way the secret goal and maybe always my secret goal so I guess it's not really a secret is I want to highlight the diverse expertise across our library and show that it's not just the digital scholarship lab that can help support assignment design and digital scholarship assignments in classes or even digital scholarship projects and really the larger goal and the goal that I've been talking about throughout my talk today is to think about making sure that faculty understand how I want to collaborate with them how we can work with them um and I'd like to end today by thinking the digital projects and platforms team this is not a small team so it was the entirety of the digital scholarship lab two undergraduate students who worked on our xr workshop uh we had expertise represented across the library so we had outreach librarians involved our head of metadata our director of research initiatives our director of assessment our assistant director of rare books and special collections our university archivist two undergraduates and my entire team in three weeks we put together six workshops and we ran them successfully uh we curated a ton of information like a lot of people have talked about in their workshops they have pivoted to having modules and information online that we could share and use later and we did that as well and so all those resources are now there and available um our intro videos and our faculty showcases are all there and available and a bunch of resources and including all of our slide decks and the workshop and the worksheet that we used for um for our workshops so I just want to say thank you to the entire team who were game to play along with this crazy experiment um and it was really fun and that is linked to all of the workshop resources I am happy to take questions thank you so much Emily it's really amazing what you've been able to accomplish and I really like your philosophy of what you're trying to do uh please go ahead and type questions into the chat and while you're doing that I'm going to ask Emily in a couple of uh our previous sessions we have talked about how to integrate staff whether librarians or other staff into digital scholarship activities programs and instruction can you talk a little bit about um how that goes at your institution sure it's a great question and it can be it can be challenging sometimes because um sometimes it involves training people up um sometimes it involves just valuing their expertise and I really am happy doing both so for example um we have a new film and media studies and English subject area librarian who started in January and I work one of our big digital projects is a video annotation tool and so I work a lot with our film and media studies faculty and um so one of the ways that we get them involved is we just bring them along so I would reach out to the outreach librarian if I'm working with one of their faculty members and say hey I'm running a project in a class do you want to just sit in do you want to see what I do do you want to just sort of shadow me and then I try to find ways where they can take on stuff so if I have you know if I'm working closely with like a digital media studies course there might be a couple of small assignments we're doing and so I might reach out to the digital media studies librarian and say hey I'm working with one of your faculty do you want to come in and meet some of your students do you want to take on say um this database workshop maybe maybe you want to run it instead of me so I try to find ways where they can start to not just shadow but take on some more ownership of that if I'm planning a workshop like I'm running a workshop for an education faculty member on Thursday and so the education librarian I brought her in at the planning process I already knew what I was going to run for the workshop but I met with her to talk through how I was going to approach it so that she can then be there and be present and I said do you want to run the workshop and she was like not yet but I'll do it next year and so we try to find models where um we have to find ways to train people up but in a way that they're comfortable great thank you here's a question from one of our participants did you coordinate with your center for teaching and learning or whatever it's called on your campus typically faculty turn to them for lesson and assignment design and don't think to think to turn to the library digital scholarship unit that's a great question so the first year that I was at university of Rochester I did reach out to the faculty director for the center for teaching and learning they're all called different things at different places um and he and I co-hosted the digital pedagogy workshop and so that was great because faculty trusted him right I was a new unknown quantity at the university but they knew who he was and he didn't really have a particular stake in the digital approaches except he used some in his own teaching and so really he was just there to help facilitate the workshop um I gave him versions of it that like if he wanted to run or take point on um so yes in that particular instance we have coordinated with them this particular training series we have a college of education that was working a lot with our center for teaching and learning and they were doing things like how to run zoom sessions effectively how to run discussion boards so the tools that they were focused on um or more utility based in terms of how you do a zoom class or how you might run a blackboard discussion and so the provost really the assistant provost really felt and actually people who took both workshops really felt that they complemented each other we were sort of getting through the pedagogy and the approach and like trying to figure out how tools could could help with that and they were really trying to teach the tools that were helping run an online course and we were sort of using digital methods to make that more engaging and so um a lot of the faculty who took both felt they were very complementary it's a good question great thank you another participant asked if you can share links oh if you share your screen again because this question directly relates to that can you share links to the slide decks and other documentation for the workshops you mentioned and i think you had a bit.ly URL yeah i just put the bit.ly right in the chat i think that'll be easier to okay great um but all of our workshops or videos are there all of the handouts are there the slide decks all the great worksheets everything thanks so much yeah the next question has there started to be communities of practice with faculty you've worked with who could take your training and extend it themselves a train the trainer type idea that's an interesting question i love that idea and i would absolutely i would happily welcome that um i don't know that we have faculty who are there yet um we do have faculty though who are interested in the same types of things so that was one of the nice things about running the thematic workshops is like our video edit our video annotation workshop had faculty from across the campus who are interested in like thinking about how you annotate with audio um and visual materials and so we've had one of the nice things about these workshops is we saw some interdisciplinary questions come up and engagement come up that we weren't expecting um i would hope that eventually some compute communities of practice would develop around some of these topics um we're starting a new extended reality program and we definitely have faculty who are already starting to engage more in those conversations because there's kind of a a new interest in that great thank you and your co-presenter demesha is asks what aspects of the work do you find most enjoyable um it's really fun for me to highlight the expertise from across the library so i love it when our head of metadata comes in and just blows the faculty's mind it's so much fun um i like being able to draw on materials from airbooks and special collections when we're teaching cultural heritage or when we're doing an annotation um i think that's really fun to say look at all the talent we have across the library um don't you want to work with us uh but mostly i just like solving problems i like it when a faculty comes to me with a really like stumped idea and they can't figure out how to get out of it and i like just kind of brainstorming solutions very nice thank you well i think uh that's the end of questions and so we'll have demesha bring up her slides and share her screen and then we'll have more time for questions to her and for both of you at the end thank you so much emily that was really engaging presentation over to you demesha all right uh thank you thank you for everyone being here today thanks jone for the invite and thank you emily i got some really good ideas from your presentation so again my name is demesha donahue i am a librarian with the wane state university library system and i do also appreciate the overlord shout out i'm having a hard time getting everybody to catch on to that one uh so thank you so what i'll be talking about today is basically engaging the individual and sort of this idea of innovative learning in the 21st century and so skip too many on me by accident there so sort of this first idea that i just wanted to kind of go over um we're all sort of aware of um and have common knowledge of what maker spaces and fab labs are so their hands on they're meant for exploring they're all about learning making and doing um there's a lot of skills building that happens they're collaborative and they're open so sort of in thinking about this idea of what we know about those what are some different ways that other people view them so sort of thinking in terms of a lot of the conversations that are happening definitely that have become more relevant today than they were probably six months ago a year ago or two years ago um is this idea of uh ownership and dominance right so as with anything there are usually groups of people or one big group of people who sort of are thought to be the leaders of something or they're the people that we look to for information evidence-based studies and things like that so this quote is from a website for a maker education conference that will be happening in a few weeks and i pulled this directly from from the website because i thought it was interesting and again it's really timely and it has a lot to do with what i'll talk about in some of the later slides so this idea of ownership is something that i said to myself and sort of creating the space that i'll be talking about is who owns what and why do they own it and sort of how can we disrupt the idea of a specific group of people sort of taking ownership of something that that really belongs to everybody and i think one of the ways that that's possible is through positive disruption and taking a look at this idea of difference being visionary so it's an open-minded approach as i'll discuss a little later the space can't really be defined as anything specific other than what the people who come in it actually make it so one of the the biggest way that we're kind of taking the traditional thoughts about maker spaces being open and collaborative and sort of looking at the previous slide and saying okay well how can we give the power back to the people who come into the space or whatever the case may be is sort of taking a look at the idea of of library reference right so when we have someone that comes to us in person or someone who has a chat with us virtually and we're asking questions to try and figure out how we can help them so how can this space provide us with a new way of doing reference using technology so we can call that community technology reference and the idea behind it is simply to allow people the opportunity to investigate technology right so we've all sort of whether we wanted to or not we've been thrown into this uh technologically based world definitely since march and it's been an adjustment for a lot of people a lot of other people love it a lot of people are coming into contact with pieces of technology that they have never seen before and trying to figure out how to navigate the use of it so what we want to do is is investigate that different types of technology different tools different resources and kind of look at like technological literacy different ways to collaborate things related to scholarship equity diversity inclusion and access so the way that we do that it's by asking some common questions the who what where when why and how we take a look at ethics and the idea behind it again is to empower people to understand that technology is theirs technology is not scary it's it's an opportunity to have a relationship with technology that you may not have have otherwise had so some of the ways that people engage the space they may come in and have an idea they want to develop they may come in and just want to talk about some stuff related to technology maybe they they have a design that they're really interested in doing it really depends on the person that comes into the door so our job is to figure out what they're looking to do they may not have any idea what it is that they actually want to do when they when they walk into the door but by the time they leave out we hope that they leave out with some type of new knowledge or some something that they're going to collaborate with other people on and things like that so this is an image of the actual tech bunker space itself so there are two spaces that we have they're actually currently i am housed in two study rooms so the tech bunker space is a space that is a little bit bigger and then the space next door called the vault is a little smaller so the difference between the two is that the tech bunker basically has pretty much all the technology right the 3d printer the virtual reality headset some souped up machines our electrical kits and things like that and then the space next door that's called the vault is basically the space where people can go and kind of just kick back without being surrounded by all the technology so there are some pieces of technology in that space it's not totally full but it's it's more of like i like to call it like a more creative space we have a lot of people that hang out on that side of the space and do sewing projects we have a lot of art students that go over there and do artwork and things like that so it's still very much engaged but the two spaces kind of offer different environments for different types of people and one thing that i always always always make sure is that yeah i may be the overlord of the spaces but they are not my spaces they're fluid they are ruled by their visitors and we want to try and appeal to everyone as much as possible so there are many many many modes of learning thinking and doing which is you know that's that's sort of a lot to incorporate into an ideology behind the space but as long as we allow them to come in and recognize that this is a space that they can make their own um everybody ends up finding their place in the space so we are we aren't trying to force anything specific on people when they come into the space and again the idea is just to engage the individual so discovery is huge and we're also trying to um help students specifically realize that they're autonomous beings and they have the ability and the potential to sort of make their own pathways right so this is an example of this always makes me smile because these little kids were amazing so some of the outreach activities that we've been involved in you do a lot of stuff with k through 12 um in the in the detroit and surrounding communities we also do a lot with a lot of the entrepreneurs and the thinkers and the doers and the movers and the shakers in detroit and outside of detroit as well so i'll just give you a description of what these images are all about so the one in the right corner the left corner is actually a product that a tenth grader created for us it was the result of a very quick 30 to 40 minute workshop about a tool called blender so i have two staff that work with me one is a computer science student and then the other is uh he's not currently a student um but he does work in the community with a lot of the the technologists and entrepreneurs and things so that image is actually um a toilet that the student sat down and she said i don't i don't know what i want to do with what i just learned but for some reason i think i'm going to make a toilet right so within like five minutes after a very short brief tutorial and introduction to blender the student created this for us right and so i was like well that's awesome could i take a picture of that she was very excited and so was i because just in that 30 to 40 minutes of you know learning how to use the tool how to use the controls etc she kind of sat down and within five minutes made something that that she felt like was her own and then the picture in the middle and the one that's further on the right is a camp that the one computer science student her name is quintessa that she that she set up so it was called uh steam builders and what she did is she found a collaborator within the city of detroit who was trying to work with kindergartners and expose them to uh technology in whatever way he could now while he was successful in getting the camp established and getting people to sign up he didn't necessarily have a place to go where he could sort of have the students come in and play with technology learn about technology engage with technology so they got together and i met him he came in and we talked about you know the goals of the program and so for two semesters quintessa worked with these students about ten to eleven weeks um each semester on saturdays their parents would bring them in and she would teach them different technology tools they would talk about um how they might be able to use it in their homes the parents were very interested in it you know she used tools like tinkercad and then they would come into the space and kind of apply what she taught them and remember these were kindergartners so they came into the door and they were just amazed by everything that they saw so detroit has you know detroit public schools we have a lot of charter schools we have private schools and we have traditional public schools and the access to information the access to technology varies a lot depending on the school and the location of the school so these particular students were students who didn't necessarily have access to a lot of the things that that we have access to here on campus and so they were freaking out and screaming and yelling and they were so happy and i was freaking out and screaming and yelling because i was so happy that they were there and that they were having an experience that they otherwise probably wouldn't have been able to have and then that last image is an image of a chair design that a designer came in and spoke with the other staff member that works with me his name is Robert and this person came in and they were going to Switzerland or Sweden i don't remember exactly which place they were going to but they were visiting a place out of the country and they had this deal that they were basically trying to close right and so he had his his designs of what the chair looked like so this individual and Robert sort of got together came up with the concept design designed it in in some 3d software and printed the object out for him so that he was able to take it with him and you know introduce his his chair design concept to these people that he was hoping to get funding from so he did reach out to us afterward to let us know that he did get his funding so we were super excited that we were actually able to help another one of the ways that we are engaging individuals is through the curriculum right so these images just show some of the ways that we've helped some of the students across campus so that first image is an image of one of the neuroscience students that we had come in so they had scans of their brains and they were working on research project and they were presenting it in one of their classes so again we sat down with them took a look at the scans made 3d renderings we 3d printed those for them we did full-size brains and we also did half so that when they were doing their demonstrations they actually had objects that they could use to describe help describe the research project that they were working on then the picture in the middle is from an engineering student that we had come in who was building a car and he basically just sat down designed some parts we talked him through some different processes that that would help his design and we printed off a few different items for him so that he had those for his project that he was also working on in his class and then that last picture is probably one of my favorite stories i've ever had the privilege of telling so the student seated his name is joshan and the student that's standing is jacob so joshan was a engineering student and jacob was a communication student who focused in broadcast journalism so they had both been in the space for one reason or another a few months prior joshan actually came into the space to work on a game that he created so he had enough technology of his own to develop the game and sort of get it started but there was he needed a bit more so he came into us we talked about his project and he ended up finishing the game in the space he made a music soundtrack for it it's available for purchase on steam it's great it's awesome jacob was working on his senior project and he had come into the space and he was like this is really cool like i think more people should know about it how do you feel about doing an interview and i was like i don't i'm like yeah you can interview me but it would be so much better if you interviewed one of the students who have used the space to help them create a project so i introduced the two of them they got along fabulously they recorded the video and as a result of the video jacob ended up getting a job here at Wayne State with our marketing team and joshan his game with it being on steam someone from ford actually saw his game and actually contacted contacted him for an interview and he's an engineer at ford and i was like see this is the kind of awesome stuff that we love to see happen right because the space is here people see it they sort of walk past it and they're just like what is that and they come in and they peek their heads in and we're like no come in come in it'll be great like we're awesome you guys are awesome come hang out with us so we try and keep it as open as possible because again the space is whatever whatever the people want it to be it's it's not what i what i tell them it is so sort of picking up on the connection that joshan and jacob made we also take a look at what the future of work looks like right so we know during this pandemic again we've all had to you know deal with technology in one way or another like i said some of it's awesome some of it's not so great some of it needs a lot of work so we try and engage the students and the people who come in in this way too right so the future of work is technical human connected there's there's something out there for everyone and it's it's a matter of figuring out where your interests lie and what you're sort of interested in because i think as a librarian i'm also an educator so i think that we are obligated to offer services that support the development of like a diverse set of skills right those 21st century skills that pretty much all of us are going to need to have in order to sort of survive in the future so we we think of the space as a new learning system a new mode of learning where what happens in in the space is totally depends on the person that walks into the space so one of the ways that we have really been examining the future of work is has been with the emergence of esports across campus so the space launched in 2018 and pretty much as soon as the doors opened there were a certain amount of students that came in and who again were just very curious about what we were doing and after doing some like some reference interviews and figuring out where they sort of like technologically i found out that they were avid gamers right so we ended up having multiple conversations and what we realized was that there was no real umbrella available for esports on campus so this group of students got together they formed the student org i'm their advisor and basically what i've done is sort of gotten them seats at certain tables right so the president the provost the dean of students rc and it and so through the course of probably like a year and a half we've been to we've been able to develop a pretty robust program related to recreational gaming as well as competitive gaming we also have a gaming lab a gaming lounge was i'm really excited about that we'll be launching we had a soft launch a couple of weeks ago and this was mostly thanks to cn it and our dean of students office it's in the basement of our student center and we're hoping to do a lot of k-12 work as well as holding some of our recreational and competitive tournaments and the students they do everything themselves there are a lot of different disciplines involved so we have engineers we have doctors we have journalism students we have digital art students so they combine all of their talents together and they've been able to come up with esports on campus so it's very exciting for us and then this last slide just demonstrates another way that the students have collaborated with each other across campus so just before quarantine happened they were able to offer a conference and this was a collaboration between the esports student org and the anime student org so one of the things that we're also doing is trying to introduce this idea of diversity into these ideas anime and esports have a lot of connotations to them that aren't necessarily positive so the students like to produce engaging events to sort of sort of show people hey you know this stuff's awesome like we're having fun but we're also learning things at the same time so they put on a conference that they all organized themselves i did very little there were probably about a thousand people who registered and probably 700 actually showed up again they did all of this on phone which was pretty amazing and it was academic and fun at the same time so a lot of the panels the panelists some of them were graduate students others were members of the esports club or the anime club or just friends of theirs or you know we did a peer reviewed refereed way for people to submit proposal ideas again they did all this on their i really didn't help them with much at all so that was a very exciting event that we were able to do before we all got booted off campus and it was a lot of fun and i'm hoping that we're able to do it again sometime soon so with that i am done talking on and on about the space and the stuff that we do and this is just a picture of one of my favorite buildings on campus it's a yamasaki design we have a lot of great architecture on campus so i just kind of wanted to close with that that image this is one of my favorite places on campus thank you so much demesha you would be so much fun to work with i like it please type some questions in the q&a you're getting a number of comments about how people love your collaborations and the anime or other characters and the stories that you've told and i think your favorite story especially in intrigued people about the engineering student and the communication student and have you found any way to use those kinds of stories to do outreach to a greater number of faculty so they understand what you're doing the kinds of 21st century skills that these students are going to need to find jobs which will be even harder in today's climate and how they can start incorporating more of these skills in the curriculum and working with you and others in the library to prepare their students yeah so there are probably a few different ways that we're doing that so one is i in conversations with the students i'm always encouraging them to talk to their instructors and their their professors about what they're doing when they come into the space and how it applies to their curriculum or maybe even how it doesn't apply to their curriculum so that in that respect we've gotten a lot of conversations we've had with faculty about how we can incorporate what's happening in the space into their classes. Another way is simply with the the idea of doing technology reference so just a couple weeks ago there was an English class and there was a computer science student who needed information about the different discourse communities and computer science so he reached out to me and we had this amazing conversation about computer science and we ended up talking about different types of technology and it turned out that this student was very interested in biotechnology so i was able to introduce him to a number of resources and one of my favorite books from i think it's 1968 called the biological time bomb which is basically like the guy who told us that we were going to be doing biotech in the future but nobody knew what was happening so i was able to engage him that way and the faculty member whose class he's in now wants to do some workshops based on the different types of technology that exist so it's it mostly comes from the students we have i'm working on some different ways to engage faculty virtually right now and that's that's just offering more of an advanced reference service related to technology so i'm i'm posting in our academic portals and things like that to try and draw more attention to it and then as far as like the community a lot of that comes from the marketing that we've been able to get like with e-sports we've actually attracted quite a number of students which is amazing to look at Wayne State as a potential school of choice and that's just based on the fact that they they've heard about our e-sports program so it's kind of happens organically and i usually don't have to be you know sort of out there forcing the space down people's throats they kind of just show up for it sometimes or the students talk about it so much that they become interested in it that's interesting because i have heard a number of digital scholarship labs or centers talk about how the graduate students they work with are the conduit to the faculty so undergraduates as well and your co-presenter Emily Sherwood asked you to she said she loves your outreach particularly with the community beyond the college can you talk a bit more about how you encourage the community to come in and use the space and technology and what technology do they get most excited about when they visit so definitely uh it's toss up between virtual reality and the 3d printer like like people just usually love just the idea of those but then actually be able to use them and put them into play and we talk about them and we have conversations about it usually pretty pretty amazing for everyone involved and you so when it comes to k through 12 or you know submerging ourselves within the Detroit community i usually just go places and try and talk to people or i'll you know if i we have a mutual acquaintance i will reach out to them and ask them if they're interested in uh coming in and you know they'll come in and see the space and we'll sort of figure out how we can make it work for them there are also instances where Wayne State does a lot of k through 12 outreach in general um so you know knowing networking with people across campus has been helpful so that's how we've been able to be involved in a lot of the different programming that that Wayne State itself does with k through 12 so i have an inroads and then i go out there and like cold call just like you know here's this we can help you with this or if this doesn't work out um how could you see the Wayne State University library system helping your students achieve success thank you so uh please continue to type questions we have a few minutes left i'll ask one um i do think that many people are increasingly focused on how to make technologically intensive learning experiences accessible and inviting to all kinds of groups and welcoming i noticed it was probably in one of the the slide on the esports it's probably very much dominated by male students and so do you think that it's okay just to have certain things that may be weighed one way or another in terms of various types of diversity or should almost all the activities um be welcoming or have representation from a variety of groups and if if the latter how do you go about achieving that so definitely the latter and i think that part of the like the attraction for me and doing this work is that there is not a lot of diverse representation right and so there's people come through the door and a lot of times i'm just hanging out like talking to students and stuff so it seems like there's there's no authoritative presence in the space which is kind of the way that i like for it to to be but the fact that Wayne State is such a diverse campus actually helps with that we have people from all over the country we have people who have various interests and i think you know me being female and me being black is in in itself a draw for people just because it's not you know it isn't so common place yet it will be you know women in technology people of color being involved in technology is increasing more and more so i think just my presence here and what we're doing helps you know volumes with that and i also think it has a lot to do with reaching out to the community that surrounds us because we're right in the middle of of Detroit yeah a lot of different things emerging around here like i said there are a lot of different schools so it's just a matter of trying to introduce technology as something that's for everybody right so that everybody has a place in it and i try and talk about things as much as i can when i'm out and about and when people are in the library and they walk past and they kind of stare you know i may how about the door just come on in it's fine my good it'll be a lot of fun and hopefully we'll all learn something so i think that's well it looks like you've had a lot of success the other thing i'd comment in terms of your space is like many spaces that especially those that are have been reconfigured for digital scholarship or maker spaces you have a glass wall so people can look in and see what you're doing and that is the kind of thing that will spark the curiosity of some students or or other people on campus and they may decide they'll just come in and ask and yeah so i i do think showing them or having the literal a literal window into that environment can be very helpful yeah for sure i think so too okay we have one last question love the community engagement and clear inroads with campus groups is your success in this area about the space and you and staff or is it an overall library ethos at wane state a broader integration of campus with community yeah i it's definitely not about me i don't want it to ever be about me i mean i i recognize that the space wouldn't exist had i not pushed for it to exist but it's it's an organic space it's an organic community and so we want to show the library system and wane state as places for innovation and creativity and discovery and all these amazing things because what the way that we want our students to graduate is we want them to feel empowered that when they get done they can they'll go out into the into the world and they'll be they'll be able to handle what sort of comes their way and specifically when it comes to technology but we're it's a super in a interdisciplinary campus we do a lot of collaborations with other schools the students are constantly collaborating with each other we do a lot of faculty student collaborations a lot of faculty staff collaborations so just in that in that respect wane state kind of pushes for that on its own and we're just sort of providing a different type of service to help with that terrific we do have one more question but i'm going to take that after we formally end the program because i do want to make sure that while many people are still here that i have an opportunity to thank our terrific speakers our inspiring speakers and i thank all the participants for their comments and questions and their attention our next webinar is on thursday october first so just in a couple of days and our speakers will discuss issues related to diversity equity and inclusion in relation to digital scholarship