2023 ALISE ACADEMY
Registration Fee for Members & Non-Members: $25
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Monday, October 2, 2023 from 1:00pm - 4:00pm CT

 Open Resources and Pedagogies as a Bridge to Practice in LIS

Your students can’t learn from a book they can’t afford.” If you’ve heard about open education or open educational resources (OER), you’ve probably heard that phrase before, and LIS students are certainly not exempt from that challenge. But “free textbooks” is just the tip of the iceberg. Open education opens the door for new practices and pedagogies that empower students, center your values and expertise, and build a bridge to the world of library practice that your students are preparing to enter.

Open education offers a unique opportunity to educate and prepare students to become competent practicing information professionals. Open resources are increasingly central in the collections we curate and the ways we learn as professionals, and the leadership of librarians as advocates of open education, including the rise of Open Education Librarian positions, means that familiarity with OER is a core component of many librarians’ work. Beyond the materials themselves, the practices and pedagogies built into open education are a perfect fit for increasing linkage between professional and educational practice of LIS programs or iSchool curricula. Open education removes barriers and facilitates dialogue and co-creation between students, faculty, and practitioners.

The presenters for this session have worked as tenured LIS faculty, adjunct instructors, and librarians in the field. They have developed an IMLS-funded project for opening up LIS education that bridges the gap between our curricula and one of the fastest-growing areas of academic librarianship: scholarly communication. Their project, the Scholarly Communication Notebook (SCN) connects an open textbook with a community of practice where students and practitioners share learning materials. This session will introduce the SCN as a one model for opening up LIS curricula in your own discipline. Open resources have been created in everything from core courses like Instruction and Collections to special topics like Copyright and Management. Open pedagogy, or open educational practices, can be applied in any course to create opportunities for students to create reusable materials and participate in real discussions and problem solving.

This Academy session will introduce participants to the key concepts in open educational resources and practices, provide examples of open education that are already active in LIS education and report upon models of practitioners addressing the educational needs that they perceive in LIS. Participants will engage in two brief workshop sessions to understand the process of opening educational resources and of applying models of open pedagogy. Results of the workshop activities will be shared in plenary and used to prompt further discussion. The session will conclude by sharing resources with the participants that they can use for further engagement with open education in LIS.

 ALISE ACADEMY SPEAKERS

Josh Bolick is the Head of the David Shulenburger Office of Scholarly Communication & Copyright at the University of Kansas Libraries. Josh holds a bachelor's degree from the University of North Carolina Wilmington and a masters in library and information studies from Florida State University. Josh advocates for open access, author's rights, open education, progressive information policy, and related issues. He is a former presenter for the Open Education Network and OER Research Fellow with the Open Education Group, as well as a co-principal investigator on two Institute of Museum and Libraries Services grants totaling nearly $300,000 to explore OER as a vehicle for expanding scholarly communication expertise. He has published in the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, the Journal of Wildlife Management, and the Journal of Copyright in Education and Librarianship, as well as other venues. Josh may be reached on Twitter at @joshbolick.

Maria Bonn is an Associate Professor and Director of the MS in Library and Information Science program in the School of Information Sciences at the university of Illinois Urbana Champaign. Her research and teaching focuses on academic librarianship and the role of libraries in scholarly communication and publishing. She served as the associate university librarian for publishing at the University of Michigan Library, with responsibility for publishing and scholarly communications initiatives, including Michigan Publishing. She has also been an assistant professor of English at institutions both in the United States and abroad. She received a bachelor's degree from the University of Rochester, master's and doctoral degrees in American literature from SUNY Buffalo, and a master's in information and library science from the University of Michigan.