Sabbatical 2010-2011

I took a year's sabbatical September 1, 2010-August 31, 2011. Below is my proposal of what I planned to do during this time.

A. Sabbatical proposal 2010-2011

I am requesting a one year sabbatical leave from September 1, 2010 to August 31, 2011. I have used directives from KCC Strategic Plan 2008-2015 to support the proposed activities described below. The Library is an academic support unit, and I have adapted some of the language in the Strategic Plan to reflect that fact.

The nature of the educational and professional activities to be undertaken include:

  1. Improving functionality, content, and assessment features in Learning Information Literacy Online (LILO)

    This tool is used by instructors from all UH Campuses to promote and teach information literacy. I have been the site's developer and programmer for four years. The WASC and ACCJC accrediting bodies have made it clear that information literacy skills mastery is an important component of critical thinking and student success. Accreditors want to see evidence that students are learning information literacy and are applying it in course work. Over the last several years, LILO has been developing content and gathering student response data to determine information literacy competency. As of fall 2009, instructors can use it as a full-on information literacy assessment tool, as each student response is rated using rubrics developed by UH System librarians. Eventually I want to share the responsibility for rating student responses with LILO librarians on the campuses where it is used. To accomplish this, I will need additional programming experience that I can likely get by reading books, viewing videos from my lynda.com account, attending advanced programming seminars in MySQL, PHP, and Javascript, and spending long stretches of uninterrupted time writing and de-bugging code.

    To accomplish this, I will need to learn how to develop and deploy more complicated PHP/MySQL code to enable LILO librarians to logon to the server and do the work.

    I want to use the spring and summer to develop LILO more fully so I can easily collect student response data while I am on sabbatical. During this time I will contiue to be the site administrator and provide support remotely. During this time I want to develop better methods to acquire, analyze, assess, and display student response data. Once I return in Academic year 2011-2012, I want to apply these methods to the response data prior to the ACCJC site visit the following year. Two years of data will provide satisfactory evidence that KCC instructional and library faculty members are working toward an acceptable standard of developing, instilling, and assessing information literacy competencies to meet ACCJC's directive in a more planned and executed way. I believe LILO meets the campus' idea of "ecology of learning" (page 15) that "connects classroom, centers and labs, campus, community, countries abroad, and cyberspace." (A side note - LILO has also attracted the attention of Hawaii DOE librarians in recent years. Several years ago I worked with a UH Manoa Librarian and a Professor from the School of Library and Information Studies on a P-20 initiative to bring LILO to DOE High Schools - further collaboration with the DOE has been suspended because of a lack of time on my part and a lack of DOE resources).

  2. Assessing LILO's impact on the KCC Community.

    In addition to improving LILO's technology with improvements to Web 2.0 features and database structure and operation, I want to examine more closely how LILO is used by students and faculty at KCC. Over the last three academic years, an average of 475 KCC students and 36 KCC faculty visited LILO annually. KCC students created an average of 207 projects per year on the LILO server. A problem with LILO's use by faculty is the lack of time most faculty members have to commit to new technology – in LILO's case, the incorporation of all or parts of LILO into curricula. The "LILO for Instructors" section of the Web site suggests how to integrate LILO into a course slowly unobtrusively. Faculty members can select a focus on particular information literacy skill sets that match their courses' goals and objectives. I must find additional approaches to reach faculty to inform them of what LILO can do for them. My continued involvement with the SLO committees on campus has been to encourage faculty members to introduce information literacy skill pedagogy in their courses and programs, and to collaborate on the development of satisfactory assessment instruments to measure skills mastery to meet accreditor expectations. Data in the form of student response input to the LILO server is required to do this, meaning that faculty must have students answer a set of LILO prompts that support course goals and objectives. During the sabbatical year, I want to develop ways to increase the use of LILO by faculty and students, determine LILO's current efficacy in producing information literate students, and how I can improve that efficacy even more.

    To begin to comprehend how to work more effectively with instructional faculty in regards to information literacy issues, I want to conduct a survey of KCC faculty to determine if and how information literacy skills are currently taught, and how skills mastery is assessed.

    Activities under 1) and 2) match two accreditation planning items (page 8) "[to] improve ongoing cycles of integrated research, planning, assessment, evaluation and budgeting" and "[to] complete two documented cycles of development for all certificate and degree programs, for assessment, evaluation, and improvement of student learning outcomes." Though participation in LILO is voluntary, and I do not manage a certificate or degree program, I think the spirit in which these two accreditation items are worded can be easily adapted to the LILO program that I administer. This activity also meets one of the Missions of KCC: "[the use of] ongoing cycles of planning, best practice research, budgeting, implementation, assessment, and evaluation to drive continuous program and institutional improvement."

    Sabbatical time will allow me long stretches of uninterrupted time to develop, test, tweak, and deploy new code to increase LILO functionality as well as construct, administer, and analyze the faculty survey, and devise new ways to collaborate with instructional faculty on issues in Information Literacy pedagogy and how to deliver them via LILO.

  3. Publication of research article on LILO. To my knowledge, LILO is the only information literacy Web site created by librarians to
    • collect student responses to the concepts and practice of information literacy based on a student's particular research topic;
    • assess responses using a UH System-created set of rubrics and the Standards, Performance Indicators, and Outcomes for information literacy promulgated by College and Research Libraries section of the American Library Association;
    • deliver assessment data directly to instructors who use LILO, and
    • A journal article describing LILO's development, growth, and assessment activities to peers worldwide using anonymous UH System student data collected over the past three years is needed to show how information literacy competencies disseminate assessment methods to peers at other institutions. My presentation on LILO Assessment activities to 200 librarians at the Internet Librarian Conference in October 2008 was warmly received, and several academic library journals have expressed interest in reviewing and publishing an article. My proposed co-author Brett Bodemer is a recent graduate of UHM's School of Library and Information Studies and is currently on the faculty at the California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (CalPoly). We worked together on LILO when he was a graduate student at Manoa.
  4. More 2.0 features in LILO. To improve LILO further, I need advanced programming skills to introduce more user-friendly features, such as the ability for a user to import book, article, and Web citations from any database into his/her LILO account. I need to more fully understand how servers and Web browsers interact to accomplish this in order to pass data back and forth more efficiently. Programming seminars and reading technical documentation will help me accomplish this during the proposed sabbatical.
  5. LILO as open source code. The Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the University of Hawaii System suggested I create a generic version of LILO to share with the higher education community as open-source code. This would enable interested academics to add new content and features that would eventually be incorporated into newer versions of LILO at UH. This activity will also give me the opportunity to further streamline the code for greater efficiency. The CIO has followed LILO development over the years, and was instrumental in providing me access to UH Manoa's ITS programmers in the summer of 2006, when I began to learn about the intricacies of database design and management, resulting in greater functionality of the LILO database. This ongoing relationship with ITS "sustains mutually beneficial partnerships within the UH System" (p. 19).

    6. LILO has been a stand-alone online program for several years and used by students throughout the UH System. The overall improvement of LILO meets Performance Measure 2, E2 of the KCC Strategic Plan “To strengthen faculty and staff development to increase by one every two years the number of programs that can be completed by students in under-served regions via distance and off-site learning" (page 37). A Potential Strategy for this Measure is "E2A [to] Increase the quantity and quality of courses and programs available to students through online, distance and off site learning methods" (page 37). Overall, this activity supports Strategic Outcome E, Resources and Stewardship, Potential Strategy E1C "[to] support the development, implementation, evaluation and improvement of learning materials and pedagogies based on research based best practice" (page 37) and Potential Strategy E2A, "[to] increase the quantity and quality of courses and programs available to students through online, distance and off site learning methods" (page 37).

  6. American Sign Language support.

    I am a librarian, a linguist, and a lifelong learner. When I arrived at UH in 1991, I was assigned to the Hawaiian Collection. I took four years of Hawaiian language and became proficient enough in it to conduct library instruction sessions for underserved Hawaiian Studies students and faculty who preferred to communicate in Hawaiian. Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing students who use English and American Sign Language (ASL) to communicate attend KCC. Between four and six Deaf faculty work here at any given time. I saw an opportunity to learn ASL to better communicate with a traditionally underserved population. After 3 semesters of ASL and continued practice with members of the Deaf community here, I am now able to provide reference assistance and library instruction in ASL. In January 2010, I became the library's collection development specialist for ASL, Deaf history, and Deaf culture materials. I will complete KCC's Interpreter Training Program in May 2010. During my sabbatical I plan to spend several weeks at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) in Rochester, New York. NTID is the first and largest two-year technological college in the world for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing students (with a current enrollment of approximately 1,075), and is affiliated with the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). My purpose for time at NTID is to learn how the library serves a large Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing student body in an higher educational setting with two-year programs similar to KCC. Although Lama Library has made books on Deaf culture, Deaf history, Deaf Education and American Sign Language available to Deaf and hearing students, the library could do more if we understood the kinds of daily transactions that happen in a library with many Deaf users. Lama library has made recent progress in increasing service to Deaf students. For example, I arranged for the installation of a Videophone for Deaf students to communicate in sign language with Deaf instructors, hearing instructors (via Video Relay Service) and others. Gallaudet University is the preeminent higher education setting serving Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing individuals in the world. I plan to spend time there to consult with librarians on ways to manage ASL, Deaf History, and Deaf Culture materials to better serve KCC students, and to increase my proficiency in American Sign Language so I can be a better resource for KCC faculty and students, both Deaf and hearing.

    This work falls under "Strategic Outcome B: Increase the educational capital of the state by increasing the participation and degree completion by students, particularly those from underserved regions" (p. 27). I would argue that Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing students are representative of an underserved population.

    Granting my sabbatical would meet Strategic Outcome E:"Resources and Stewardship - Recognize and invest in faculty and staff resources and develop innovative and inspiring learning environments in which to work" (page 10). Higher Education activities now include the creation of learning products and environments in which to facilitate student learning and student success.

B. Summary of outstanding contributions to the College

C. Financial Remuneration

It is possible that I will be employed part-time during my visits to Gallaudet and/or NTID. I know and accept that any rumuneration negotiated and accepted "within the sabbatical period does/will not exceed that provided for regular sabbatical leave." I interpreted language from the previous UH Sabbatical application instructions found in "A9.400 Guidelines for Sabbatical Leave for Faculty, Eleven Month Faculty" to mean that I cannot, and will not, accept remuneration that, added to my one year at half-pay, would exceed my full-time salary. In my particular case as a faculty member on one year's sabbatical leave at half-pay, I could accept up to $40,000 in outside funds.