2nd week reflection

The second week of the program was almost full of activities, sessions, and tours with different places in University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign.

The following Themes for the 2nd week program are: 

  • Human Design Thinking (Tour to Sibel Center for Design, session, and Teamwork) 
  • Blogging 
  • SWOT Assessment, Professional Development and Action Plan
  • Digital Preservation (Tour to University of Illinoi library and session) 
  • Artificial Intelligence for Libraries (Sessions, Documentary Film and Group discussion) 
  • Campus Instructional Facility and learning and technology support (Tour to the new campus instructional facility building CIF)
  • Teen open lab (Tour to Urbana free library

The Objective: 

  1. How to apply human design thinking in libraries and transfer the idea of design thinking spaces.
  2. Using the WordPress for blogging 
  3. Writing Self Action plan and SWOT assessment 
  4. Explore My Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats to learn about My professional direction(s) and what I need to do to get there
  5. Develop a 5-year professional development plan; and reflect on enablers and obstacles in your professional growth. 
  6. The Role of Digital preservation to support all the University stakeholders.
  7. Building design and built a flexible center for learning and technology.
  8. The Roles of Teen open lab.

Part 1: – Summary and outcomes for Human Design Thinking

The Sibel Center is one of the unique centers of its kind concerned with training in design thinking and modeling by providing training and the necessary spaces for creativity and imagination.

Dr. Saad Shehab has taken us in a tour to show us the power of provided spaces in the center that support the creativity for the faculty, student, academia, and researchers.

The center adopts design thinking as one of the successful means in finding solutions to the problems facing humanity

Dr.Shehab has mention on his paper titled: Teaching With, About, and Through Human-Centered Design   about teaching the human design thinking and the main steps for instructors to integrate this concept within the classroom. 

Dr. Shehab provide us with a detail about the programs and activities the held in the center since the opening and the different spaces and the value of the building.

The shop is the makerspace where users can benefit from all machines in this area which include 3D printing Machines, wood laser machine and other technical and electrical machine that used by users for their project.

Part 2: – Summary and outcomes for Blogging 

Dr. Clara explains about the blogging through WordPress and how we can benefit from the default account to moderate your library by yourself.

In this session all the associates create their own blog under Mortenson center program and start post their program reflection. 

Part 3: – Summary and outcomes for SWOT Assessment and Professional Development. 

Through a practical method, we and Dr. Clara in this session conducted an assessment using the SWOT model to understand the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and challenges for us as professionals or for the libraries in which we work.

We started working in this session to prepare a 5 year professional plan using S.M.A.T approach which include the following elements: Actions/ Timeline/Responsibility of/ partners.

Part 4: – Summary and outcomes for Digital Preservation.

The University of Illinois Library at Urbana-Champaign has invested a lot of money in preserving the physical and intellectual contents of the library’s collection through the establishment of the Preservation Services Unit, which contributes to providing various programs to achieve this goal.

Chris Prom, Associate Dean for Digital Strategic in University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign provided a detailed summary about the services provided by the Preservation Unit in the library, the most important programs, and projects it is working on that support the whole university community, and the challenges the library faced during the pandemic of covid-19.

In addition of digitization and preservation the Unit work to provide various of program and service that support researcher, student , faculty and the academic staff in the university for Example: 

  • IDEALS: a repository where student, staff, faculty and academia can deposit their research work and grants.

The Illinois university library has different services, but the preservation Unit is the most important services that work to preserve the history of Illinois and to provide access to library collections.

The preservation Unit has for major services has been mentioned during the Tour and its available with details in their website which are as following: 

  1. The conversation unit which supports all the general Collection in the library.
  2. Digitalization services and this unit have the capability to digitize a lot of material in one day using a unique tools and equipment.
  • Media Preservation provides consultation, conservation treatment, and reformatting/digitization services of obsolete or at-risk audio, film, and video assets.
  • Patrons Digitization Request: and this usually done by Media preservation department in a specific projects with users.

Part 5: – Summary and outcomes for Artificial Intelligence for Libraries

In this part all the associates have watched a documentary movie for about 1 hour and 45 minutes related to one aspect of Artificial intelligence and that was about (Face Recognition).

In this session we discuss as a group learn how we drop what we saw in the library services. 

There is a lot of potential to develop a library service with AI and a specific algorithm in both public and technical library services.

Part 6: – Summary and outcomes for Campus Instructional Facility, learning and technology support

The visit to the new building is considered one of the most important visits that demonstrates the cooperation between the existing centers at the university and the high potential for the realization and application of learning ideas. The building itself, in its modern form, is a flexible center for learning and technology.

Eric Vetter the Facility Manager in CIF took us in all classrooms and other building facilities 

the building basically supports the environment and built to enhance and improve the learning operation within the university.

CIF have the following classrooms layout and each classroom have its learning concept and the instructor will decide what kind of classroom to accomplish his course target: 

  1. Gather
  2. Group share
  3. Tired pod
  4. Turn to talk
  5. Class in the round

In addition of that the CIF building have an auditorium and the Monumental Study Steps as shown in the pictures below

Part 7: – Summary and outcomes for Teen open lab.

the teen open lab in Urbana free library start in 2013 with different activities and stations. 

The main Aims for teen open lab to provide a space for teens to work with technology and their own activities with guided by librarians.

The lab has built a strong collaboration with different association and organization within the state as following: 

  • The Champaign Urbana community fab lab 
  • The makerspace Urbana 
  • School of information science at university of Illinois at Urbana champaign

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