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March, 2014:

Higher ‘Professional’ Ed, Lifelong Learning to Stay Employed, Quantified Self, and Libraries

***  This post was originally published in ACRL TechConnect on March 23, 2014. ***

The 2014 Horizon Report is mostly a report on emerging technologies. Many academic librarians carefully read its Higher Ed edition issued every year to learn about the upcoming technology trends. But this year’s Horizon Report Higher Ed edition was interesting to me more in terms of how the current state of higher education is being reflected on the report than in terms of the technologies on the near-term (one-to-five year) horizon of adoption. Let’s take a look.

A. Higher Ed or Higher Professional Ed?

To me, the most useful section of this year’s Horizon Report was ‘Wicked Challenges.’ The significant backdrop behind the first challenge “Expanding Access” is the fact that the knowledge economy is making higher education more and more closely and directly serve the needs of the labor market. The report says, “a postsecondary education is becoming less of an option and more of an economic imperative. Universities that were once bastions for the elite need to re-examine their trajectories in light of these issues of access, and the concept of a credit-based degree is currently in question.” (p.30)

Many of today’s students enter colleges and universities with a clear goal, i.e. obtaining a competitive edge and a better earning potential in the labor market. The result that is already familiar to many of us is the grade and the degree inflation and the emergence of higher ed institutions that pursue profit over even education itself. When the acquisition of skills takes precedence to the intellectual inquiry for its own sake, higher education comes to resemble higher professional education or intensive vocational training. As the economy almost forces people to take up the practice of lifelong learning to simply stay employed, the friction between the traditional goal of higher education – intellectual pursuit for its own sake – and the changing expectation of higher education — creative, adaptable, and flexible workforce – will only become more prominent.

Naturally, this socioeconomic background behind the expansion of postsecondary education raises the question of where its value lies. This is the second wicked challenge listed in the report, i.e. “Keeping Education Relevant.” The report says, “As online learning and free educational content become more pervasive, institutional stakeholders must address the question of what universities can provide that other approaches cannot, and rethink the value of higher education from a student’s perspective.” (p.32)

B. Lifelong Learning to Stay Employed

Today’s economy and labor market strongly prefer employees who can be hired, retooled, or let go at the same pace with the changes in technology as technology becomes one of the greatest driving force of economy. Workers are expected to enter the job market with more complex skills than in the past, to be able to adjust themselves quickly as important skills at workplaces change, and increasingly to take the role of a creator/producer/entrepreneur in their thinking and work practices. Credit-based degree programs fall short in this regard. It is no surprise that the report selected “Agile Approaches to Change” and “Shift from Students as Consumers to Students as Creators” as two of the long-range and the mid-range key trends in the report.

A strong focus on creativity, productivity, entrepreneurship, and lifelong learning, however, puts a heavier burden on both sides of education, i.e. instructors and students (full-time, part-time, and professional). While positive in emphasizing students’ active learning, the Flipped Classroom model selected as one of the key trends in the Horizon report often means additional work for instructors. In this model, instructors not only have to prepare the study materials for students to go over before the class, such as lecture videos, but also need to plan active learning activities for students during the class time. The Flipped Classroom model also assumes that students should be able to invest enough time outside the classroom to study.

The unfortunate side effect or consequence of this is that those who cannot afford to do so – for example, those who have to work on multiple jobs or have many family obligations, etc. – will suffer and fall behind. Today’s students and workers are now being asked to demonstrate their competencies with what they can produce beyond simply presenting the credit hours that they spent in the classroom. Probably as a result of this, a clear demarcation between work, learning, and personal life seems to be disappearing. “The E-Learning Predictions for 2014 Report” from EdTech Europe predicts that ‘Learning Record Stores’, which track, record, and quantify an individual’s experiences and progress in both formal and informal learning, will be emerging in step with the need for continuous learning required for today’s job market. EdTech Europe also points out that learning is now being embedded in daily tasks and that we will see a significant increase in the availability and use of casual and informal learning apps both in education but also in the workplace.

C. Quantified Self and Learning Analytics

Among the six emerging technologies in the 2014 Horizon Report Higher Education edition, ‘Quantified Self’ is by far the most interesting new trend. (Other technologies should be pretty familiar to those who have been following the Horizon Report every year, except maybe the 4D printing mentioned in the 3D printing section. If you are looking for the emerging technologies that are on a farther horizon of adoption, check out this article from the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Emerging Technologies, which lists technologies such as screenless display and brain-computer interfaces.)

According to the report, “Quantified Self describes the phenomenon of consumers being able to closely track data that is relevant to their daily activities through the use of technology.” (ACRL TechConnect has covered personal data monitoring and action analytics previously.) Quantified self is enabled by the wearable technology devices, such as Fitbit or Google Glass, and the Mobile Web. Wearable technology devices automatically collect personal data. Fitbit, for example, keeps track of one’s own sleep patterns, steps taken, and calories burned. And the Mobile Web is the platform that can store and present such personal data directly transferred from those devices. Through these devices and the resulting personal data, we get to observe our own behavior in a much more extensive and detailed manner than ever before. Instead of deciding on which part of our life to keep record of, we can now let these devices collect about almost all types of data about ourselves and then see which data would be of any use for us and whether any pattern emerges that we can perhaps utilize for the purpose of self-improvement.

Quantified Self is a notable trend not because it involves an unprecedented technology but because it gives us a glimpse of what our daily lives will be like in the near future, in which many of the emerging technologies that we are just getting used to right now – the mobile, big data, wearable technology – will come together in full bloom. Learning Analytics,’ which the Horizon Report calls “the educational application of ‘big data’” (p.38) and can be thought of as the application of Quantified Self in education, has been making a significant progress already in higher education. By collecting and analyzing the data about student behavior in online courses, learning analytics aims at improving student engagement, providing more personalized learning experience, detecting learning issues, and determining the behavior variables that are the significant indicators of student performance.

While privacy is a natural concern for Quantified Self, it is to be noted that we ourselves often willingly participate in personal data monitoring through the gamified self-tracking apps that can be offensive in other contexts. In her article, “Gamifying the Quantified Self,” Jennifer Whitson writes:

Gamified self-tracking and participatory surveillance applications are seen and embraced as play because they are entered into freely, injecting the spirit of play into otherwise monotonous activities. These gamified self-improvement apps evoke a specific agency—that of an active subject choosing to expose and disclose their otherwise secret selves, selves that can only be made penetrable via the datastreams and algorithms which pin down and make this otherwise unreachable interiority amenable to being operated on and consciously manipulated by the user and shared with others. The fact that these tools are consumer monitoring devices run by corporations that create neoliberal, responsibilized subjectivities become less salient to the user because of this freedom to quit the game at any time. These gamified applications are playthings that can be abandoned at whim, especially if they fail to pleasure, entertain and amuse. In contrast, the case of gamified workplaces exemplifies an entirely different problematic. (p.173; emphasis my own and not by the author)

If libraries and higher education institutions becomes active in monitoring and collecting students’ learning behavior, the success of an endeavor of that kind will depend on how well it creates and provides the sense of play to students for their willing participation. It will be also important for such kind of learning analytics project to offer an opt-out at any time and to keep the private data confidential and anonymous as much as possible.

D. Back to Libraries

The changed format of this year’s Horizon Report with the ‘Key Trends’ and the ‘Significant Challenges’ has shown the forces in play behind the emerging technologies to look out for in higher education much more clearly. A big take-away from this report, I believe, is that in spite of the doubt about the unique value of higher education, the demand will be increasing due to the students’ need to obtain a competitive advantage in entering or re-entering the workforce. And that higher ed institutions will endeavor to create appropriate means and tools to satisfy students’ need of acquiring and demonstrating skills and experience in a way that is appealing to future employers beyond credit-hour based degrees, such as competency-based assessments and a badge system, is another one.

Considering that the pace of change at higher education tends to be slow, this can be an opportunity for academic libraries. Both instructors and students are under constant pressure to innovate and experiment in their teaching and learning processes. Instructors designing the Flipped Classroom model may require a studio where they can record and produce their lecture videos. Students may need to compile portfolios to demonstrate their knowledge and skills for job interviews. Returning adult students may need to acquire the habitual lifelong learning practices with the help from librarians. Local employers and students may mutually benefit from a place where certain co-projects can be tried. As a neutral player on the campus with tech-savvy librarians and knowledgeable staff, libraries can create a place where the most palpable student needs that are yet to be satisfied by individual academic departments or student services are directly addressed. Maker labs, gamified learning or self-tracking modules, and a competency dashboard are all such examples. From the emerging technology trends in higher ed, we see that the learning activities in higher education and academic libraries will be more and more closely tied to the economic imperative of constant innovation.

Academic libraries may even go further and take up the role of leading the changes in higher education. In his blog post for Inside Higher Ed, Joshua Kim suggests exactly this and also nicely sums up the challenges that today’s higher education faces:

  • How do we increase postsecondary productivity while guarding against commodification?
  • How do we increase quality while increasing access?
  • How do we leverage technologies without sacrificing the human element essential for authentic learning?

How will academic libraries be able to lead the changes necessary for higher education to successfully meet these challenges? It is a question that will stay with academic libraries for many years to come.

Query a Google Spreadsheet like a Database with Google Visualization API Query Language

***  This post was originally published in ACRL TechConnect on Dec. 4, 2013. ***

Libraries make much use of spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are easy to create, and most library staff are familiar with how to use them. But they can quickly get unwieldy as more and more data are entered. The more rows and columns a spreadsheet has, the more difficult it is to browse and quickly identify specific information. Creating a searchable web application with a database at the back-end is a good solution since it will let users to quickly perform a custom search and filter out unnecessary information. But due to the staff time and expertise it requires, creating a full-fledged searchable web database application is not always a feasible option at many libraries.

Creating a MS Access custom database or using a free service such as Zoho can be an alternative to creating a searchable web database application. But providing a read-only view for MS Access database can be tricky although possible. MS Access is also software locally installed in each PC and therefore not necessarily available for the library staff when they are not with their work PCs on which MS Access is installed. Zoho Creator offers a way to easily convert a spreadsheet into a database, but its free version service has very limited features such as maximum 3 users, 1,000 records, and 200 MB storage.

Google Visualization API Query Language provides a quick and easy way to query a Google spreadsheet and return and display a selective set of data without actually converting a spreadsheet into a database. You can display the query result in the form of a HTML table, which can be served as a stand-alone webpage. All you have to do is to construct a custom URL.

A free version of Google spreadsheet has a limit in size and complexity. For example, one free Google spreadsheet can have no more than 400, 000 total cells. But you can purchase more Google Drive storage and also query multiple Google spreadsheets (or even your own custom databases) by using Google Visualization API Query Language and Google Chart Libraries together. (This will be the topic of my next post. You can also see the examples of using Google Chart Libraries and Google Visualization API Query Language together in my presentation slides at the end of this post.)

In this post, I will explain the parameters of Google Visualization API Query Language and how to construct a custom URL that will query, return, and display a selective set of data in the form of an HTML page.

A. Display a Google Spreadsheet as an HTML page

The first step is to identify the URL of the Google spreadsheet of your choice.

The URL below opens up the third sheet (Sheet 3) of a specific Google spreadsheet. There are two parameters you need to pay attention inside the URL: key and gid.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqAPbBT_k2VUdDc3aC1xS2o0c2ZmaVpOQWkyY0l1eVE&usp=drive_web#gid=2

This breaks down the parameters in a way that is easier to view:

  • https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc
    ?key=0AqAPbBT_k2VUdDc3aC1xS2o0c2ZmaVpOQWkyY0l1eVE
    &usp=drive_web

    #gid=2

Key is a unique identifier to each Google spreadsheet. So you need to use that to cretee a custom URL later that will query and display the data in this spreadsheet. Gid specifies which sheet in the spreadsheet you are opening up. The gid for the first sheet is 0; the gid for the third sheet is 2.

Screen Shot 2013-11-27 at 9.44.29 AM

Let’s first see how Google Visualization API returns the spreadsheet data as a DataTable object. This is only for those who are curious about what goes on behind the scenes. You can see that for this view, the URL is slightly different but the values of the key and the gid parameter stay the same.

https://spreadsheets.google.com/tq?&tq=&key=0AqAPbBT_k2VUdDc3aC1xS2o0c2ZmaVpOQWkyY0l1eVE&gid=2

Screen Shot 2013-11-27 at 9.56.03 AM

In order to display the same result as an independent HTML page, all you need to do is to take the key and the gid parameter values of your own Google spreadsheet and construct the custom URL following the same pattern shown below.

  • https://spreadsheets.google.com
    /tq?tqx=out:html&tq=
    &key=0AqAPbBT_k2VUdDc3aC1xS2o0c2ZmaVpOQWkyY0l1eVE
    &gid=2

https://spreadsheets.google.com/tq?tqx=out:html&tq=&key=0AqAPbBT_k2VUdDc3aC1xS2o0c2ZmaVpOQWkyY0l1eVE&gid=2

Screen Shot 2013-11-27 at 9.59.11 AM

By the way, if the URL you created doesn’t work, it is probably because you have not encoded it properly. Try this handy URL encoder/decoder page to encode it by hand or you can use JavaScript encodeURIComponent() function.
Also if you want the URL to display the query result without people logging into Google Drive first, make sure to set the permission setting of the spreadsheet to be public. On the other hand, if you need to control access to the spreadsheet only to a number of users, you have to remind your users to first go to Google Drive webpage and log in with their Google account before clicking your URLs. Only when the users are logged into Google Drive, they will be able see the query result.

B. How to Query a Google Spreadsheet

We have seen how to create a URL to show an entire sheet of a Google spreadsheet as an HTML page above. Now let’s do some querying, so that we can pick and choose what data the table is going to display instead of the whole sheet. That’s where the Query Language comes in handy.

Here is an example spreadsheet with over 50 columns and 500 rows.

  • https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?
    key=0AqAPbBT_k2VUdDFYamtHdkFqVHZ4VXZXSVVraGxacEE
    &usp=drive_web
    #gid=0

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqAPbBT_k2VUdDFYamtHdkFqVHZ4VXZXSVVraGxacEE&usp=drive_web#gid=0

Screen Shot 2013-11-27 at 10.15.41 AM

What I want to do is to show only column B, C, D, F where C contains ‘Florida.’ How do I do this? Remember the URL we created to show the entire sheet above?

  • https://spreadsheets.google.com/tq?tqx=out:html&tq=&key=___&gid=___

There we had no value for the tq parameter. This is where we insert our query.

Google Visualization API Query Language is pretty much the same as SQL. So if you are familiar with SQL, forming a query is dead simple. If you aren’t SQL is also easy to learn.

  • The query should be written like this:
    SELECT B, C, D, F WHERE C CONTAINS ‘Florida’
  • After encoding it properly, you get something like this:
    SELECT%20B%2C%20C%2C%20D%2C%20F%20WHERE%20C%20CONTAINS%20%27Florida%27
  • Add it to the tq parameter and don’t forget to also specify the key:
    https://spreadsheets.google.com/tq?tqx=out:html&tq=SELECT%20B%2C%20C%2C%20D%2C%20F%20WHERE%20C%20CONTAINS%20%27Florida%27
    &key=0AqAPbBT_k2VUdEtXYXdLdjM0TXY1YUVhMk9jeUQ0NkE

I am omitting the gid parameter here because there is only one sheet in this spreadsheet but you can add it if you would like. You can also omit it if the sheet you want is the first sheet. Ta-da!

Screen Shot 2013-11-27 at 10.26.13 AM

Compare this with the original spreadsheet view. I am sure you can appreciate how the small effort put into creating a URL pays back in terms of viewing an unwieldy large spreadsheet manageable.

You can also easily incorporate functions such as count() or sum() into your query to get an overview of the data you have in the spreadsheet.

  • select D,F count(C) where (B contains ‘author name’) group by D, F

For example, this query above shows how many articles a specific author published per year in each journal. The screenshot of the result is below and you can see it for yourself here: https://spreadsheets.google.com/tq?tqx=out:html&tq=select+D,F,count(C)+where+%28B+contains+%27Agoulnik%27%29+group+by+D,F&key=0AqAPbBT_k2VUdEtXYXdLdjM0TXY1YUVhMk9jeUQ0NkE

Screen Shot 2013-11-27 at 11.34.25 AM

Take this spread sheet as another example.

libbudgetfake

This simple query below displays the library budget by year. For those who are unfamiliar with ‘pivot‘, pivot table is a data summarization tool. The query below asks the spreadsheet to calculate the total of all the values in the B column (Budget amount for each category) by the values found in the C column (Years).

Screen Shot 2013-11-27 at 11.46.49 AM

This is another example of querying the spreadsheet connected to my library’s Literature Search request form. The following query asks the spreadsheet to count the number of literature search requests by Research Topic (=column I) that were received in 2011 (=column G) grouped by the values in the column C, i.e. College of Medicine Faculty or College of Medicine Staff.

  • select C, count(I) where (G contains ‘2011’) group by C

litsearch

C. More Querying Options

There are many more things you can do with a custom query. Google has an extensive documentation that is easy to follow: https://developers.google.com/chart/interactive/docs/querylanguage#Language_Syntax

These are just a few examples.

  • ORDER BY __ DESC
    : Order the results in the descending order of the column of your choice. Without ‘DESC,’ the result will be listed in the ascending order.
  • LIMIT 5
    : Limit the number of results. Combined with ‘Order by’ you can quickly filter the results by the most recent or the oldest items.

My presentation slides given at the 2013 LITA Forum below includes more detailed information about Google Visualization API Query Language, parameters, and other options as well as how to use Google Chart Libraries in combination with Google Visualization API Query Language for data visualization, which is the topic of my next post.

Happy querying Google Spreadsheet!