WHY didn’t I think of this sooner?
I’ve been struggling to explain EBSCO’s “My EBSCOhost” feature to students for a year now. Most times, when I explain that it’s a way to save citations and articles (and other stuff, but I generally don’t go into that) from one session to another, or a useful way for students in group projects to share their research, there are a few students who seem to get it, but most have that kind of blank look that says, “and I would want to do this…why, exactly?”
I finally found an analogy that actually seems to work. At least, it did in the Biology class I taught this afternoon: it’s a shopping cart. Or rather, the “folder” is a shopping cart, and creating a My EBSCOhost account is like creating an account on a shopping site: it lets you save the items in your shopping cart and come back to them later. That seemed to get a reaction, or at least recognition, from them.
Just call me Captain Obvious over here.
