February 15, 2013 – 3:06 pm
Two Fridays ago was a busy day for me. My campus is trying to start up a first-year seminar (FYS) program as part of our new general education program. We’re working on recruiting faculty to teach courses in the program, which has been a bit of a stumbling block for a wide variety of reasons. [...]
January 16, 2013 – 9:52 am
My last three posts have been about new things I tried last semester, and how they worked out. Now I’m going to talk a little bit about new things I’m trying this semester, and what I’m hoping for them. Digression: I realized about a year ago that I needed a bit more structure to thinking [...]
January 8, 2013 – 11:33 am
The third new thing I tried in the fall semester was to incorporate different formative classroom assessment techniques, in addition to my old standby, the minute paper.1Â Minute papers are great, don’t get me wrong, and I’ve learned a ton of stuff from them, but there are other tools out there that you can learn [...]
December 21, 2012 – 10:50 am
So in addition to trying out a new lesson plan concept this semester, I also screwed up my courage and asked a few of the faculty I worked with to share their students’ bibliographies from the papers or projects they worked on. This is part of a concerted effort on my part to add summative [...]
December 20, 2012 – 10:24 am
One of the biggest challenges I have as a teacher is when I get a class where the students have wildly different backgrounds and experience with doing research. Some of them might be second-semester first-year students who have never done college-level research before; others might be juniors or seniors with a number of research projects [...]
September 27, 2012 – 11:51 am
This blog has been dormant long enough that I think it’s probably okay for me to hijack it from its usual purpose (discussion of the hows, whats, and whys of library instruction) to address an issue that’s come to a head in recent days and weeks. So a couple of weeks ago, the libraries at [...]
In the past week or so, there’s been a bit of a tempest in a teapot surrounding the journal Reference and User Services Quarterly (RUSQ), the peer-reviewed journal of the Reference & User Services Association (RUSA), itself a division of the American Library Association (ALA). I’ll try to tell the story as clearly as I [...]
March 13, 2012 – 10:45 am
Three things I’ve been mulling over lately, that probably aren’t enough to justify a blog post on their own but, put together, make a substantial post. Think of this as the tapas of blog posts. Thing The First I wrote up a lesson plan recently that contained the directive, aimed at myself, “and go from [...]
February 24, 2012 – 8:46 am
Okay, so Barbara Fister linked to me from her spectacular Library Babel Fish blog at Inside Higher Ed, listing me as one of many pre-tenure librarians who’d signed the Elsevier boycott at The Cost of Knowledge. While it’s certainly true that I’ve signed the boycott, what I haven’t done — yet — is make a [...]
October 12, 2011 – 9:55 am
It’s been a long time since I’ve given a simple yes or no answer to the question, “would this be a good source for my paper?” but lately I’ve been getting even more nuanced in my answers (and probably the students are getting even more frustrated with my unwillingness to give them a straight answer!) [...]
