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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
September 1, 2011 – 10:38 am
There’s a meme that’s been going around lately about people’s philosophy of librarianship. Since I had to write a statement to precisely that effect1 just last month for my pre-tenure review portfolio, it seemed an easy thing to toss mine off here. Part of my statement of philosophy had to do with continually asking students [...]
August 26, 2011 – 1:13 pm
I love it when my friend Vardibidian blogs about libraries, because he always has such intriguing and thought-provoking things to say. Yesterday, he had a post that very neatly connected some dots surrounding the recent Ithaka S+R report and its contention that while library directors prioritize the library’s role in facilitating teaching and learning, faculty [...]
So, remember those two presentations I did last fall? Well, I’ll be reworking and expanding that content, and delivering it as a webcast for ACRL’s e-Learning program on Tuesday, July 19, at 2:00 p.m. EDT: “Classroom Assessment for Information Literacy Instruction: Are They Learning What You’re Teaching?” If you want to learn more about formative [...]
December 17, 2010 – 11:12 am
(See this post for an introduction to this blog series.) Well, this is the final post in the series, and I thought I would wrap up with one last thought, which is to point out that this entire series has been enabled by the minute paper assessments that I got back at the end of [...]
December 16, 2010 – 2:06 pm
(See this post for an introduction to this blog series.) One question that got asked over and over again was essentially, “how can I use this information in my annual performance review and/or my tenure portfolio?” And that’s an excellent question! It’s common practice for teaching faculty members to include course evaluations as part of [...]
December 1, 2010 – 9:00 am
(See this post for an introduction to this blog series.) The single most common response I got on my conference presentation minute papers can be accurately represented by this quote: How on earth to institute this kind of reflective practice among other librarians!! First off, this is a problem of leadership and organizational culture. Assessment, [...]
