I recently saw a very interesting case study of information literacy in a blog I follow, but before I tell that story, I need to provide a little background first.
About a month ago I attended two information literacy events at Purdue University: the first was a day-long workshop by Ross Todd, from the library school [...]
I am old enough to have used the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, in print.
There. I said it. As a matter of fact, I used print indices of various sorts right through my undergraduate degree and my first graduate program. (Ah, those print volumes of RILM, eventually supplanted by the CD-ROM version that ran on [...]
Something like half of the one-shot instruction sessions I do follow the same pattern: the faculty member wants me to teach the students “how to find (scholarly) journal articles.” During the first couple of the semesters I was in this position, I gradually worked out a lesson plan that works pretty well for this:
I [...]
I’m gearing up for a conversation/presentation with faculty on our campus about SafeAssign, the “plagiarism” “detection” tool (more on those quotes in a moment) that’s integrated into Blackboard, so I’ve been doing some testing to see how it compares with Google for finding and sourcing suspicious passages.
But first, some definitions:Â I put both “plagiarism” and [...]
A couple of weeks ago our campus hosted a guest speaker who gave a presentation on assessing critical thinking skills, especially in the context of general education. (This was part of an ongoing project on our campus to reform our general education curriculum and move more in the direction of assessment of learning outcomes.)
The presentation [...]
This is, in many ways, a post-Immersion success story.
Earlier this week, I taught a one-shot session for an introductory class that had about 15 first-year students and 5 seniors. As soon as we got started, it became apparent that there was one student, evidently a senior, in the class who simply would not [...]
So the APA just recently published a new edition of their style manual, the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. And hoo, boy: what a mess. Among other things, they’ve made substantial changes to the way writers are supposed to cite journal articles accessed online, especially via licensed subscription databases.
This blog post is likely [...]
So the instruction season is in full swing (I have 5 sessions for three classes this week, and 4 sessions for two classes next week, yikes!) and I’m back from Immersion, so I’m sure you’re waiting with baited breath to find out how Immersion has transformed my information literacy instruction!
Wait, you’re not? Oh.
Well, I’m going [...]
There’s been another 10-librarian pileup on the ILI-L in the last couple of days concerning Wikipedia. This kind of thing happens every few months on ILI-L: someone starts it by reporting a funny story about Wikipedia, or asking how others use (or don’t use) it in our teaching, or what [...]
So I’ve been working lately on a presentation idea that I’ve been kicking around for a while, that I intend to submit for LOEX 2010, and as a result I’ve been looking through a bunch of messy assessment data that I’ve collected over the past year and a bit. And I was reminded of [...]
