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 at Rutgers, titled “New Foundations: Building An Inquiry-Based Information Literacy Agenda.” One of the goals of Todd’s workshop was to get us to change our vision of what the end product of information literacy instruction ought to be.  The goal is not to produce “information literate students.”  It’s certainly not to produce mini-librarians. Rather, the goal is to produce adults who can use information to solve problems.  He emphasized that all the rhetoric about information literacy being essential to “survival” in the current age is just that: rhetoric.  People can survive just fine (most of the time; see below re: health literacy) while lacking IL skills.  But they won’t be able to solve the world’s problems.

The second event was the May meeting of the National Forum on Information Literacy, which is an organization I had not previously heard of, but whose mission is to promote information literacy through partnerships with community organizations.¹ This meeting was interesting in other respects; for one thing, I learned a little bit about this organization that you would think I would have encountered before now.  We heard reports from people working on information literacy in agriculture, and people working on health literacy,² both of which are areas where lots of people who have no experience with higher education really need information literacy skills.

So anyway, all this got me thinking about what I think about when I imagine an “information literate” adult, and keep in mind that this is only one image, but it’s a particularly vivid one for me, and one that I return to frequently as a kind of a touchstone for why I do what I do:

a pregnant woman.

No, really, hear me out: middle- and upper-middle-class pregnant women (and new moms) are bombarded by so freakin’ much information, so much of it contradictory, so much of it loaded with agendas – it was nearly overwhelming for me, and I consider myself to be a pretty darned information literate person, thank you very much.

Breast or bottle? Give birth in a hospital or a birth center or at home? OB/GYN or midwife? Eat peanuts or avoid them? Vaccinate, or not, or delay?³ Cloth diapers or disposables? Crib or co-sleeper?  “Cry it out” or not?  It’s endless – and very little of the information out there is actually evidence-based, and even less is from truly disinterested parties.

So with that in mind, I can get back to the little case study I mentioned at the beginning of this post.

The Environmental Working Group recently released a report evaluating the safety of the active ingredients in a wide variety of sunscreens, and raising concerns that some ingredients (oxybenzone and retinyl palmitate, primarily) may increase the risk of cancer.  Magda Pecsenye, (nom de blog Moxie), mentioned the report in a blog post, and the ensuing discussion in her comments was a fascinating study in information  literacy.

Now, I should mention that Moxie has assembled a remarkable community of compassionate, respectful, intelligent, and good-humored commenters.  Trolls and flame wars don’t happen at Moxie’s blog, which as you probably know is unusual for a longstanding blog.

Anyway, the comments started out in a predictable trajectory:  the usual panicky, “oh my god the sunscreen we’ve been using for years is horrible” and “but all the recommended products are exorbitantly expensive and not available in my rural community” comments.  But then something interesting started happening: people started calming down, and then started questioning the EWG’s study, getting down to interrogating their methodology and some of the underlying assumptions behind their research.

First we have this comment, which advises proceeding cautiously with the results of the study, and in the excerpt I’m quoting below, astutely identifies the attention-grabbing headline/soundbite the EWG used:

On this data, I’m not sure I’m as 100% persuaded as folks here seem to be that some sunscreens are this big, bad, baddie worth freaking out about. I also don’t think I buy the “some sunscreens cause cancer!” line anymore than I would pay heed to a headline that screamed “news flash: the sun causes cancer!” I don’t mean to be glib. Sun protection is a valid concern, but let’s not go overboard with the worry.

Then there’s this comment that followed shortly afterwards, which I’m going to quote almost in its entirety because if a student of mine ever said this I would fall down on my knees and thank a Higher Power:

If you’re really worried, I would check out some of the science on PubMed. This is just my personal opinion, but EWG appears to be the kind of environmental group that tends to overstate risks and does not present a balanced picture – according to them, it seems like everything is toxic and every toxin is highly dangerous. I have my doubts about whether the scientific literature they cited is an accurate representation of the current knowlegde [sic].⁴

And then immediately following, we have this commenter, who in addition to criticizing the EWG for fear-mongering, also did a little legwork and figured out something about the EWG’s methodology — which, as it’s described here, seems a bit dubious:

[I]t is important to note that they only did their rankings based on the ingredients, they did not do actual tests of the products. There is no accounting for the amounts of each ingredient in the product, and with any ingredient, the risk is in the *dose*. … In summary, I think that their ratings are half-baked, not scientific, but more or less a resource for ingredients in sunscreen…. The best form of sun protection is the one that you use, or that you can get on your kids.

Then a commenter who’s an actual scientist weighs in with some really heavy-duty evaluation of their methodology:

[M]y quick skim of their methods section doesn’t really tell me the gory details, like whether they included every single study they could find in their meta-analysis, and if they didn’t, what their exclusion criteria were. Also, how do they compare results across studies with different methodologies? I know that there are methods for doing that, but I can’t tell what they did.

And she continues with:  “I’d feel a lot better about their conclusions if they would write them up in a scientific paper and submit them for peer review [emphasis added].”  Whoa.

The conversation continues, with commenters sharing what sunscreens they use and how well they work for them.  And at the very end, someone posts an unsourced “article” from a dermatologist who appears to be representing the American Academy of Dermatology, which questions the report’s findings (and points out that their study was not peer-reviewed).  But my point is, here are a bunch of people on the internet, using their very best information literacy skills to make informed health decisions for themselves and their families. (And doing a pretty darned good job, I have to say.)  This is what we are trying to accomplish, right?

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 the DOS-only computer. Good times, good times.)

But I do have a point here:  I’m actually very, very glad that I am this old, and that I have this experience under my belt.  Because now, whenever I use a database to search for articles, I have a very clear mental model for what I’m doing: what exactly is contained within the database, how it’s searching, what it’s finding.  And quite frankly, I don’t think you can use a print index and not have a very clear mental model for the process of indexing the periodical literature.

My friend and former colleague Kim Duckett talks and teaches a lot about the two processes of scholarly research: discovery and access.  Discovery is what happens when you’re searching an index: you’re discovering what has been written about the topic. Access is getting your hands on the full text of whatever it is that you’ve found.  The advent of full-text content in online bibliographic databases has elided the distinction between the two processes somewhat; sometimes so much so that students are unwilling to pursue articles that aren’t in full text in the database they’re searching (or don’t realize that they can pursue those articles).  And I’m not entirely sure that’s an entirely good thing.

When you’re working with a print index (this is the part of the post to which the title refers), the research process is pretty straightforward:

1. Identify articles/items of interest.  Collect them into a list.
2. Identify which of those items you have immediate access to, and go get them.
3. Of the remaining items, prioritize which ones you want to pursue.  This generally involves a cost/benefit analysis: is it worth waiting for Interlibrary Loan? (how fast is your ILL? is there a cost to the user? etc.)  Is it worth going to another library to get it? (how far is that other library? will you be going there anyway? etc.)

It’s that third step that’s important here: you’re constantly thinking critically about your articles/items and their relative value to your overall research project, constantly re-evaluating your priorities, etc.  And this, I think, is a step that gets largely lost in the process when it’s facilitated by full-text access.  The tendency to grab the first full-text items you can find (what I think of as a “pillage and plunder” approach to building a bibliography) seems to be much, much more overwhelming in this environment.¹

And this, finally (FINALLY) brings me to my point — or, part of my point — which is that recently I re-discovered a fascinating article by Martin Gordon called “Article Access — Too Easy?” published in a book entitled Serials Librarianship in Transition: Issues and Developments in 1986.  Yes, you read that correctly: nineteen eighty-six. Nearly a quarter-century ago.

And Gordon makes essentially the same point, though some of his language and ideas are charmingly quaint when viewed from this perspective (due primarily to the fact that online searching at that time was largely mediated by librarians).  His concern is largely that the tremendous leap in accessibility of material via online searching will lead to research papers becoming “an exercise in seeing how many citations they can append to their essay in the hope that quantity will either add to its substance or hide the lack thereof” (170).

And lo, it came to pass.

His other concern is that the greater accessibility of the journal literature will lead to undergraduates over-using it, in situations where books might be more appropriate:

Unlike monographic sources that tend at the undergraduate level to provide overall views of a topic, periodical articles are apt to be as pieces in a landscape of possible sources that require careful selection and placement in order to be of value. … How well they mesh with one another as well as their ability to update or expand the monographic choices are of primary importance in selecting them. (171)

Which leads me to my other point (FINALLY), which is that his concerns have, at least to some degree, come to pass.  And this is not entirely a bad thing: undergraduates should work with the primary research literature in their field.  But so often, the primary research literature is either written at a level that’s far beyond their comprehension, especially in their first couple of years; and/or it’s exactly as Gordon describes above: one very narrow slice of a much, much larger picture.  And that’s not always the best kind of information for what undergraduates need.

Now, thinking about the kinds of information that undergraduates need, got me thinking about Barbara Fister and her colleagues’ recent study of the contents of aggregated multidisciplinary databases (PDF), and librarians’ assessments of the value of those databases.  They found, unsurprisingly, that aggregated databases tend to pad their offerings with journals of dubious quality, and/or highly specialized or technical journals whose value to undergraduates is questionable.  They also found, however, that librarians were generally satisfied with these databases and didn’t want to see them restricting or reducing their contents to better meet undergraduates’ needs.

I’m not precisely certain, but I think I may have taken the survey that Barbara and her colleagues administered as part of the study.  In any case, I probably would have sided with most of the librarians in the study for one simple reason: I don’t want vendors making the decisions about what to include and what to exclude; I want librarians making those decisions.  And this is the wonderful bit of history that I learned from Barbara’s article: at one time, we did.  The periodicals to be indexed in general indices² like the Humanities Index and the Social Sciences Index from Wilson were voted on by the subscribing libraries (275).

Partly this was for practicality’s sake: in an age when interlibrary loan was much more cumbersome, libraries wanted their own holdings to be foremost in an index’s contents, and before online catalogs, it was much simpler for librarians to report this information than for the vendor to assemble it it/themselves.  But there was also a pedagogical/collection development component at work here: librarians understood which journals were more appropriate for their undergraduate students’ work, and prioritized those journals for inclusion in the indices.

Maybe this makes me hopelessly old-school and out of touch (see above re: “used a print index”), but I’m not sure that such a thing isn’t such a bad idea after all.  Maybe instead of an “undergrad” checkbox, we need a whole separate “undergrad” database?

I start with an exercise on taking a topic phrase like “reducing juvenile delinquency through after-school sports” and translating that into a database-friendly keyword search like “juvenile delinquency AND (sports OR athletics).” Then I have the students go through the same process with their own topics on a structured worksheet, working in pairs, and we put one or two examples on the board to discuss them. No computers — mine or the students’ — are used in this portion of the class.¹

Then I turn on the instructor’s computer and projector, and do a short demo of whatever the relevant database is for the class. 99% of the time it’s an EBSCO database, due to the intersection of the classes that tend to do instruction (Psych, Education, and Communication are our biggest customers) and the particulars of our database subscriptions.  Lately I’ve been having a student “drive” the computer while I stand in front of the screen and point and talk.

Then I turn them loose, either individually or in pairs/small groups, to search on their own for the remainder of the class (usually between 5 and 15 minutes), while I circulate and try to solve problems in the room.

This has worked relatively well for the past year or so, but I’ve become increasingly dissatisfied with the database demo portion of the class: I feel like it’s too lecture-y and I’d like to get away from it.  Here’s a chronology of my thinking on this:

• I started being involved in some online conversations with librarians I respect and trust, who were talking about how much they’d moved away from the more mechanistic, “click here, type here, now use this menu option…” aspects of demonstrating databases, and how much they had shifted over to letting the students figure out the mechanics of the database interface themselves.  I wanted to move in this direction, but just wasn’t quite sure that our students were up to the challenge.
• A colleague of mine gave a presentation on using blogs and wikis with her classes — her extremely humanities-based classes² — and explained that she really doesn’t teach the students how to use the blog and wiki tools’ interfaces, and the students are generally able to figure them out just fine.
• I heard a presentation a LOEX just a few weeks ago, where Emily Mazure talked about asking students who were about to attend one-shot library instruction sessions to view a couple of tutorials ahead of time, so that certain basic concepts wouldn’t need to be addressed in the session itself.³
• Also at LOEX, I heard a fantastic keynote address by Brian Coppola that, among many other fabulous things, introduced me to research from cognitive psychology that suggests that people learn stuff more deeply and thoroughly if they think they’re going to have to explain it to someone else (regardless of if they ever actually do so), than if they’re just learning it for themselves.

Whew. That’s a lot of influences and relatively random, unconnected conversations and presentations.  But what it convinced me was, students can probably figure out the basics of the EBSCO search interface on their own, especially if they get a little bit of pre-preparation via a tutorial of some sort; and having them figure it out on their own, and then report back to their classmates, is probably much more effective than me talking at them and pointing at the screen.  So here’s what I’m planning to try this fall:

• Before the session, ask the faculty member to ask/require the students to watch NCSU’s “Article Databases in 5 Minutes,” and/or NCSU’s “Peer Review in 5 Minutes,” and/or a tutorial (to be determined, possibly by EBSCO themselves, but definitely not created in-house, so as not to reinvent the wheel) on the basics of the EBSCO search interface.
• Keep the Boolean/keywords section as is, with lecture/discussion followed by working in pairs, followed by group discussion of 1-2 search strategies.
• Then put them in groups and give them 5-10 minutes to find appropriate/peer-reviewed articles on one of the topics we’ve just discussed in class, not on their own topics.⁴ I’ll give them directions for how to get to the database, but nothing beyond that.  And I’ll tell them they should be prepared to teach the rest of the class what they learned through this process.
• After the 5-10 minutes, call 1-2 groups up to the podium to teach what they’ve learned.  Make sure to fill in any essential gaps that they’ve left out (e.g., if nobody mentions the “peer-reviewed” checkbox, make sure to mention that).

I have no idea if this will work better than what I was doing before. But, it’s different, and it’s less me-focused, which can only be a good thing.  I’ll try to remember to post about how it’s working sometime in the fall.

Walt Crawford has a great post up on his blog about the choices he makes about technology for his own use.  It’s a great post not just because his specific choices mirror mine in many ways, or because his decision tree about whether to adopt a new technology or upgrade an existing one largely mirrors mine as well, but because he so clearly explains that decision tree.  Walt doesn’t ask “what can this new tool do?” but rather, “what do I want to do, and which tools will help me do that in the most efficient way possible?”

But the reason I’m posting about this is because in the shower this morning (really) I realized that his decision process about technology is nearly identical to the decision process we use to determine the learning outcomes for a class, course, or program.  Instead of asking, “what do we need to cover?” we ask, “what should the students be able to do at the end of this session/course/program?”

So for example, instead of saying “hey, I need a smartphone!” I ask, “what do I need in a phone?”  When the answer is “the ability to call for help and be reached in an emergency,” the choice is clear: my $8/month cheapie phone from Virgin Mobile is perfect.  But when I say, “hey, I’ve got a toddler, and he does cute things, and I want to capture that on video,” I go out and discover that (relatively) inexpensive and (very) easy to use video cameras are available.¹  So, purchasing a video camera is a logical response to what I want to do.

Likewise, instead of saying, “we need to cover reference books, the catalog, at least three databases, interlibrary loan, and explain about plagiarism in this session,” we ask, “what do students need to be able to do for this assignment?”² And then we have them practice doing just that.

So I’m not really sure where I’m going with this, but I thought I’d put it out here anyway.

But first, some definitions:  I put both “plagiarism” and “detection” in quotation marks in the previous paragraph because I don’t think SafeAssign does either one.  First of all, it’s not smart enough to detect when a student is properly citing a source, so any quoted material will be flagged as suspect.  This is fine as long as you’re reading the report carefully, but it could very easily be confusing to a student.  Second, calling what SafeAssign does “detection” can be misleading, since (as I’ll show below) SafeAssign doesn’t detect all plagiarized material and can also incorrectly flag common turns of phrase as plagiarized when in fact they’re simply common phrases.

So what I did was this: I put together a document that consisted entirely of plagiarized passages from resources I had at my disposal.  I tried to get as many different kinds of sources as I could, stopping short of patronizing online “term paper mills,” since I wasn’t about to spend any money on this project.  I used passages from Wikipedia, the open web, full-text articles from EBSCO’s Academic Search Premier, JSTOR, Project Muse, Biography Resource Center, and Oxford Reference Online, as well as a book from Google Books and a print (gasp!) reference work.  For the online resources, I tried to get a mix of HTML and PDF texts.  (This required re-typing some text from a JSTOR PDF!)  Most sources were quoted word-for-word, but I did some bad paraphrasing as well.¹

(If you’re interested in the document I came up with, it’s here (Word doc). Fair warning: it makes no sense whatsoever, but that wasn’t really the point.)

Then I ran the paper through SafeAssign, and also checked representative sentences/phrases with Google to see what it could find.

The results were very interesting:  SafeAssign indicated that 66% of the paper was “suspect” and identified 7 sources that matched the text (of the 15 separate passages, it identified 10).  Google found 8 of the 15 passages.²  What was interesting was the patterns in what SafeAssign and Google could, and couldn’t, find:

1. On the whole, SafeAssign was much better at identifying paraphrased passages than Google, though an expert Googler could probably identify more than just the 8 passages that my method found.
2. Google did much better than SafeAssign on content from JSTOR and Project Muse (SafeAssign didn’t find any of this content.)
3. Oddly enough, all the content that SafeAssign detected was attributed to web sources (e.g., answers.com, university web sites), even when I had originally found that content in licensed databases. ³  This is interesting to me in that one of the main selling points for subscription-based plagiarism detection tools (like TurnItIn.com, which has leaned heavily on this in their marketing) is that they can compare student papers against sources (like licensed databases) that are not on the open web.
4. Finally, I noticed at the very bottom of the SafeAssign report that there’s a little logo that says “powered by Windows Live Search.” Make of that what you will.

So that’s what I learned.  I’ve always had serious concerns about the ethics of using SafeAssign, TurnItIn.com, and other such tools, and I’ve has suspicions about the effectiveness of these kinds of tools, but now I have some (not very hard) (actually pretty squishy, but evocative) data on that question.

This year, the Library Society of the World (better link here) was well represented, with Movers & Shakers Maurice Coleman, Matt Hamilton, Jason Puckett, and Andy Woodworth.  But most notably for the LSW, our very own Steve Lawson and Josh “Sheriff” Neff were honored for . . .  well, founding doesn’t seem like quite the right term for an organization as disorganized as the LSW.  Perhaps catalyzing is a better term.  Anyway, they’re two of the driving forces behind the LSW, and the award couldn’t have gone to a better duo.  Congratulations, carping nerdboys!

LSW aside, I also want to draw people’s attention to another Mover & Shaker this year, Bonnie Tijerina.  Bonnie and I were Fellows at the NCSU Libraries together (this brings my list of one-degree-of-separation M&S up to six) and I remember when she was starting to organize the first Electronic Resources and Libraries conference.  I know a number of people who attended this year’s conference in Austin and had a terrific experience there, but I had no idea that was her conference, and that it had grown so much.  I’m not surprised, though, and I’m so happy that she’s being noticed by her colleagues and by LJ for this essential work for the library community!

So most of my teaching for this semester is done: I have three more sessions for two classes coming up after Spring Break, and then, unless someone comes to me with a completely out-of-the-blue request (which could happen) that’s it for the semester.  It’s been relatively busy for a spring semester: I did ten sessions in February, which is the most I’ve done in any one month except for one September when I did twelve.

When scheduling classes, I try to limit myself to no more than three preps per week, and no more than one prep per day if I can possibly manage it.  One week this term I did five sessions (only three preps) and at the peak of the term, I did eight sessions in the space of eight workdays, which I think is a new record.  That was pretty rough and I was very very glad that most of those sessions were repeats of lesson plans that I’d done in previous semesters.

Any teaching faculty out there reading this? You’re probably either chortling with disdain or picking your jaw up off the floor right now. Double bonus points if you teach at a community college with a 5-5 load.

“What do you mean, only three preps per week?” you’re probably howling. “I do three preps per day some terms.  What a total wimp!”

Yep, I admit it.  But here’s the thing:  every class I teach is the first day of class.

It’s true: every time I meet a class, it’s the first — and most likely the only — time I meet with that class.  The term “one-shot” for a library instruction session means just that: I get one shot with these students, and I’d better hope that whatever I need to get across to them, even if it’s something as basic as “come ask us for help,” gets across.

Remember how exhausted you are after the first days of every term?  Now imagine that you had to do that every time you teach, and there was no opportunity to go back and fix anything you did wrong on the first day, or add a reminder of something you accidentally missed, or…well, anything.

Yeah, it’s exhausting. The real problem, though, is that it doesn’t scale well: I can’t do a whole lot (like, orders of magnitude) more instruction than I’m already doing, and our campus is going to need a whole lot more instruction than I’m already doing.  And we’ll need it soon, once our new General Education curriculum comes online.  I’m not at all sure what to do about that.

1. When I was in elementary school, I read a book called There’s a Rainbow In My Closet that made me want to paint, and paint, and paint. I checked it out of the library a bazillion times, and read it many more times than that. The library I checked it out of, still has it. It’s out of print, and used copies are running in the $250 range, or else I’d have bought myself a copy.
2. My first library job was in the Preservation Department of Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library in the summer of 1993. I was working on a project to survey the condition of the books in the stacks (as part of a campaign to advocate for — wait for it — air-conditioning in the stack tower). We did brittleness and other tests on long runs of serials including volumes of The Gentleman’s Magazine that went back to the 18th century. And were sitting there in un-airconditioned stacks. OMGWTFBBQ.
3. When I was three, a friend of the family gave me a copy of The Dot and the Line, by Norton Juster. I still have it, and read it to James on occasion. My mom swears that I actually got the joke of “he found himself completely on edge” at the age of three.
4. I do not remember the first book I could read. (Though I do remember being able to read a traffic sign that said, “NO TURN ON RED.”) I really don’t remember not being able to read.
5. In first grade, we worked through some progressive readers of some sort at our own pace, and at the end of the year I made a point of remembering which reader I had just completed, and actively maintained that memory through the whole summer, so that when I came back in the fall I could pick up where I left off.
6. I really despise “gift books,” those little useless tomes that bookstores keep by the cash register so you can buy a cute book of cat quotes for your friend who likes cats, or whatever. They’re usually awful books, and I never know what to do with them when people give them to me. Which they seem to do with alarming frequency.
7. I don’t have memories of my parents reading to me, though surely they did.  We didn’t read chapter books aloud as bedtime stories or any of that, at least not that I can remember, possibly because by the time I was mature enough for chapter books, I was reading them myself.
8. I am NOT an audiobook person. Not not not not not. Partly because I cannot fathom when I’d have time to listen to an audiobook, but mostly because I want reading to be a self-directed activity: at my own pace, with the freedom to go back and re-read a sentence, check a reference, etc.  However, having said that…
9. Before our son was born, my husband would read aloud to me on long car trips.  That was okay because I could interrupt him to ask a question, make him go back, etc. Our favorites were P. G. Wodehouse (Leave it to Psmith) and Harry Potter books. He does a wicked Hagrid accent.  It’s possible that we’ll get back to reading aloud once James is of an age to appreciate it (and pay attention to books without pictures).
10. My third library job was in the undergraduate library at Yale, where among other things I sorted and shelved books.  Since it was a small, compact collection, I eventually covered the entire LC classification system, and pretty much learned at least the initial letters, as well as some of the second letters (PQ vs PR vs PS vs PZ, for instance) long before I started library school.
11. The first author-signed book I owned was a copy of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, which I picked up at the greatest used bookstore in the universe (now defunct), and it’s inscribed to the Oberlin College Science Fiction Society.
12. Also at that used bookstore, I picked up a copy of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting that was inscribed by a friend of mine to his ex-girlfriend. I’ve never told either of them that I have it. Heh.
13. The best used bookstore in the universe was Miranda Books, in Oberlin, Ohio.  I won’t hear objections to this.
14. The band director at Yale once gave me a set of the 1961 edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians that was missing the first volume (A-B).  Not that there are any important composers whose names begin with A or B.  Some years later, I told this story to the music librarian at UNC-Chapel Hill, and he promptly marched me back to the room that contained their unprocessed gifts, and plucked one (of several) first volumes off the shelf and gave it to me.  He also tossed in a Liber usualis for good measure.

Sorry, I really couldn’t come up with a fifteenth!

My 5-minute segment was a quick set piece about how the “Find Text” (OpenURL resolver) links in our databases work.  It went over well, and I was pleased with it, but my fellow cohort members mentioned that since it was such a set piece, totally the same in every class I used it in, and didn’t need to be customized to the particular disciplinary context, perhaps a more efficient strategy would be to do a screencast that covered the same content.

So, that’s what I did.  After a semester of waffling and considering options, we got a license for Camtasia last week, I watched a bunch of tutorials on how to use it, and eventually produced this (which unfortunately is too wide for this blog, but I think the embed works anyway):

I’m quite pleased with the results!

Things have been pretty quiet around here lately:  actual in-class instruction has been done for several weeks now, but we’ve got a lot of projects cooking on various back burners.  We’re going to be doing usability testing on the new library website in January, so we’re getting geared up for that, and I’m working on some new instructional tools including my very first screencast.  So there’s a lot going on behind the scenes, but not much to talk about.

Here are some recent photos of my little guy J, though, just so this blog doesn’t go all dormant: