Author Archives: Catherine

Eyeballs

Just putting this here so I can find it again: ಠ_ಠ

What do you want to learn next?

At my very last instruction session for this semester (which was on December 2 — possibly a new record for latest instruction session in the semester) I had a brilliant idea for an alternative to the Minute Paper1 for an end-of-session formative assessment, which was to ask students to write down the answer to one […]

Walking the walk may be trickier than it first appears: An open access publishing story

So I’m pleased to report that an article I wrote, “A Preliminary Methodology, and a Cautionary Tale, for Determining How Students Seek Research Help Online,” has been published in the April 2014 issue of portal: Libraries and the Academy.  Because of a variety of factors, the article is available in its final published version (PDF […]

What I did during my summer

(The title of this post was going to be “What I did during my summer vacation” except I’m on a 12-month contract.) Maura Smale posted her #summerIdidlist on her blog recently, so since this has been a particularly busy summer, I thought I’d do the same: Submitted an article manuscript to portal. Facilitated a conversation […]

How we done good

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. […]

Some new things I’m trying this semester

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 […]

Some new things I tried this semester: the failed experiment

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.1  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 […]

Some new things I tried this semester, Part 2: Summative assessment

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 […]

Some new things I tried this semester, part 1: The workshop class

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 […]

Stewardship, Librarianship, the ACS, and us

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 […]