Category Archives: Instruction

Active Learning on Steroids: Unconferences and Information Literacy Instruction

So I went to a session at Computers in Libraries that I thought wasn’t going to have any relevance for my day-to-day work at all, but I wanted to hear the presenters speak because I’d heard good things about them through the Library Society of the World grapevine, and there wasn’t anything else compelling scheduled […]

New lesson plan: “Guided Pandemonium”

I tried a new lesson plan idea a couple of weeks back, and I’m not really sure how it went. It was a one-shot instruction session for an intro communications class; I’ve worked with this class and this faculty member before and it’s always gone well. The students are working on informative speeches on an […]

On-the-fly lesson plan conversion

So a couple of weeks ago, I taught a library research session for a nursing class and professor with whom I’d worked before, on a fairly straightforward lesson plan of “how to find articles in an EBSCO database.” The students were upperclasswomen who had done at least some research before, so I had a whole […]

Thinking about “scholarly” vs. “popular” serials

We’ve all done the classic “how to tell a scholarly journal from a popular magazine” lesson, usually with a face-off between something like Newsweek and The Journal of Neurobiophysiology or Critical Discourses in Freudian Meta-Rhetorical Analysis.  And we all tell our students that one of the classic hallmarks of a “popular” or trade magazine, as […]

In which I slap myself in the forehead

WHY didn’t I think of this sooner? I’ve been struggling to explain EBSCO’s “My EBSCOhost” feature to students for a year now. Most times, when I explain that it’s a way to save citations and articles (and other stuff, but I generally don’t go into that) from one session to another, or a useful way […]

What do faculty know about what students know?

There’s a lot of discussion going on about what students, especially first-year students, know about library research and information literacy. This makes sense: we need to know what students know, and what they don’t know, so that we can avoid boring them with stuff they’re already familiar with, and so that we can fill in […]