Pull quote: “Consistent with earlier ERIAL findings, the students in the new study tended to use every tool’s search function box as though it were a Google search box. And they tended not to adjust the default settings.
Therefore, the efficacy of each discovery tool often depends on how well the criteria written into the default search algorithm of that particular tool accords with the criteria of the particular research assignment it is being used for, say the researchers.”
Pull quote: “Image captioning: I use images a lot in my class, but I would like to do an activity each week where I show an image related to the week’s readings and then ask them to create a caption for it on an index card. This is a different skill from the usual and requires the ability to synthesize information. Plus I can use it as a mini-reading quiz.”
Pull quote: “I don’t know if there have been studies on this, but it would be interesting to figure out at which level does it make the most sense to provide face-to-face instruction and at what level would students benefit most from learning objects. It seems like most suites of learning objects designed to replace face-to-face instruction happen at the Freshman level, but that might just be because there are so many sections of the same few courses and it’s easier to create something that works for many, many, many classes.”
Pull quote: “I buy that students find writing for Wikipedia to be so much more meaningful and real than writing a term paper — it’s a tool they use and value, and it’s public — there’s lots of reasons why I think this is engaging. I agree that it’s a better option, for those reasons, than the traditional research paper (with the important caveat that the person designing the assignment and guiding the students through the assignment has to really ‘get’ Wikipedia if it’s going to work). But I’m wondering if the very factors that make Wikipedia ‘better’ as a platform for student research aren’t highlighting some of the problems with the ways we’re currently trying to get students engaged in academic writing, knowledge creation, and meaning-making in our composition and library classrooms?”
Pull quote: “I think we gain opportunities and motivation to examine our practice, to have difficult discussions, to encourage and pull stragglers along, to mollify and reign in renegades, and to shift emphasis from one point to another in the vast matrix of professional goals. I think we lose a sense of the complexity of our past. New concepts or emphases do not spring fully formed into being, and new pedagogies retain large portions of old pedagogies, but a new name assignes concepts and pedagogies an artificial start date.”
Pull quote: “So, you can be an expert so long as you satisfy two properties: you’ve got to know a lot about something and you have to be able to apply that knowledge to new situations. For example, a particle physicist is not an expert on subatomic particles merely because she knows a lot about them. She also has to be able to make predictions, solve problems, and be able to adapt to new discoveries. That is, the expert is the one who can reliably solve problems in particle physics. In contrast, the Wikipedia editors on the particle physics page are not experts because they are interested in the page. Neither are they experts if they’re read a lot and have a lot of domain knowledge. They’re only experts on particle physics if they can successfully apply their knowledge in new and challenging situations. Basically, if a given Wikipedia editor is capable of searching for the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider, I’d say she is probably an expert on particle physics.”
But what about asking students to do some work before they join us in the library classroom? I’m sure many of us ask students to come to their library instruction sessions with a research topic in mind, especially for one-shots. We could ask them to view or read tutorials or research guides about the library catalog and databases before their one-shot, so they can jump right in once they get to the library. But will they do it? And are there other ways that we can take advantage of the flipped model to help students get more out of library instruction?
Pull quote: “In sum, publication-based assignments emphasize the responsibilities of public discourse and build learner accountability. Librarians have concrete responsibilities and opportunities on this front. We are well positioned to encourage the dissemination of student work in open forums, many of which we are intimately acquainted with and/or directly responsible for. We can identify and pursue these prospects with faculty and students and collaborate to ensure the best possible realization, and in so doing become more critically and holistically involved in the learning experience of our user communities.”
Pull quote: “What if instead of coming into an information literacy session planning to teach students how to evaluate a website or explain searching the databases or catalog you came into class planning to explore an interesting information literacy question with your students? This would be a really interesting or important question that affects not just college research but our everyday lives. These would be questions interesting to us as librarians, but also likely interesting to anyone living in this information age.”
Pull quote: “What I am arguing for is that ‘library instruction’ should be so integrated into the academic curriculum that we construct it and implement it within this larger context. As long as we (libraries) continue to implement learning initiatives disconnected from the formal (read: real) curriculum, we will struggle to find attention and value.”
Pull quote: “We often get trapped into thinking that we’re simply helping students with their research. But we’re not just trying to teach students to become successful academic researchers. We are trying to help them become sophisticated consumers and creators of information. This is a much bigger view that encompasses student’s critical thinking skills, lifelong learning and the future of the web.”
Pull quote: “Sometimes students are required to keep a journal of their research process, which they may have to hand in along with their research paper, presentation, or project. At its best the research journal forms a kind of story of the journey students take as they do research: the hesitant beginnings, wrong turns, forks in the road, unexpected shortcuts, and (hopefully) the successful outcome of completing the research needed to finish their project. And we hope that students find it useful to reflect on their own research process, and that they begin to understand the iterative nature of research, that it’s not just a straight line from point A to point B. What if we asked students to create a game that tells the story of their research rather than keeping a research journal? Would students achieve the same goals of recording and reflecting that they do with a traditional research journal?”
Pull quote: “More and more often I’m convinced that our beginning undergraduates need to use books for their research assignments. Books can bridge that gap between very general and very scholarly that is difficult to find in a journal article. They often cover a broad subject in smaller chunks (i.e., chapters), and can provide a good model for narrowing a topic into one that’s manageable for a short research assignments. Books can also help students exercise the muscles that they need for better internet and database searching as they mine chapter titles and the index for keywords.”
Pull quote: “Rather than asking students to follow a librarian on a traditional tour of the physical building or to work through a website-centered computer lab session, the Scavenger Hunt throws teams of first-year scholars into a fast-paced game using iPod Touches and the cloud-based multimedia note-taking app Evernote. As a result, students don’t just learn about the library; they interact with it by exploring spaces and the Libraries’ website, asking questions of library staff, taking photos, and texting information back to librarians. Using the mobile and online technologies that today’s students live and breathe, the mobile scavenger hunt presents the library in a fun, low-stakes way that reduces library anxiety by using situated, problem-based learning.”
Pull quote: “Furthermore, this process of having a really good draft in hand, reading it critically, and then finding new evidence to fill gaps you didn’t see before is perfectly normal. In fact, it’s great! The research process is circular, so trying to hammer it out flat will often get you less great results. See? It looks like this. You are currently re-examining your topic. Again. And ideally you’ll do it often.”
