Pull quote: “I think it’s dangerous for students to be put in the mindset that a piece of information is all good or all bad. They might use a checklist and go through the site / resource to determine if it meets particular criteria, but not having them think critically about a range of goodness/badness and a gray area sets them up to actually think less critically overall. Once they check off enough boxes to determine a source as all good or all bad, they don’t have to think about the information much anymore: it’s just use it or don’t use it at this point.”
Pull quote: “I asked students, and their professor (and myself) to take out a sheet of paper and write down at least 3 aspects of the research process that were still problematic for them. These could be mechanical things like not knowing how to get articles from journals we don’t subscribe to or bigger things like finding research related to your area of interest or knowing how to structure your lit review. I also asked students to include any fears associated with research they might have. If some folks were still writing while others were through, I turned it into a think-pair-share activity and asked them to discuss what they’d written with the person sitting next to them.”
Pull quote: “Awareness of all of these issues might help to insure that librarians and researchers (and the students we teach at the reference desk and in the classroom) don’t get stuck in the filter bubble, surrounded by thin information that was written by bots!”
Pull quote: “Quick, simple, elegant, Vine offers something more than a snapshot, but less than a three-minute tutorial in which one’s eyes glaze over, or constantly pause and rewind to keep up.”
Pull quote: “One thing I did learn from one of the two classes, though, is that of the students who clearly ‘got it,’ nearly all of them wound up citing journal articles from databases in their bibliographies. We talk about finding journal articles in the class session, but it gets a really quick, slapdash approach, and we spend a lot more time on other issues. Seeing how many of the successful bibliographies use articles makes me think that we need to switch things up and spend more time, and be a lot more deliberate, in our explanation and exploration of databases.”
Pull quote: “Then during class, we looked at a selection of the sources that students brought in, talked about what made them good or less-good sources, talked about how they’d found them, and used those as springboards to talk about places to search (databases, Google Scholar, Google tips, etc.), searching strategies (Boolean, keywords, etc.), and evaluating what they find. It’s a way to meet them where they are, acknowledge the skills that they already bring to class, and give them tools and strategies to take those skills further.”
Pull quote: “So, with all this in mind, the professor and I encouraged the students to see their annotated bibliographies as their chance to map out the boundaries of the conversation they’d be entering, selecting key works for theoretical foundations, background information, and the main voices in the conversation their papers will be adding to. The annotations should point out why and how each source functions in the context of their papers. And all of this will help them and their professor see the major landmarks on the emerging landscape of their topic.”
Pull quote: “At SUNY Geneseo, we wanted to know what students were learning via reference transactions, beyond typical counts of reference questions or user satisfaction surveys. These reference transactions occur in several settings, including at the reference desk, during scheduled reference consultations, and through impromptu questions at various locations. Building on assessment techniques such as the One Minute Paper traditionally used in library instruction settings, students were given a survey after each reference transaction that simply asked ‘What did you learn today from your meeting with the librarian?’”
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: “As with the previous incarnation of the course, the students all walked away from the course with a firm belief that research counts and that accepting whatever you find online at first glance is a bad policy. I was really pleased to see that they extended this lesson beyond the Internet to pretty much all historical sources. As one student said to me, from now on she was going to apply the “sniff test” to all her sources..if it smelled slightly fishy, she was going to have to seek corroboration. If all they got out of the class was this one lesson, then it was well worth teaching.”
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: “The decentralized model is no accident. In short, the goal of DS106 is to teach students how to be creative, capable Internet citizens, able to consciously shape their own identities and narratives online. Minus the modicum of structure and authority exerted by the instructors, the course operates much as the Web does. ‘DS106,’ says George Siemens, a professor at Athabasca University and one of the early pioneers of open teaching, ‘is itself an expression of its content.’”
Pull quote: “[H]ow do we successfully determine and prove what a feasible teaching workload is and how can new librarians like Meredith effectively share and demonstrate workload concerns with their administrators?”
