October 1, 2010 – 8:54 am
It’s been pretty quiet in Blogville these days: not much happening over the summer, and then BAM the semester starts and suddenly I’m teaching eight different library sessions (two of them built completely from scratch) in nine work days. But the fall-semester rush is dying down, and even though apparently blogs are dead (who knew?) […]
Something like half of the one-shot instruction sessions I do follow the same pattern: the faculty member wants me to teach the students “how to find (scholarly) journal articles.” During the first couple of the semesters I was in this position, I gradually worked out a lesson plan that works pretty well for this: I […]
This post1 isn’t so much for all you instruction librarians out there, since you all probably know what I’m going to say already. It’s more for any teaching faculty who might be out there (anyone? anyone? Bueller?) and anyone else who’s curious. So most of my teaching for this semester is done: I have three […]
November 12, 2009 – 6:46 pm
This is, in many ways, a post-Immersion success story. Earlier this week, I taught a one-shot session for an introductory class that had about 15 first-year students and 5 seniors. As soon as we got started, it became apparent that there was one student, evidently a senior, in the class who simply would not stop […]
September 23, 2009 – 2:53 pm
So the instruction season is in full swing (I have 5 sessions for three classes this week, and 4 sessions for two classes next week, yikes!) and I’m back from Immersion, so I’m sure you’re waiting with baited breath to find out how Immersion has transformed my information literacy instruction! Wait, you’re not? Oh. Well, […]
So I got back from ACRL’s Immersion program at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida late on Friday night and I’m still processing all of it. As anyone who’s been to Immersion will tell you, it’s intense. It’s four and a half days of probably the most focused, hard thinking, never-slacking-off work I’ve done since…well, […]
I posted this to FriendFeed over the weekend, but I wanted to expand a little on it here, because it relates to information literacy instruction: My good friend Vardibidian, who works in a library but is not, generally speaking, a library blogger, has an hysterical post up about attending a “training” “webinar” for his library’s […]
How many instruction librarians would actively choose the following scenario for maximizing learning in their classrooms? Instructor stands at the front of the room, behind a podium, reading from or frequently consulting notes, while students sit passively in chairs facing the instructor, taking notes (or not). The students don’t have computers of their own in […]
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 […]
February 25, 2009 – 4:59 pm
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 […]
