December 5, 2014 – 9:57 am
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 […]
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 […]
January 16, 2013 – 9:52 am
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 […]
December 21, 2012 – 10:50 am
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 […]
December 20, 2012 – 10:24 am
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 […]
March 13, 2012 – 10:45 am
Three things I’ve been mulling over lately, that probably aren’t enough to justify a blog post on their own but, put together, make a substantial post. Think of this as the tapas of blog posts. Thing The First I wrote up a lesson plan recently that contained the directive, aimed at myself, “and go from […]
August 25, 2011 – 1:33 pm
I just finished up writing my pre-tenure review portfolio, and one of the things I wrote about in my “philosophy of librarianship” statement was asking students, repeatedly if necessary, “how do you know that?” It’s a fantastic question to ask, when you’re trying to get students to think critically about the sources of information they […]
So, remember those two presentations I did last fall? Well, I’ll be reworking and expanding that content, and delivering it as a webcast for ACRL’s e-Learning program on Tuesday, July 19, at 2:00 p.m. EDT: “Classroom Assessment for Information Literacy Instruction: Are They Learning What You’re Teaching?” If you want to learn more about formative […]
March 28, 2011 – 11:12 am
Wow, it’s been pretty quiet around here. I’m sorry about that; the semester got kind of busy. So what have I been working on this semester? Well, to begin with, I made a real effort to move toward fewer database demonstrations in my instruction sessions. A lot of the one-shot instruction sessions that I do, […]
December 13, 2010 – 10:40 am
(See this post for an introduction to this blog series.) So the first example I used in my presentation was a collection of excerpts from minute papers that eventually convinced me that a large portion of our students, given a journal article citation, don’t know how to find it in a collection of bound print […]
