I’m gearing up for a conversation/presentation with faculty on our campus about SafeAssign, the “plagiarism” “detection” tool (more on those quotes in a moment) that’s integrated into Blackboard, so I’ve been doing some testing to see how it compares with Google for finding and sourcing suspicious passages. But first, some definitions:Â I put both “plagiarism” […]
November 25, 2009 – 9:22 am
A couple of weeks ago our campus hosted a guest speaker who gave a presentation on assessing critical thinking skills, especially in the context of general education. (This was part of an ongoing project on our campus to reform our general education curriculum and move more in the direction of assessment of learning outcomes.) The […]
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 […]
October 15, 2009 – 8:08 pm
So the APA just recently published a new edition of their style manual, the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. And hoo, boy: what a mess. Among other things, they’ve made substantial changes to the way writers are supposed to cite journal articles accessed online, especially via licensed subscription databases. This blog post is […]
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, […]
There’s been another 10-librarian pileup on the ILI-L in the last couple of days concerning Wikipedia. This kind of thing happens every few months on ILI-L: someone starts it by reporting a funny story about Wikipedia, or asking how others use (or don’t use) it in our teaching, or what have you. This time it […]
April 20, 2009 – 12:57 pm
So I’ve been working lately on a presentation idea that I’ve been kicking around for a while, that I intend to submit for LOEX 2010, and as a result I’ve been looking through a bunch of messy assessment data that I’ve collected over the past year and a bit. And I was reminded of something […]
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 4, 2009 – 12:36 pm
A colleague and I were chatting this morning about the freaky stuff that undergrads often request through Inter-Library Loan, often not realizing what exactly it is that they’re requesting. The most common example is Dissertation Abstracts, where if they request the item through ILL, what they get in return is…the abstract of the dissertation. Which […]
January 27, 2009 – 2:21 pm
I just had a student come to the reference desk with a question about a business assignment about India for a class I taught last week. (Every student in the class has to write the same memo about India, so I’m not worried about her confidentiality: she could be any one of the 19 students […]
