January 2012 Articles

Lately, I've been feeling a little frustrated with myself as an instructor.  I'm always changing the game plan, never happy with what I have planned.  My co-teacher and I are constantly reinventing our lesson plans and our class.  It takes a lot of time.  And, frankly, sometimes I wonder why we haven't figured this out yet - this is the sixth time we have taught this course.  Why aren't we on auto pilot? Then, I realized that all of this reflection and reinvention is a good thing.  I remember reading The Reflective Practioner by Donald A. Schon in libary school…

It's week 4 of the quarter, and I'm almost literally swimming in service-learning projects.  In addition to the information literacy course I co-teach, I'm also librarian-partner for two service-learning courses this quarter.  The Honors interdisciplinary course about social and environmental sustainability (UH 202-203) and an English composition course (ENG 102).  I am also preparing a syllabus for a service-learning course I will co-teach next quarter, UVC 103:  Campus-Community Connections in the First Year. So, I'm also swimming in research about all of these topics.  In UH 202-…

This week, students took their first readiness assurance test (see team-based learning, Larry Michaelsen) to reinforce the following concepts:  The information cycle, Invisible Web, Service-Learning, and the course syllabus!  Yes, we ask questions about the syllabus to be sure that they've read it!  They take the RAT individually, and then as a team.  They get the better of the two scores, which is almost always the team score.  The team discussion helps them understand/retain the concepts. The week 3 lesson plan included "selecting" information.  We evaluated web sites and…

Tuesday in class, Cheryl and I tried something new.  In addition to our guest speaker, Becky Garvin from Project READ (our community partner), and introducing the concept of the Invisible Web and some advanced Google search techniques, we also assigned the students a team-building activity.  The students were put into teams (the teams they will be working with throughout the quarter on their research portfolios) to build a tower using only spaghetti and marshmallows.  After they built their towers, we discussed their group process and how they worked as teams.  We hope it will help…

UH 202-203, Environmental and Social Sustainability in Appalachia, students will come to the library for a research workshop next week.  This week, I created a libguide to point them to some resources that can help them think of topics (in addition to class material and the novel they are reading, Strange as this Weather Has Been by Ann Pancake).  I showed them the libguide at the beginning of class yesterday and told them the more they think about their topics before they come, the more time they will save during the workshop. The libguide is available …

Just this week, I learned that I will have a new opportunity this quarter.  I am embedded librarian in a service-learning interdisciplinary course, UH 202-203:  Environmental and Social Sustainability in Appalachia.  This will include a 6-day service trip to Southeast Ohio, an area hard-hit by coal mining and economic struggles, to work with several community partners over our spring break.  And, yes, I'm going on the trip!  In fact, we may partner with one of the Athens County Public Libraries to complete a service project for them as well. The instructors, a social work professor…

And, we're back!  My co-teacher and I taught Day 1 of our information literacy course this morning.  Our students this quarter will research fundraising for non-profit agencies.  We have a list of questions our students will attempt to answer including:  "What motivates people to donate to non-profit agencies?"  and "How have non-profit agencies been using social media to raise funds?"   Here is a more complete list of questions related to the ResearchTopic…