For those of you stopping by to see more about my Information Literacy Course, the list of posts about the course can be found here.  Or, you can click on "Information Literacy Course (EDT 110)" under Categories in the right menu.

"Research for the greater good: Incorporating service-learning in an information literacy course at Wright State University" was published in this month's (June 2011) College & Research Libraries News. I hope this encourages other librarians to try a similar service-learning model for their information literacy course.

Since our class ended in early March, I've been reflecting on how we can improve the research portfolios. As it stands now, the students include annotated bibliographies in the portfolio, along with recommendations for the agency. The recommendations were a new requirement this past quarter. Our aim was to get students to synthesize the information they were finding, rather than just summarizing it. In most classes, they would write a paper. However, our class is only 2 credits, and the focus is supposed to be on the research process, not writing the research paper.

Days like yesterday don't happen often - but they make all the struggles of teaching worthwhile.   Our students completely blew us away yesterday! A tradition of this course is that we invite our community partner staff members and the Director of the Office of Service Learning to the last day of class for a group reflection, and for the students to hand over their research portfolios to our partner.

Next week, March 8, our students will turn in their completed research portfolios to Project READ.  So this week (week 9), the groups were working fast and furious to continue compiling their portfolios and write appropriate recommendations based on their research.  This is the part where the students apply critical thinking skills by synthesizing the research they found. Students also took a very brief 5-question review "quiz."  The quiz covered the big concepts we covered, like evaluating information and the invisible web.

Last week in class, our students spent time working in groups to revise their citations and annotations for the annotated bibliography and also begin to compile some recommendations based on their research.  We met with each team separately to check on their progress and make some suggestions about how to improve their citations and annotations and how to start writing recommendations.  Since our goal is for the students to experience all stages of information literacy, the recommendations they will write will be a way for them to synthesize the information they have found.

Since our service learning experience (the book sorting activity) was cancelled yesterday, we created an alternate service project for our students.   And with only 3 weeks left in the quarter, we consulted with Dr.

Flexibility is extremely important in service learning partnerships.  And anyone who teaches undergraduates knows that students often lack flexibility.  That is one of the challenges of service-learning courses.

Our class didn't meet during Week 5 due to the ice storm.

Homework due today, 1/25:  Students viewed the Information Cycle tutorial, produced by Penn State University Libraries; Students also submitted three articles related to their research topic (reading/writing assessment for K-8 students) to a dropbox in the learning management system.