A few WSU service-learning (and non-SL) courses this fall are themed around November's election. As such, one of my colleagues put together this very informative guide: http://guides.libraries.wright.edu/election2012 I also discovered today a few other resources that other librarians may be interested in: You can order free posters (or download PDFs) to encourage voting at this web site: http://www.nonprofitvote.org/endorse-voting.html And, it might also be worth p
Watch out world! My faculty friend Dr.
The concept of civic literacy was brought to my attention this morning by my friend and fellow service-learning enthusiast, Jennifer Nutefall. Perhaps I've been living under a rock. I've heard dozens of kinds of literacy in recent years (digital literacy, media literacy, transliteracy, financial literacy, etc), but I haven't spent any time looking into civic literacy. Jennifer forwarded me papers and proceedings from a recent IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations) conference: http://www.lnb.lv/iflariga2012/p
If my Wordpress dashboard is correct, this is the 100th post on Service Learning Librarian! This is a big week for my blog and for my "agenda" of pairing service-learning and information literacy. On Monday, Chris Sweet, Information Literacy Librarian at Illinois Wesleyan University, became SLL's first-ever guest contributor! If you haven't read it yet, here is his
Let me begin this guest post with a short introduction. My name is Chris Sweet and I am the Information Literacy Librarian at Illinois Wesleyan University (Central Illinois). I had been following Maureen's blog as well as her publications for some time prior to meeting her in-person at this year's LOEX Conference in Columbus, OH. Both of us have discovered a real passion for service-learning and have seen first-hand how adding information literacy elements to service-learning courses can create even stronger and more effective classes.
This summer, I'm working on several projects that will support several service-learning courses with which I will l partner beginning fall semester. As I've said many times over, service-learning students and community partners often need local or otherwise unique data - outside of the usual "find some scholarly articles" kind of assignments.
This morning, I read an article posted in the online American Libraries, called Community Reference: Making libraries indispensible in a new way by Colbe Galston, Elizabeth Kelsen Huber, Katherine Johnson, and Amy Long. It reminded me a lot of why I chose to explore service-learning as an option for my information literacy course 5 years ago. They highlight many of the same concepts in their endeavors to get out into the community that are vital to a successful academic service-learning relationships. The authors stress the importance of working as a partner, building relations