Monday, November 12, 2007

Instruction ideas / methods / analogies

Below are some ideas for instruction that I found valuable from the CARLI Best Practices in Instruction Forum last week. Please share if anyone has any other good ones - I think analogies and new instruction methods are great!

Pre-session assessment – what do they already know?

How do you prepare students to learn?

  • Tell a funny story
  • Show a short video clip
  • Tell them that this will be “the greatest library experience of their lives!
  • Start class with a Google search – similarities, differences, and how the library resources can do so much more
  • Ask them what they would like to get out of the session
“What do you want to get out of this today?"

  • Gets students involved immediately – creates a sense of ownership, that this is “their learning”
  • Empowers students, answers their questions

Communicating with faculty about a vague or difficult assignment

  • “What do you want your students to get out of the assignment?”


Library Instruction Analogies

Selecting a database

  • “If you were searching for ice cream in the vegetable section, you might think, this store sucks!”
  • Databases as different stores like Target and Wal-Mart – they have overlap, but also offer different specialized things – if Target doesn’t have it, you don’t just go home, you go to the next store, or a specialty store

Searching in different databases and catalog

  • How Facebook and iTunes are organized – advanced searching in these areas – form comparisons
  • How students organize and search their music files and collections


*All of these ideas came from a number of different people - I wish I could remember their names!

Saturday, November 10, 2007

Fwd: Plagiarism 101: Keys to Preventing Academic Misconduct

This came across the GSLIS webboards. The online conference is $200 with no restriction on number of attendees. Anyone else interested? Care to invite other interested faculty?

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Plagiarism 101: Keys to Preventing Academic Misconduct 11/28Audio Conference
Date: Fri, 09 Nov 2007 00:46:22 -0500
From: audio@HigherEdHero.com <audio@HigherEdHero.com>
To: painter@uiuc.edu

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Thursday, November 8, 2007

Research & writing training

Meg's post of the Penn info lit site reminded me of this tool that Lauren and I used in our tutor training: Tufts Research Paper Navigator http://www.library.tufts.edu/researchpape. It's like the U of Minnesota navigator, but it combines the writing process with research. Lauren and I liked it, but the students were less impressed (they don't work as "linear-ly" as the navigator).

If you are curious about the training module we created for the writing center/library project tutors, you will find the outline and linked resources on the shared drive:
S:\Marcia\Writing Center\Training material\Training outline combined2 final\

Marcia

Info Lit resource

Just in case you haven't already come across this Info Lit site...
http://www.libraries.psu.edu/instruction/infolit/andyou/infoyou.htm

It was mentioned in the best practices session at heartland yesterday.

Clever Special Collection Funding

This came across my feed reader. It would be a great way to support collecting the materials our student teachers need each spring.

Scholastic Book Fair

Get a head start on holiday shopping while supporting the Miami University Libraries! Come visit the Scholastic Book Fair between Thursday Nov. 15 and Monday Nov. 19 and shop for yourself, your family, the holidays, or any special occasion. There will be more than 30,000 books available for all ages, and your purchases help enhance the children's literature collection of the Miami University Libraries. The book fair, which features easy readers, picture books, best sellers and more, will be held at the Instructional Materials Center (IMC) on the ground floor of King Library at Miami University. In addition to the book sale, Clifford the Big Red Dog will pose for photos with customers, and there will also be an opportunity to donate books for children in need in our local community and through the Books for Africa program. Scholastic Books will match book donations, up to 150 books.For book fair hours and more information:http://bookfairs.scholastic.com/homepage/miamikinglibrary

~Sarah

Friday, November 2, 2007

Twine

I'm on the waiting list for this new tool. But I want it now!

"...Twine is a place to organize information you find or create on the Web—bookmarks, notes, videos, photos,contacts, tasks. (A Web browser plug-in makes it easy to save stuff to your Twine wherever you may find it on the Web). You can also share that information with a private group or publicly. Once you ingest in all the information you want to organize, Twine applies a semantic analysis to it that creates tags for each document or video or photo. The tags match up to concepts that Twine’s algorithms associate with each piece of content, regardless of whether that concept is specifically mentioned in the Web page or other content being tagged. For example, you might bookmark this post and Twine would create tags for all the people mentioned in it (Nova Spivack, Paul Allen, Peter Rip, and Ron Conway). It would also create tags for the organizations related to the post, such as Radar Networks and DARPA, but also Paul Allen’s venture firm Vulcan Capital—even if Vulcan was never mentioned in the post."

IT DOES THE TAGGING FOR YOU!!! I love this and I haven't even tried it yet. Want to know more? See the TechCrunch Post that talks about it. Or get on the waiting list your self at Twine. This might be a better information sharing tool for the librarians as a group than this blog...

Calming down now and going back to working on SFX...

~Sarah

Thursday, November 1, 2007

Vision of Students Today video

This YouTub video A Vision of Students Today came out of an intro anthropology class at Kansas State University. Pretty interesting.

Marcia

Personal Library

I'm not sure what to make of this resource. I'm talking about Questia, what appears a subscription-based online library which you can access via one of several personal subscription plans including the low annual price of $99.95 per year. It gets a big zero in the science resources column, but I'm not sure how the humanities journal titles stand up.

This is from the "about" section for librarians-

"Although the agreements licensing the content on Questia from publishers prohibits us from selling directly to libraries, Questia is a great resource for librarians who routinely assist undergraduate students in their research efforts to recommend to their students."

This is from the "about" section for publishers-

"When students borrow a library book or photocopy pages directly from texts, you lose an opportunity for revenue. The Questia business model captures that opportunity. Students and other users are able to search the Questia collection at no charge, but they cannot access a single page without paying a subscription fee. Publishers receive revenue from these subscription fees each time a student views a page of one of your works."

A community college librarian on the ERIL-L asked if anyone had any experience with providing individual Questia accounts to students... Isn't that what EZ Proxy is for?