For a wealth of information, ideas, and lesson plans, try the Library Instruction Wiki.

Take a look at peer-reviewed online tutorials on the PRIMO site.

Teaching Tips, Spring 2007

I'll be sending out teaching tips each week. Some weeks I'll feature a database. This week I want to tell you about ask.com. I've been including internet searching in all my sessions, showing students google scholar and searchedu.com. This is a way to point them to higher quality internet information.

Ask.com, which used to be askJeeves, has been overhauled and acts more like Google now. For example, go to ask.com and do a search on "karl marx." On the right side of the screen you'll see ways to narrow, expand and find related names. These are good ways to find additional keywords for searching databases. Under each website entry, you'll see a pair of binoculars that gives a preview of the page before it's opened.

Anxiety Relief. Here are ideas from other librarians on dealing with pre-class anxiety.

"I work with a group of instructors in managing our library instruction program and have been asked about anxiety relief by many of them. My 'last resort' idea is always to remind them that we aren't curing cancer. No one will die in our classes if we mess up, forget a point, or have technical problems. At the very worst they will leave knowing more than they did then when they came in, even if they did not find it to be the most exciting hour they have ever spent. And that's not a bad day's work."

"I've probably used all the anxiety relieving techniques mentioned at one time or another. But I didn't see the one that I use as a "last resort" method after I've already prepared and am still worried. I get past this by reminding myself that "this time tomorrow, for better or worse, it will all be over. Anyway, most people are more concerned with their own agendas and won't remember any goofs you made. Measure success of your presentation by whether you equipped people to do what they needed to be able to do. Nothing else matters, but there's opportunity to learn from every presentation you make and opportunities to improve for the next one."

Teaching Tip

"How about just letting the students get hands on as soon as possible with their own, real, research needs of the moment? I limit my demo to the bare bones of searching and emphasize the content of the database, then I let them learn by doing. Their questions will be at the level each of them needs." I've found there's nothing like walking up and down the rows and asking people directly if they have a question. Then, if I discover something everyone could benefit from, I say it to the room.

Don’t type, don’t click—good words of advice from Leslie Madden, our guest teacher on Faculty Discipline Day. I find it very distracting if I hear someone’s keyboard when I’m talking. Maybe a student has gotten behind and is trying to catch up or maybe a student isn’t paying attention. Neither of these are good scenarios. I used to be an advocate of leaving the printers on during class. Now I turn them off at the beginning of class and turn them back on during practice time. The queue at the printers has also become a distraction.

Information Navigation 101 (from Chronicle of Higher Education, March 9, 2007) http://chronicle.com/free/v53/i27/27a03801.htm

Here are some quotes from the above article that are relevant to our instruction program:

College students use technology constantly. They text-message friends, compile play lists for their iPods, and are whizzes at updating their MySpace profiles. But when it comes to one kind of work they are required to do in college — namely, academic research — they can be inept. Too often, college officials say, students rely on Google or Wikipedia as sources, as if oblivious to peer-reviewed scholarship. . . . The Net Generation, it turns out, may not be so tech savvy after all.

Educause prefers the term "Net savvy" [instead of information literacy] to convey the idea that students need to be sophisticated users of software and understand, for example, how search engines rank their results and how social-networking sites can undermine privacy, said Ms. Oblinger.

Urban campuses and those with a racially diverse student body, like California State University's, tend to be particularly active in promoting information literacy because students there focus more on honing skills that will appeal to employers. At Fullerton, largely a commuter campus, since the fall of 2004 about 31 percent of incoming freshmen have been Hispanic and 12 percent are Asian. Most of these students are the first in their families to attend college.

At the University of North Texas, where 37 percent of the freshmen are minority students, the library recently raised the number of computer workstations from 26 to 52 to make more room for information-literacy instruction. "Students think they know more than they do," said Frances A. May, the library's coordinator of user education and outreach.

Here's a tip from Cary Jardine, Antioch University New England

I tell students that searching the web is like shopping in a large discount store (usually something ending in -mart!). These stores have LOTS of stuff; you may find what you need but it's going to take a long time to wander around until you find it.  The quality of the merchandise in these stores is often of questionable quality.  The buyers and/or staff in these stores, while very helpful of course, often don't know a whole lot about the products they carry (or even where they are).

Databases that we purchase access to, on the other hand, are more like specialty stores.  This kind of store has a smaller but more targeted & easier-to-navigate inventory.  The quality of the merchandise is typically of better quality and was chosen by 'subject specialists' if you will (like a jeweler, for instance).

Dartmouth College Videos online: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~acskills/videos/index.html. These are nice videos on topics that all of our students could use some help with, especially HEDS students. They include stress management, note taking, and reading improvement.

Brainstorming

I have a sheet that I use in my classes on Brainstorming keywords. I don’t think students fill it in very often, but it gives them a chance to think about their research process. I’ll give you each a complete copy or have a scanned copy available.

Keywords, defined by one student as the words that hold the key, are tricky for students. They are used to using phrases to search on the internet. Databases are somewhat okay with phrases like "global warming" or "rap music," but they don’t work well with phrases like "finding jobs in education" or "how nurses work with AIDS patients." I emphasize jotting down key words picked up from GIL subject headings, internet searches, and subject terms in articles. This is also the time to talk about Boolean searching whether you call it that or not. I don’t. I just talk about and, or, not.

page created, June 2007, Sherry Durren