Friday, May 25, 2007

More Fellowships Available! We still have several grant-funded IL fellowship opportunities for faculty. The purpose of the fellowship is to teach your colleagues about IL. Grants provide $150 per facutly participant; groups are encouraged to apply. The planning and content must be developed by July 15, but your presentations may be done in fall. Contact Karen Michaelsen (x4098) ASAP if you plan to apply for a fellowship.

For example, you could…
  • Write an article about your experiences with IL
  • Develop a model curriculum component to present to collegaues
  • Develop a more general IL presentation
  • Develop training materials to accompany the research model

Thursday, May 17, 2007

Taking Action - May 11 retreat

Goals for the day:
  • Strengthen participants’ awareness of IL in their curriculum
  • Enable participants to promote IL among their colleagues by sharing its value and teaching and learning strategies
  • Prepare participants to leave retreat with an IL action plan

Defining IL: Kelley presented IL concepts and issues facing us and our students. Since some participants have been to other IL workshops while others had not, this presentation and the following activity helped to make sure that all present had a common understanding of IL. Following the presentation, small groups created a poem, song or picture to describe the information literate person. Please see Appendix 1 for descriptions of the group presentations. The PowerPoint for Kelley’s presentation is available to participants on the “IL Toolkit” CD and to others who are interested.

From Library Skills to Information Literacy: Three faculty members, Tracy Lai (history), Jim Cauter (music) and Kate Wolfe (psychology), presented their experience integrating IL into their courses. They described the experience of improving their assignments over time and collaborating with librarians to give their students a richer experience. A common thread to their stories was how IL assignments enriched their courses and teaching and developed their students’ ability to successfully find and use appropriate information.

The SCCC IL Model:
Lynn presented the graphics for the IL Model and library logo. The artwork, posters, bookmarks and other collateral have been made possible through a marketing grant from the Washington State Library. Tracy and Jim facilitated a brainstorm about how the model can be used for instruction and then groups of participants created assignments addressing different parts of the IL process “puzzle.” Selected assignments are described in Appendix 2. For the record, the instructions for this activity were not as clear as they might have been and there was some confusion over the task. If this exercise is repeated, ‘evaluation’ should be integrated in the other aspects of the IL process rather than as a separate aspect.

Plan for Action: Participants were invited to complete an IL Action Plan individually or as a member of a team. The action plans were to define one action to be taken at the personal, course, program, or institution level. Participants were actively engaged in this activity, but there was no time allowed at the end of the day for individuals and groups to tell us what their plans were. As a result we are planning a follow-up event so participants can share their plans and learn about resources and support for carrying out the plans for action.

Perfect IL Person Activity

A song:

A student went to SCCC
To see what she could see, see, see
And all that she could see, see, see
Was the big, bright world through liter’cy

Word Poems:

Critical
Ubiquitous
Relevant
Inquisitive
Open-minded
Unstoppable
Successful

Passionate
Organized
Willing to wonder
Evaluative
Resourceful

Pictures:

An IL person balancing plates full of the following qualities:
inquisitive engaged
persistent open minded
thoughtful efficient
multi-disciplinary practical

People connected to other people, books, computes, cell phones, and the world, over a birth to next-life timeline.

A person juggling books, electronic devices, and standing on a globe with the words: Information = Power Flexible Adaptable

IL Assignments Activity

Selected assignments resulting from IL Model Brainstorm

Access: Select a topic (such as Executive Order 9066) and use each of the following tools to locate resources on that topic:
- Library Catalog
- ProQuest
- Ethnic NewsWatch
- NY Times Historical
- Britannica.com
- Google or Yahoo
Describe and compare how you searched each tool and the types of resources each provides.

Strategize: Identify and evaluate scholarly secondary sources related to the experiences of WWII veterans (1945-1960).
- Assessment strategy:
o Source addresses the correct topic
o Source is or is not a scholarly secondary source
o Student can explain why they chose a certain article
o Degree of relevance

Evaluate: Select a nursing topic and find articles from Google.com and ProQuest. Compare the results and articles from the searches and address:
- Quality
- Usefulness
- Ease
Write a citation and description for each article.

Synthesize: Prepare and deliver a training model for a software application.
- Students need to know methodologies for teaching and learning
- Students practice different presentation formats

Friday, May 4, 2007

Google Books

Historians weigh in on the quality of the books scanned in Google:

http://blog.historians.org/articles/204/google-books-whats-not-to-like

Tuesday, May 1, 2007