Warm ups?

As I think most (all?) of you know, I´m teaching English in a Chilean university this semester. Part of this job has included attending training on how to teach, and I wondered if/how one idea from one of these seminars could be applied to information literacy instruction. The `Presentation, Practice, Production,`teaching methodology emphasizes that every lesson should start with a brief warm up to set the tone, elicit information about background knowledge from the students, and to emphasize why they are here and absolutely need to know the information we will teach.

I realize that in library instruction, particularly in one shot sessions, time is very limited. That said, would it be productive to try to start with some kind of brief warm up? From sessions I have observed and conversations I have had with you,I know one possibility is to incorporate some YCDI, emphasizing that library research is really not all that different from what they already do. I sometimes start sessions with a `competition` among the advantages of wikipedia, google, and the library. What other warm ups could we do, or is this even something that would be helpful in this kind of instructional setting?

Cool Tutorial!

Here's a very interesting tutorial that I ran across that I thought others would be interested in seeing. It is at the Baruch College Library and is on basic business research. It looks like it was done by an outside professional group. After viewing it, I began to think about the possibilities here. Hmmm...

http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/tutorials/zicklin/research

Teaching International Students

These ideas are from Maureen Bradley, an international student adviser, for giving instruction sessions to classes of non-native English speakers:

-Take the amount of material you have to present and cut it by 1/2

-Speak slower and remember that the students have to not just hear you, but be able to hear and translate in their head at the same time.

-Understand they must be pretty smart to have made it this far --sometimes we forget this.

-International students who have made it to the U.S. generally have a great appreciation for libraries and learning in-general. So while it may seem like 'just an instruction session' to an American, the International students will generally be more interested in your material. It may not seem like it from their response (or lack of it), but rest assured, they don't just 'go to college, they are here to succeed, and see the library as a key factor.

-Remember that the majority of people are not auditory learners, but visual or kinesthetic learners. Try to focus on the visual aspect. They will remember what they see, even if your words are not sinking in to everyone. Think for a moment how you would give a presentation to a deaf person, and you will see the library very differently.

-Don't worry about lack of feedback. Many of these students are from cultures where feedback is considered a lack of respect.

A few Interesting Sites

I have been reading Academic Librarianship by Design by Steven J. Bell (The Blended Librarian) and John D. Shank. It's a great book about instructional design principals and collaboration with faculty in instruction. They make reference to some sites that I found useful. Some of you may already know these:

FURL (a site to collect, organize, and share bookmarks): http://www.furl.net/

Several repositories of digital learning materials:
MERLOT: http://merlot.org/
Wisconsin Online Resource Center: http://www.wisc-online.com/
LOLA Exchange: http://www.lolaexchange.org/
PRIMO: http://www.ala.org/apps/primo/public/search.cfm

wikipedia assignment

An interesting presentation at Educause focused on the use of wikipedia in a term paper assignment.

Best blog title ever!

Check out The Information Literacy Land of Confusion. Best title ever! It's also a relatively interesting blog. I like the post where a student calls the hard-copy periodicals "printed out web pages"... :)

a new journal

Communications in Information Literacy will be one to watch!

Info-Literacy Group Forms Standards Panel

Short article from the Chronicle of Higher Ed. -- it will be worth watching to see what these folks come up with. The panel is scheduled to meet in December.

http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/1659/information-literacy-group-forms-standards-panel

-Anne