Big mouth strikes again...

I have recently changed my approach to the library presentations I give to students.
This quarter I decided to not stand in front of the class and yamber on and on about how to search.
I asked for a topic and we searched it. Not only in the virtual library, but with the Googler, and public library. We evaluated websites to determine if they were experts, if the material had a bias, was the information from a primary source and so on.
I explained that searching a topic and only coming up with 6 hits through the discovery tool did not necessarily mean that was all that was there.  I recommended changing key terms, and also looking at bibliographies of works they were already using. Here I explained is a treasure trove of materials that could have useful information.
My hope is that the students were not bored and that they"got it."There was a lot more conversation and afterwards the faculty who was teaching the class seemed very pleased. Next quarter,I am going to prepare it out a little more, because it wasn't super polished, but I think hitting a few bumps along the way gives a real picture on how researching works.


My library workers constantly hear me spout off about information literacy, critical thinking, active research, and the like, so I  have also decided to give them a new assignment before their quarterly review. Typically, I give them a database or resource and ask them to answer some questions about it. This time I will  give them a topic and they have to provide me with an angle for a research project. They don't have to write an actual thesis, but they will have to exercise the info skillz and present me with something that they could use if they were writing an undergraduate paper.

I recently read "Teaching Information Literacy Reframed," by Joanna M. Burkhardt and I  really liked  it.
The exercises provided are really great. Not only to use as presented, but as a jumping off point when teaching information literacy.
I find that many in education love to throw around the term, information literacy, but many don't know what it means, and even more do not know how to teach it.

This book definitely offers practical exercises, tools, and terminology for someone who is actually going to teach information literacy.