Category Archives: first year students

Information Literacy is about Choices

I just had a really fun meeting with a professor who is developing a new freshman seminar for Fall, and we were trying to work out what exactly first year students could reasonably and usefully get out of her course in terms of information literacy, particularly since she’s interested in ditching the Big Final Research [...]
Also posted in teaching and learning | 1 Comment

Communities of Inquiry

I spent the last two afternoons in a workshop for professors who are thinking of teaching Carleton’s new first year seminars next year, so I’m now well steeped in thoughts about first year students. And the more I think about it, the more I think that my main goal for first year students is for [...]
Also posted in teaching and learning | 2 Comments

What is Information Literacy Anyway?

Tomorrow I’m supposed to stand up in front of a group of faculty, all of whom are considering teaching one of the college’s new curriculum-wide freshman seminars next year, all of which must include some explicit practice developing information literacy. My task: explain information literacy to them in 10 easy minutes so that they can [...]
Also posted in Uncategorized, libraries and librarians, teaching and learning | 4 Comments

The World Between the Lines

A few friends and I have started a Shakespeare Project. We want to read Shakespeare’s plays, starting with the ones we’re least familiar with and moving up to the biggies we all remember from college, taking about two weeks to read each one. (This is kind of a repeat of a project my family undertook [...]
Also posted in teaching and learning | 1 Comment

Turning Topics Into Searches

The last couple of mornings I’ve spent time with a couple of different freshman writing seminars getting them ready to tackle the research component of their classes. Both times I tried a technique that I’d done once last year when I co-taught with a colleague of mine. It’s kind of like concept mapping… but with [...]
Also posted in in my classroom, teaching and learning | 6 Comments