I just finished teaching this term’s installment of one of my least usual classes. This is a class that takes the idea of course-integrated instruction to an even more integrated level. There are trade-offs, for sure, but it remains one of my favorite sessions to teach.
The General Idea
I show up for one class period of an intro to linguistics course. During the first half of the session, the professor covers an introduction to made-up languages, tells the students about their upcoming assignment (a short presentation on one of several made-up languages), and demonstrates the way a linguist might describe a language in hopes that the students will do something similar in their presentations.
Pretty straight forward stuff. Except that while he’s doing that, I’m also teaching. Here’s how it works. He chose Láadan as his made-up language to describe, so I then show how you might find things like consonant inventories and vocabulary and grammar rules. We start with Wikipedia, and I show them how to use it as a reference work (sifting through for important terms and using it to point them toward authoritative web sites). Meanwhile, the professor swoops in whenever I hit on a particularly linguistically relevant bit of information and uses them as the foundations for mini-lectures on linguistic characteristics. All in all, I only talk for about 5 or 10 minutes, but, we cover basic search strategies and web evaluation, and we do it in the context of building actual linguistics skills.
For the last half of class, the professor and I launch into a little ad libbed song-and-dance that is ostensibly there to introduce students to one of the kinds of research they’ll have to do for their final paper and a basic gloss on what makes a good research question. But it also serves as a fascinating introduction to the neurological work involved in reading. The professor explains the history of the three writing systems in Japan, and then talks about a paper he found that used an fMRI to determine that Kanji and Kana are processed via different cortical pathways. This, he says, would make a really interesting basis for a research project, but the problem is that the study was published in 2000.
So I show how to use the Web of Science to do a cited reference search, and then how to do a search for (kanji OR kana OR hiragana OR katakana) and then combine that new search with the cited reference search to find the nearly 30 articles which both cite the original paper and have something to do with Japanese writing. All this gives me a chance to talk about how scholars index their own literature (via citations) and about exploding articles. Meanwhile, the professor jumps in whenever I hit on an interesting article. He usually mentions something (some theory, or a part of the brain), that I can Google in the background to find an example or an image, and then I can show how to evaluate the web site or image we find. Again, all in all I talk a for about 10 minutes, but together the professor and I demonstrate how research and evaluation are part of learning to be a linguist rather than a completely separate set of “library skills.”
Drawbacks
Clearly, there are strategies and tools that I can’t cover in this format. Many of the students’ topics end up requiring books, for example, and I never show them the catalog. My main goal is to teach two things: I can help you, and there are some pretty powerful tools out there that can help you, too. The upshot of this is that I spend much of the next few weeks in one-on-one consultation with these 20+ students, which takes a lot of time.
Benefits
The students see me (the single greatest influence on whether they’ll come to work with me in my office later), and the professor claims that the quality of the papers is measurably better now, even though I only teach for a couple of minutes, and even though only half to two-thirds of the students come see me later.
For me the most interesting part of the whole thing, though, is that it’s the only class I teach where I feel fully integrated into the disciplinary work that the students are doing. The skills I teach are part of the lecture, part of the work of learning about linguistic structures and brain activity rather than being separated out into an auxiliary library day.
So while there’s no way this would work if it’s the only kind of class I taught, I still get a kick out of every term when the professor calls me and says, “Ready to go again? Shall we use Láadan as an example this time? Can we still use the Sakurai article?”
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Seeing Search Boxes
We’ve all heard that single search boxes are the only way to go when it comes to building search interfaces. We’ve probably also seen students who will bypass all relevant information or links on a page and zero in on whatever looks like a search box. But I never put these two pieces of knowledge together before. Not, that is, until just this morning as I was driving in to work. This morning I had a revelation:
Every page with a search box is a “single search box” page.
We may gripe about clutter. We may grouse about having not enough guidance surrounding our search boxes. It doesn’t matter. For people who are primed to search, they will only see the search box anyway. The other stuff may as well not be there. (For those of you getting hot under the collar like I would be if I were reading this right now? Hang on, I’ve got something for you in a minute.)
Here’s my Parable With Two Screenshots. We have several lists of electronic resources on our library’s website, each of which has a “Search” and “Browse” function at the top.
Then last week I had a professor call me in consternation that the library systems were telling her there was nothing on her topic. Turns out… she had entered her topic terms into that search box.
Ok, ok, so that one’s legitimately confusing. We’ve realized that while the existence of the box is out of our control, the wording next to it isn’t. Soon it’ll say something more like “find a database.” Still, this is only the first half of the parable, and probably not the most relevant half at that. It’s mostly relevant in that its proximity to the second half made everything come together in my head. And so, on to the second half…
So now back to my revelation (and those of you who’ve been thinking “But we simply can’t do away with advanced search pages! Single search boxes aren’t always the way to go!!” can tune back in now). Here’s what I now think: We can feel free to have advanced search pages on any interface that we think functions better with all of those options laid out. It doesn’t matter. People who only want a single search box will only see that search box anyway. People who want the options will see and appreciate the options. Everybody happy.