I will manage these passwords if it’s the last thing I do

By IRIS Posted on by

With passwords proliferating like tribbles, I’ve had to upgrade from my two previous methods of managing my accounts.

The first method was the easiest: I had two passwords, an easy one and a complicated one. If the site was important I used the complicated one. If the site wasn’t important I used the easy one. Well… that started to seem like less and less of a good idea pretty much as soon as I started online banking and getting work passwords that mattered and stuff. So.

The second method worked for a long time: I had several passwords written down in a fairly secure online place that was itself password protected, and then I had an easy password that I used for all my “I wonder what del.icio.us is” experimentation online. That started seeming less and less good after several of the sites with the easy password got hacked multiple times and the hackers stole their databases of user passwords. Multiple times. And then I’d have to go through these millions of little sites changing a bunch of passwords all day. That got to be a less and less appealing way of spending a few hours. So.

Now I’m using an encrypted password manager. Here’s the setup. KeePassX (the Mac version of KeePass) on each of my computers and KyPass installed on my iPod Touch, each of these is directed to look at the KeePass database that’s stored in Dropbox (and the file made available offline on my iPod Touch).

Hopefully this solution lasts me for a while.

Some 100-level information literacy concepts in lesson plan form

By IRIS Posted on by

Several people have asked for examples of my lesson plans lately, which is both flattering and terrifying. Flattering for all the obvious reasons, and terrifying because I can always see the flaws in my lessons when I write them out to share, and terrifying because my “lesson plans” are the barest sketches of outlines regardless of how many hours I’ve put into preparation, tailoring the class to the specific assignment at hand and trying to match the course professors’ ultimate learning goals as much as possible. When I get into the classroom with 2 or 3 learning goals firmly in mind, an interactive exercise or two up my sleeve, and notes about readings the students have been or will be doing and how to mesh those with my own session, the actually class is more like jazz — playing off of the outline and goals but also off of the students and the course professor.

So lesson plans are kind of hard for me to write down in a way that feels authentic. Still, with all that as preamble, it occurs to me that even sketches can help people looking for ideas. I’ve benefited greatly from colleagues sharing their sketches with me. So here goes. (I’ve chosen to focus on 100-level classes because the people asked me about those specifically.)

First, there are several modules that I’ve already written about here in more or less detail. While they shift with the given context, I love to work them in whenever relevant, and I think they help 100-level students begin to get some practice with the kind of critical information literacy that my colleagues and I wrote about in our recent article CSI(L) Carleton: Forensic Librarians and Reflective Practices. Other similar modules are linked to in the lessons plans I’ve sketched out later in the post.

  • The value of book reviews
    I started toying with this before the Information Literacy in Student Writing really got going, but I’ve continued to use book reviews as valuable sources since and worked it in whenever I can because of  the useful habits of mind it helps develop.
  • Citation as a lens for interdisciplinarity
    This one really is a fleshed out lesson plan (which takes about 20 minutes) and the main points of which I’ve used over and over again in many courses with great success.
  • Turning topics into searches
    Builds off of the idea of concept mapping in ways that then generate source decisions and search terms in very practical ways. This takes about 15 minutes and it helps if you have some seeds to start with that you can lay out on the board as the students are working.

Most classes need to get at some combination of conceptual and practical learning goals, so here are two very different sessions that I’ve given recently. I chose the first NOT because it’s one of my crowning achievements. It’s anything but that and I’d love to hear ideas for streamlining it. But it does show the combination of practical and conceptual, and it’s a multi-cultural topic (which matches the needs of at least one of the people who asked for a lesson plan example). In terms of the match with the concepts we wrote about in the “CSI(L) Carleton” article, this class teach concrete search skills but emphasize the context-building nature of scholarship, the importance of watching for the breadcrumbs scholars leave for you in their writing to tell you what they’re drawing on, what related concepts are important, and the purpose of using sources in the first place.

The second is one of the sessions I did for a course that has no formal research component, building off of what I learned from the “Evaluation” section of the “CSi(L) Carleton” article. You’ll notice it looks a lot like a class for a research paper. The main difference is in the framing — emphasizing that this kind of looking and the habits involved are useful for all kinds of work.

CCST 100: Growing Up Cross Culturally (had to be taught in a room with no student computers)

Assignment: Write a paper based on one of the cross-cultural studies topics they’ve talked about in class (which follow the life-stages and study how cultures influencing each other can change the way people experience those life stages, such as birth, childhood, adolescence, marriage, adulthood, old age, and death). Find a few sources (3-5-ish) outside of course readings to support your arguments. Students are encouraged to take inspiration from recent international news/culture stories.

Resources: Research Guide, New York Times article on Japanese tooth un-straightening, and a Term Diary

Introduction (10 minutes)

  • Why only a few sources?
    The purpose of your sources is not to provide an exhaustive list of everything written on your topic. It’s also not to allow you to write a report. Instead, you’re writing your own paper, and you’re using a few outside voices to help you situated your ideas within the “conversation” that’s already happening on a topic. Conversations don’t work well if you parrot back what everyone says, but they also don’t work well if you just go on in a monologue and make everyone sit back and listen. Conversations work well when you build on what people have said and contribute new ideas or perspectives.
  • What constitutes “on my topic”?
    We often look for things that are “on our topics” but sometimes it’s more interesting (or necessary, if the topic is too new) to look for related topics or analogous topics and talk about how they support or contribute to your understanding of your topic. THIS IS OK. Scholars do it all the time and for this assignment it’s almost a given that you’ll have to do the same. Give some examples. (First year students often don’t realize this is allowed.)

Brainstorming Exercise (working in small groups – 20 minutes)

  • Term economy (see this blog post)
    Computers can’t read. They match letters in a row. Consequently, we have to figure out what letters in a row to feed into the computer to make it spit out the results we want. This is why we’ll be using a term diary to record keywords and phrases as we go along today, and then using those to help us come up with new searches.

In small groups, read the New York Times article on the new fad where Japanese women make their teeth crooked. Answer the following questions and report back. We’ll use these concepts and terms for our searches in the rest of the session.

  1. What concepts is this related to? (symmetry, beauty, youth culture, individualism, etc)
  2. Who might have written more about this or related concepts?
  3. What questions might they have asked of these topics?
  4. Where might these things have been published? (blogs, newspapers, academic articles, books, etc)
  5. What are some key terms associated with these topics?

Wikipedia with a glance at Goolge (5 minutes)

  • Basic searches using key terms already generated. These will inevitably reveal a wikipedia article. Mention that this is wonderful. Watch students faint in surprise…
  • discussion: You’ve heard that wikipedia isn’t good to use — why is that? What might it be good for? (use as a jumping-off place like any other reference work, good for term gathering and to point you toward related concepts and further reading — bibliographies are wonderful things)
  • term gathering and source gathering as we jump around and follow links through Wikipedia together with students leading as much as possible– add to our growing list of terms in our term diaries (In this year’s class, we stumbled on the term “wabi-sabi” which is about the many things, including the aesthetic of asymmetry.)

LexisNexis, for the international coverage (10 minutes)

  • Point out that we’re searching “every word the journalists wrote” so think like a journalist when coming up with terms to try.
  • Try several searches using the terms we already found (letting students choose). Collect new terms, concepts, and potential authors/experts along the way.
  • Introduce the idea of concept clusters (i.e. boolean searching)

Academic Search Premier (10 minutes)

  • Explain the differences between free-text databases and indexing/abstracting databases — now we have to think like scholars/librarians when choosing terms to use
  • how to limit to scholarly articles
  • discussion of how scholarly articles differ from newspapers in terms of scope and topic coverage
  • student-lead searching as before, this time introducing the power of subject headings.

Books (5 minutes)

  • Books often contain much broader topics than articles, so now we have to zoom out and look at broader topics that might give us good foundations for our topic.
  • student-lead searching as before, pointing out the importance and power of subject headings.
  • Point out call numbers — remind students that they can ask for help, especially the first few times they use call numbers to locate books
Wrap-up
  • There is no one perfect search — try combinations of terms and write down new terms/concepts as you come across them
  • Librarians can help you, so come talk to us about your specific topics.
Some things I’ll change next time:
  • TOO MUCH STUFF — The constraints of space and the breadth of the assignment were working against us, but really it was too many things. Next time I will almost certainly cut out the books section. I just don’t know yet what to do about the rest, but this is probably double what it should have been.
  • Emphasize the brainstorming/problem-solving part of when searches fail — The students didn’t seem to understand well enough why we weren’t concerned with failed searches so next time we need to build failed searches more explicitly into the expectations.

ENGL 100: Visions of the Waste Land

Context: This course had no research component. It was important to the professor that students learn to read closely and delve into the primary source text. However, the professor and I both realized that it can be hard to find interesting things in texts if you lack the context to know what’s interesting when you see it. So we devised this context-building session and assignment to help students know how to build up their own knowledge to the point where they can accomplish the kind of careful reading the professor wanted.

Assignment: Select an article that is illuminating, write a 200-word summary to be handed in, be prepared to lead the class in a discussion of a passage in the book based on both your interpretation and the article you found.

Resources: Research Guide

Introduction (5 minutes)

  • Matching Evidence to Audience
    There are lots of kind of evidence, and in other courses you’ll be asked to find books and articles and statistics and images and who knows what else to back up your arguments. Lead a little discussion about kinds of evidence that may matter to some audiences but not others, like blogs or something your aunt said or aggregate statistics vs data.  In this course your evidence is the text itself and your audience is not interested in other kinds of evidence.
  • Context-Building
    However, all of this doesn’t mean that YOU aren’t allowed to know things other than the text. Far from it. Context-building helps you figure out what questions to ask of the text and also to see how other scholars in the field have accomplished this kind of thing so that you can model yourself a bit on their approaches.

Finding Models to inspire you and aspire to: (5 minutes)

  • Show how to search within the publication “The Explicator.”

Finding the backgrounds of words: OED (use “smashing” as an example) (5 minutes)

  • How words get into the OED
  • What’s in there (etymologies and date charts and quotes)

Scholarly articles often provide a lot of context/insight: JSTOR (20 minutes)

  • Limit to literary journals only
  • Building concept clusters
  • Brainstorm together about some concepts that might be interesting to follow up and what words might be associated with those concepts. Work together to cluster those concept (having students write on the whiteboard together)
  • Have students work in small groups to find an article and report back on why they chose the article they did (emphasizing aspects of evaluation by making them articulate a choice and discuss it together).

Following up on a citation (15 minutes)

  • Usually one of the best ways to find information because scholars index their own literature. Bibliographies are creative things build from experience and wide readings, which means you can find connections to things you wouldn’t find purely by searching.
  • Explain that book citations list a place and publisher while articles don’t, and how to follow up on book citations (catalog) vs article citations (A-Z list) – this whole thing takes about a minute.
  • Working in small groups again, use the article they found JSTOR to find a book or article that we have access to. Bonus points if you find a book citation that we have access to.
  • Go together to collect one of the found books from the stacks (have an example on hand just in case nobody found a book that’s available). Look at near-by books to talk about what kinds of context that helps them build. Mention that similar call numbers in different areas of the library (reference, periodicals, etc) will be about similar topics. Show the “Google of the book” (i.e. the index) of a book.

Wrap-up (10 minutes)

  • Group discussion about how what we’ve found today applies to what they’re reading. Any words or themes that seem more important now?

Writing Well

By IRIS Posted on by

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the kind of writing I enjoy, that I strive for, that I aspire to.

I love writing that sounds like exactly the words you would have chosen if you’d thought of it. Simple and clean. I love it when there’s an underlying coherence to the language — a rhythm, a lilt, a metaphor. Nothing that bashes you over the head, but there if you look for it.

Recently, as NPR cajoled me into wakefulness one morning, I heard an interview with Tina Brown talking about what makes a good columnist and these two quotes jumped out at me:

“Columnists speak in a voice readers understand — their own, but just a bit better.” (Quoting the introduction to Deadline Artists, edited by Jesse Angelo, Errol Louis and  John Avlon)

“It’s really about how they think and their ability to empathize in a unique and interpretive way, in a sense, both with their readers and the culture,” Brown says. “You really want to feel that the writer is both absolutely in tune with what’s happening in the culture but also has a kind of counterintuitive response to it.”

This is what I like best about my favorite bloggers’ writing. This is even what I like in those few formally published articles that I’ve enjoyed not only for content but also for style. In fact, this is what I enjoy most in fiction, as well. Basically, this is the kind of writing I love.

CSI(L) Carleton: Forensic Librarians and Reflective Practices

By IRIS Posted on by

“Wait, this is information literacy?” a rhetorician at our workshop exclaimed in excited surprise. “But this is so cool!” And we wanted to respond “YES!” not only from joyful pride but also out of recognition. After all, we too had had very similar reactions to our own work with information literacy, and not that long ago. We too had realized that information literacy could be different than we had originally thought (or that the ACRL information literacy standards had led us to believe). Information literacy could be more alive and integrated within the discourse of academic work. It could be more applicable across disciplines and genres and rhetorical goals. And these revelations remapped our practice.

So begins the essay my colleagues Danya Leebaw, Heather Tompkins and I wrote for In the Library with the Lead Pipe that was published last night. It focuses on how our Information Literacy in Student Writing project has helped us learn more about information literacy and how that has influenced our teaching and our work with faculty and departments.

What does it mean to have a library?

By IRIS Posted on by

Unsurprisingly, a lot of my friends have been talking about the dismantling of the People’s Library at Occupy Wall Street, and it’s got me thinking about why the protesters set up the library and why people care so much that it’s gone. And why tiny towns have libraries, and why universities are judged on their libraries, and why tweed-coated English gentlemen built private libraries far larger than they could read through in a lifetime.

For lending libraries, of course there’s an economic benefit to the community that comes from sharing books. And I imagine that this was a core benefit to the People’s Library, too. It’s easy to see how the protesters would have wanted to carry out simple acts of sharing with all who were in want.

I think there’s also a nice metaphor of cultural exchange that happens with lending libraries. Ideally, more than one person will have read each book, and that means that those people will have experiences in common to discuss and build upon.

I think a library, any kind of library, is also a statement about belonging and longevity. “We are here,” they help us say, “and we plan to be here for a while.” And it’s not just belonging and longevity, but also a statement about progress. “We know things,” they help us say, “and we will continue to learn new things and add those things to this collection.”

I have been having a hard time feeling outrage about the dismantling of the People’s Library, but maybe it is in part because I have been thinking of it as a collection of books in a tent. Maybe it was more than that.