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Category: Teaching and Learning

Specialization: License to jump off the deep end?

Published by Iris on Wednesday, January 19th, 2011

In some ways, it’s probably overkill to have subject librarians teaching loyally for the first year seminars in their subjects. I know there were several courses I taught for last term, first year seminars in my departments, that any of my colleagues could have taught for as well or better than I did. And yet, if that happened regularly, when would I ever get to teach classes after saying flat out, “You don’t need to have them do research in order to fulfill the information literacy requirement for the class” to faculty who couldn’t work a research component into their courses?

And so a few times last term I found myself coming up with ways to integrate information literacy into courses that had no real research component. And it was fun.

I wonder if I’d have the guts to suggest such a session in a physics course, where I know much less about how knowledge is created and how scholars ask questions and what counts as evidence. I wonder if I’d be able to build up the kind of knowledge that would allow me to suggest this to a physics course if I were more of a generalist in my teaching. Maybe I could if I were a lot better at that kind of thinking than I am, but for me being a subject librarian paid off big time with these non-research-based first year seminars. Talk about unforeseen outcomes.

Of course, I’m still wondering if that was the responsible course of action. But it was fun, and it didn’t seem to do actual harm, and it got people thinking about information literacy in more nuanced ways. So maybe I don’t have to hand in my librarian credentials just yet?

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Why Would Undergraduates Need Those Clunky Databases Anyway?

Published by Iris on Wednesday, December 15th, 2010

Google Scholar has made great strides in the 6 years I’ve been a librarian. It’s great. I use it all the time. And now interesting new research by Xiaotian Chen shows that Google Scholar contains nearly all of the articles held in several standard library databases, which is also great. Chen’s article finishes with a flourish, declaring, “The conclusion cannot be clearer: libraries can seriously consider cancelling a large number of subscription-based abstracts and indexes since their unique contents and value are rapidly evaporating” (Chen 226).

This would probably be true if the unique content and value of subscription databases were housed solely in the citation, abstract, and potential for full text access, but in fact it misses the point for many researchers. And it misses the point particularly for undergraduates.

Search is all about term matching, and terms are often the hardest thing for undergraduates to harness. So one key value of a database or search engine is the way that it introduces students to helpful information such as terms that might be important to their topics, genres of publication that are relevant to the scholars in the field that study the topic, and ways of judging the source’s relative weight by providing clues about other things the author has written or about how often the source is cited by other sources. These are not things that undergraduates are able to do just by looking at a citation and abstract.

Google Scholar is very forgiving of bad searching. It will nearly always give you something, even if you enter “impact of cell phones on globalization” into the search box. (Two of my big goals for this last term were to get students to stop searching for “impact on” and “globalization.” I was only minimally successful.) Because it’s so forgiving, it can be a great place to start. However, it’s pretty bad at leading you to new search strategies once you’ve found the one article where the author uses your phrase in her abstract.

Disciplinary databases are not nearly as forgiving of bad searching, so they may be pretty intimidating places to start. Where they excel, however, is in foregrounding those elusive, mysterious, and powerful terms that students need so badly if they’re going to revise their searches and gather more disciplinarily relevant material. The vocabulary, controlled and otherwise, is one of the two key advantages of disciplinary databases. These databases also help students make decisions about the relative worth of a source by (usually) giving links to other things by that author, other things published in that journal, citation counts, bibliographies, indications about peer review, and so on. And sure, these aren’t things that students are used to looking at when they enter college. But in my experience, these are tools that students very quickly come to rely on.

For the totally at-sea undergraduate, the most powerful research process will probably look something like this: take a citation found using a messy search in Google Scholar, plunk that citation into a library database, mine the resulting record for terms and other useful information, read a couple of articles “instrumentally,” and then repeat the process as needed with better and better terms each time.

So is Google Scholar a database killer? Like Steve, I think not. I think it’s a great tool that complements our other tools. And hey! It’s free!

Chen, Xiaotian. “Google Scholar’s Dramatic Coverage Improvement Fiver Years after Debut.” Serials Review 36, no. 4 (2010): 221-26. [Available via ScienceDirect]

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I need to stop being such a librarian

Published by Iris on Saturday, November 13th, 2010

We’ve nearly finished the first term of the new first year seminars, and I’ve worked with a whole bunch of them now, and they’ve all been totally different. Sure, they’re all required to give students practice finding, evaluating, and using information, but just as we suspected, there are lots and lots of ways to work those things into a course. Some courses have taught The Research Paper, others have concentrated on teaching students to build context for what they’re reading and hearing in class.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, though, it’s been that I am not there to teach the students how to find, evaluate, and use information. I tried that with a couple of courses, and it failed. Miserably.

No, I’m there to do two things: to give the students a couple of skills they need right now, and to spark their imaginations about what could be possible if they decided to make a habit of this research stuff.

This clicked for me the other day when I thought about what it would look like if the college decided that all first year students have a foreign language component in their first year seminar, or a biology component, or a stats component. The guest lecturer from French or Bio or Econ would never be expected to teach French or Bio or stats in half an hour or an hour. Instead, they’d get the students interested in their fields of study by providing just enough basic knowledge to make some interesting, higher order process make sense, and then they’d concentrate on making that higher order process interesting and engaging for the rest of the half hour or hour.

You can’t inoculate students in one easy session and expect that now they know French.

Note to self: There’s no way to teach it all, anyway, so think harder about things that are both practical and imagination-sparking, and then teach those things more consistently. These students like to be intellectually engaged — that’s why they’re here — so go with that. Be a guest lecturer.

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Using Learning Outcomes for Inspiration

Published by Iris on Wednesday, October 27th, 2010

Back when I attended Immersion many moons ago, they presented me with a formula for a learning outcome: “Students will” + [verb phrase] + “in order to” + [goal]. Then we used action words from Bloom’s Taxonomy [PDF] (the higher order the better, usually) to come up with the verb phrase describing what students would be able to do, and connected that action to a compelling reason for them to know how to do that.  So, for example (and not a great example), “Students will recognize key functions of a database interface in order to navigate unfamiliar databases by making educated guesses about functionality and options.”

In my own practice, two pieces of this are by far the most important. First, the formula puts the emphasis on what students learn, not on what I teach. Second, the “in order to” phrase is what I use to make sure my goals are information literacy goals rather than bibliographic instruction goals. “In order to use Boolean operators correctly” isn’t a good goal. Using Boolean is an action that may result in a goal of getting more relevant results from a variety of search interfaces, or that may help students deal with searches for concepts that don’t have standard vocabulary (very important in the humanities), but it’s not a goal in itself.

When I talk to faculty about the sessions I’m going to teach for them, I start with their goals. What are their learning goals for the course? What are their learning goals for this assignment? And then I match those to my goals for the session. That way we can prioritize what to include in the class, and we can both feel better about why we’re including those things rather than all the rest of everything we could include. And prioritizing is important because 2 goals is quite enough for a session — 3 if we’re feeling really ambitious. (Believe me, I’ve balked against that constraint HARD, but it’s absolutely true.) Whatever I can’t cover in the session, I include on a Subversive Handout.

I rarely write out formal learning outcomes, but I do keep the structure in mind all the time: students learn (not me teach), some learning action (I keep Bloom’s Taxonomy by my computer at all times), some interesting learning goal that’s directly tied to the course and the assignment. And for me, connecting the practical actions of research with the larger goals of being sophisticated scholars is what keeps me engaged and interested in instruction — what keeps me from burning out, or falling back on cookie-cutter classes. Others may have other ways of keeping themselves out of instructional ruts, but this is what does it for me.

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