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Category: Teaching and Learning

Why the Love for "Print" Sources?

Published by Iris on Thursday, October 9th, 2008

Last week one of my co-workers and I met with this year’s new writing tutors over the course of 5 small-group sessions. These sessions always present the unique challenge of building the students’ confidence and facility as tutors while at the same time covering library basics. We need to assume they don’t know these basics, but we also want to treat them as credible professionals.

In amongst all of this, we wanted to introduce them to the strategy of using Ulrich’s to determine if an article found online counts as a “print” source. And we thought we’d explain to them why professors continue to include this now-outdated terminology in their assignments even though they know that the vast majority of the library’s journal collection is online, and even though they will usually agree that even online-only journals count as print sources, and even though students have no context by which to distinguish online-but-count-print materials from unacceptably-online materials. As my co-worker and I thought about it, we realized that “print” is really short-hand for a whole set of assumptions about the publication, most of which have nothing to do with it’s actual format.

“Print” implies editorial oversight at the very least, if not peer-review. There’s a whole structure to the process of printing a journal that exists to protect the publication’s reputation by ensuring the quality of the publication’s contents as much as possible. This process also ensures that authors’ work is distributed by someone other than the author. This history, this structure, this process bestows a beautiful halo of enhanced credibility around those articles that make it through the vetting process and finally appear in print.

I’ve found, as I talk with professors who continue to require print sources, that what they’re really asking for is scholarship that has been inoculated by this process. Every professor I’ve talked to has agreed that even journals that were born-digital would count as legitimate sources for their assignments. “Print” simply stands in for all the layered assumptions.

Clearly we need new terminology because I wholeheartedly support the current assumptions.

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Best End-Of-Class Question Ever

Published by Iris on Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008

Today I was teaching 6 upper-level linguistics students the ins and outs of Linguistics & Language Behavior abstracts, the crazy rules indexers have to follow that force the rest of us to OR together broad and narrow terms, using what you have to find bunches of other things you might need, and the Web of Knowledge.

It was a pretty good class, if I do say so myself, but the best bit was the very last 2 minutes when the very last question of the day went like this:

Student: “Do you really love being a librarian?”
Me: “Yes! [insert mini-blurb about what I love so much about it and how I got here in 2 sentences or less]”
Student: “How do you become one? Is there a special degree for it?”
Me: “Yes, there is. It’s a master’s degree. [insert mini-plug for being a librarian]”

I love my job.

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Rethinking Instruction … Again

Published by Iris on Sunday, September 14th, 2008

One of my favorite things about teaching is that I never feel like I’ve figured out how to do it well. There’s always something new to try, or something old to tweak, or something tried and true to throw out because as it turns out, the students don’t need it any more. All of this means that I’m never bored, and that I’ve never taught the same session twice.

Of course, this also means that I’m always a little uncertain about what I’m doing, how effective it was, and how meaningful it was. So far, no assessment I’ve done has completely set these nagging uncertainties to rest.

But uncertainties notwithstanding, I’m going to try something new this fall. When and where appropriate, I’m going to combine the idea of the Knowledge Survey* with classroom clickers.

I’ve been hearing about clickers for years and have experience their effectiveness myself. Quite against my own will, and in spite of feeling that I was participating in something as corny as any of those team building exercises I always hated (like falling backwards and getting caught), I found myself being sucked in and engaged in the activity at hand. If that could happen to me against my will, maybe I can use it to sucker some nearly sleeping freshmen into my sessions with a couple of well-placed participatory activities.

Still, my innate aversion to gimmicky things kept me from getting too excited until after I heard about Knowledge Surveys. Those things are amazing! Students get an accurate assessment of their own abilities (the Macalester Geology department has found incredibly high correlations between the responses on knowledge surveys and the students’ actual abilities), but I get a quick way to assess students, and I get a less-gimmicky way of encouraging participation and curiosity.

Now, if I could only get the stupid clickers to work, that’d be a great first step. So far, they hang at the “sending” notification whenever I test them, and never make it through to the actual recording of a response. I’ll have to get someone to help me figure out if they’re actually not working or if I’ve set something up wrong.

* I’ve heard Karl Wirth speak about these surveys three times, now, and ever time I came away thinking that there’s got to be a way to incorporate these things into my teaching somehow. Here’s a paper he and Dexter Perkins wrote on the topic.

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These are a few of my favorite things

Published by Iris on Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

I found myself listing my three favorite e-resources today. Usually I have trouble coming up with my favorite of anything, but these three popped into my head with little effort.

Ulrich’s
I hate trying to figure out where an obscure serial has been indexed, but Ulrich’s makes this easy (most of the time). But even beyond that, I absolutely love it for solving a major problem for my students. For the last two years, I’ve taught this as a cheat sheet of “print sources.” I had the hardest time coming up with an easy way to explain how to tell if what you’ve found online (on the free web or through our bibliographic databases) counts as a “print source” when print vs online is becoming a more and more murky distinction every year, and really makes no sense at all to students (or librarians, really). Students were paralyzed thinking they couldn’t use eJournals because their professors had banned “web sources,” and professors wondered why their students were using out-of-date and only-barely-relevant journal sources in their papers. It was because their poor students had been confining themselves to our print journal collection, which is only a fraction of our total journal collection. So now I get up in front of a class and show them the cheat sheet. If you can find a publication name (and I show them how to hunt one down), look it up in Ulrich’s. If it is listed, it counts as a “print source.” Problem solved.

OED
I love word histories, and this is the most comprehensive dictionary of word histories. Ever. I don’t often have much call to use it in my day-to-day work, but I love it for all those late-night “I wonder when we started using ‘research’ as an intransitive verb” moments I have. It has also solved many a word squabble in my family (which has at least 4 discussions about word usage, etymology, or relationship over the dinner table each week).

MLA International Bibliography
I love this because it’s such a treasure-trove of articles, and (please don’t laugh) because it’s incredibly quirky. I know that we’re supposed to love it when students can use resources on their own. You know… usability and stuff. But this thing is a bear to use well, and I’m pretty comfortable with it, which makes me feel useful. And I love feeling useful.

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