librarianship =

Metrolina, the Charlotte area library association, has been organizing an excellent conference each year on information literacy. As promised here are my notes. The powerpoints should be up on their site soon.

Fostering a community of collaboration: scaffolding the student research process presented by Amy Burns, Jaime Pollard-Smith (CPCC)

I have a huge library crush on Amy Burns and the folks at Central Piedmont Community College, so I was excited to see her session. This year she presented with an English instructor at CPCC with whom she has worked closely. They ran the session like a mock class to explain how they scaffolded the research process. Basically the professor prepared the students to come to the library session with three activities:

1. A loop quickwrite: The student writes down a topic they think they would want to research and then they free-write for a set amount of time about the topic. The professor then asks them to pick something from their free-write that is most interesting and circle or star it. They then free-write for one minute about the circled thing. They circle something from that and free-write for thirty seconds. The professor then asks the students: “What happened as you were writing?” and “Why are we doing this before the library class?”   These questions get them talking about narrowing down the research topic.
2. 20 questions: The day before library session she asks them to get up and go around classroom asking classmates for questions about their topic. Each classmate is supposed to give the student one question. (I really like this activity and will definitely use it in my PSC class. May also use in library instruction.)
3. Ticket to the library session: Before students may enter the library session room, they must have on a sheet of paper answers to the following questions: What is my topic? Why am I interested in my topic? What do I hope to learn from my research? They also must give their research question and do a short prewrite exercise answering the question “what do I already know about my topic?”  (This is fabulous as it forces the students to do the kind of thinking we wish they would do pre-session!)

@ the Library session Amy does several activities. These are just a few she mentioned:

• Shows Eli Pariser Ted talk on filter bubbles
• Talks about how Google tailors content and ads for your personal information
• Talks about evaluating information: who created it? Why was it created? When was it created? Will it work for this assignment? 
• Asks them to compare the sites (http://martinlutherking.org/ and http://www.thekingcenter.org/)
• Then they go to the library website and she gives them time for individual research

They talked about their high level of trust and collaboration, which allows them to have a strong research experience for their students. Jaime also mentioned that she includes Amy’s information and name in the syllabus and refers to her by name (rather than saying “Go to the library!”). This creates a personal relationship (and an embedded experience) for the students! Just shows you don’t need a formal personal librarian program to create a personal relationship!

The Feedback Loop: Student Reflection on Research, Writing, and Information Literacy presented by Jennifer Arnold (CPCC)

Jennifer is the Director of the CPCC libraries and teaches English composition classes. She had a lot of great references in her presentation, but I couldn’t catch them all. Plus she just had a lot of great information. Below are some highlights. Here is the prezi for the full picture.

Her big idea was reflection as part of the research process. She had students complete a reflection assignment at end of their writing workshop (1 week before paper due). It asked them 6 questions around these topics: comfort using lib and why or why not; what have learned; how writing process improved; what learn about thesis writing, citing, plagiarism.

She also mentioned in her session that knowing the librarian as a person and knowing that the librarian is familiar with the assignment lessens student anxiety. It means that they don’t have to explain the assignment to the librarian. The librarian just gets it. (Another point for embeddedness!)

Another interesting insight from her session is that a student mentioned that she wasn’t sure how dominant the research should be in the paper. In other words should it be more her own views or the research that presents itself? Our students can so rarely articulate this point, but it is definitely something I see them struggling with so often. How do you explain this to a student? Do you have ideas for activities we could do to help students with this skill?

The value of evaluation; faculty and librarians teaming up to advance Information Literacy presented by Brian Mooney, Joe Eshleman (JWU)

They discussed a collaborative project to help students with ACRL IL standard 3 on evaluation of resources in a science class. Joe discussed the main criteria for evaluation and then talked about their project. They give an assignment in which the students must provide a good website and a bad website based on evaluation criteria presented in the library session. They have 48 hours to send their assignment to Joe, the librarian, who then grades and sends them to the professor.  The professor mentioned that they took the assignment seriously because it was tied to their class grade. This is a pretty good model for creating a collaborative assignment. My favorite part of the session was when he described his model for their collaboration as a “three legged stool” and that students, librarians, faculty working together is the platform for learning. I guess learning sits on top of us?

Again, Metrolina was a great conference. My absolute favorite moment is below. Seeing a current intern, Heather Helms, present her poster to a successful former intern, Kathy Shields from High Point University, brought a smile to my face! They grow up so fast…

Heather, Kathy, and Amy at poster session

My second favorite moment was seeing JESSAMYN WEST!!!!!! Squeeeee! Ahem, I mean Jessamyn West gave a lovely and funny talk on the Myths and Facts about the Digital Divide. Her materials are all linked and excellent and I was so in awe that my notes are pretty much useless. Go see what she has. The top takeaway point for me was that the digital divide isn’t just a device divide, but also and more importantly a cultural divide. Those who are the have not’s typically do not have a culture of connectedness that the have’s do. When you think about the argument that way it really hits home why this problem is a) still a problem, b) not easily surmountable, and c) typically discussed  in terms that obscure its complexity. Thank you Metrolina for bringing a library goddess to be your keynote speaker. You made this librarian’s summer.