InfoLitEd

It’s OK if I call it what it is right from the get-go, right?

Anyway, my latest project got a brief mention in last Sunday’s Pittsburgh Post Gazette. A similar, but much longer, piece was also just published in Carnegie Mellon’s FOCUS magazine (forthcoming online edition).

I gave a detailed lecture (careful, streaming video) last week about this project as part of the University Libraries’ Authors’ Rights & Wrongs lecture series.

Also, not at all self-promotion, but a mention in local media:
Our student newspaper ran an article about the Help Hunt group we’ve been working with in the Student Advisory Council. These students deserve some recognition for taking an active role in developing new library spaces and services. They’re very ambitious.

While it’s been a trend in the U.S. as the population has been aging, I think the workforce will become even more multi-generational in the near future. In a field like librarianship, in which workers have a tendency to remain in the profession throughout their working lives and continue working past retirement while library schools keep pumping out more M.L.I.S.’s, experienced librarians and new librarians will be working together more often.

The ACRL casebook, Gaming in Academic Libraries has just hit the shelves. Our chapter, “Your Library Instruction is in Another Castle…”, is an account of four Carnegie Mellon librarians’ experiences developing the Library Arcade games. Thanks to our venerable editors Amy Harris and Scott E. Rice for their insightful feedback during the revision process. Here’s a pic of the cover.

I’ll be on a panel discussion at GLLS this weekend in Chicago with the developers of Benevolent Blue, Fletcher Library Game, and Karen Markey (an expert on using games to teach information literacy).

Yes

An actual post is forthcoming. It’s been a little crazy here.

If I’ve spoken to you at conferences, meetings or just passing in the hall, you already know this…

As traditional print libraries become more focused on electronic resources and services, many librarians feel pushed to adopt too many of the latest technologies just to keep up with times. I take a practical approach in my philosophy of technology implementation: if a particular technology does not work for you and your clients, do not do it. I espouse this philosophy in all of my talks and presentations about blogs, wikis, games etc. Time is our most valuable resource, and if we attempt to adopt every new information technology we run the risk of sinking too much time into resources and services that may not best serve our clients. Before undertaking any new project, closely examine the costs and benefits to determine its potential.

ACRL Performance Indicators Mapped to Bloom\’s Taxonomy

This is something I’ve been working on a little at a time. After some literature searching, it doesn’t look like anyone’s completely mapped all of the Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education onto a Bloom’s Taxonomy matrix including factual, conceptual, procedural, and metacognitive skills. This is a draft of most the performance indicators that I will eventually build upon to include each learning outcome. It is under a Creative Commons License. Please send me comments, corrections, etc!

ACRL Performance Indicators Mapped to Bloom’s Taxonomy by Dan Hood http://ilit.files.wordpress.com/2008/05/standards-mapped.pdf is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

I know, I know…I haven’t blogged in about a gazillion, persqillion millenia. But I’ve been stupid busy and haven’t been stricken by the necessity to put finger to keyboard by anything until now.

I just got back from presenting at the Pennsylvania School Librarians’ Association Annual Conference in Hershey, Pa, and I must reinforce that school librarians and academic librarians should be working much more closely than we are currently.

Last year I helped the Pittsburgh Public School District develop its first information literacy “curriculum” in almost 25 years, and our presentation was essentially a tutorial on how to write a K-12 inflolit scope and sequence document. My role in the presentation was, “What the can an academic librarian do to help school librarians?” The crux of this is: we need to work together to create a continuum of IL instruction from kindergarten to graduate school as these are, indeed, life long learning skills. Here are our slides.

Mashup: “A mixture of content or elements. “

This tutorial was created with CamStudio, a really simple, free screencapture/movie maker and published with SplashCast. May I say that SplashCast is awesome?

A colleague and I were talking this morning about how quickly search processes change. There are fewer hard and fast rules for finding information anymore.

Example: A student comes to the reference desk with an article citation and wants the full text. First the librarian checks the catalog for a paper or electronic holdings for the journal’s title. That yields nothing. Next, we check the electronic journals list that isn’t completely integrated into the catalog. Again nothing. Ok, so next let’s check the university down the street for a subscription. No dice. So, finally we suggest using interlibrary loan as the student groans over the possibility of a 2 week wait.

As a last resort the librarian simply Googles the title of the article as a phrase and guess what?! The author has self archived it and posted it to her website as a .pdf file.

The point of this story (which I’m sure anyone in reference services has experienced) is that the traditional processes of tracking down full text don’t always work anymore. So how are we to teach students the “how” of searching and retrieving?!

The answer is to stop providing generic information literacy instruction and instead move to a discipline-specific set of critical thinking skills. Searching and retrieving skills vary from in academic disciplines so instead of trying to teach an often convoluted set of searching skills, lets try teaching students how to do it in their disciplines. Is self archiving a common practice among researchers in their field or is there a core group of 5 journals where 80% of the research is published?

Has anyone else seen this Sparknotes or am I totally behind the times? The temptation to copy/paste/alter must be overwhelming for some students. A 2005 Chronicle article mentions use of Sparknotes cribs on ipods. Wow, I remember checking out Cliffs Notes from the library (somewhat shamefully), but a website makes it guilt free.