Iowa ACRL

" Behavior vs. belief and changing culture | Home By Meredith Farkas | August 10, 2012 It's pretty clear from the comments on my recent posts that many of us have a sense that the sort of information literacy instruction we're providing is not having the impact we'd like.

"Objective: This study sought to better understand the research expectations of first-year students upon beginning university study, and how these expectations differed from those of their professors. Most academic librarians observe that the research expectations of these two groups differ considerably and being able to articulate where these differences are greatest may help us provided more focused instruction, and allow us to work more effectively with professors and student support services."

This article offers interesting data about expectations of college freshmen and the faculty who work with them.

Create images of good old fashioned library catalog cards with the book information of your choice and hand-written scribbles! 

"CLIP is creating tutorials that specifically address the larger ideas of information literacy. The collection might look something like an interactive, online information literacy "text book" from which librarians or instructors anywhere can select and use pieces as they choose."

Slideshare presentation from Randall Library, July 2010; assessment as part of university-wide culture change,

Jobs, grants, prestige and career advancement are all partially based on an admittedly flawed concept: the journal Impact Factor. Impact factors have been becoming increasingly meaningless since 1991, writes George Lozano, who finds that the variance of papers' citation rates around their journals' IF has been rising steadily.

"The information and materials on this page will help program chairs, program coordinators, and assessment coordinators develop their program assessment plans, implement them, and report on them. Assessment Plans and Reports are created at the program level." Includes templates, examples, summaries and more about creating department / program assessment activities.  

Excellent short Prezi with 3 specific group activity examples that look at creativity, teaching failures, and cross-disciplinary research.  Each activity asks great questions of the group and individuals.  Invention Mobs: recreating creativity and collaboration in the writing classroom -- Leeann Hunter, Georgia Tech -- Roger Whitson, Emory from 2012 Computers and Writing Conference at North Carolina State University ACT 1: Playing with Others Select 2 objects in this room, on your person, or in your bag.  (60 seconds) Form groups and nominate 3 objects that don't belong together (90 seconds) Create a 4-line narrative that presents the objects to a specific audience (120 seconds) Q: How do we define creativity and why is it important?  Q: How do we define mobs and why is collaboration necessary?  ACT 2: Teaching with Others In groups of three, share a failed teaching experiment. (2 minutes) Merge into groups of six, and select three major activities destined for failure.  (3 minutes) Design a large-scale project that revisits and revises these failed teaching experiments. (5 minutes) Q: How do we cultivate creativity in the college writing class?  Q: How do we create effective teamwork structures?  ACT 3: Researching with Others Identify and pair up with your "research opposite." (2 minutes) Share current and recent research projects (3 minutes) Devise a collaborative research project that is also multimodal. (5 minutes) Q: How is interdisciplinary research creative?  Q: What are the possibilities in conducting collaborative and multimodal research?  multimodal:  WOVEN = written, oral, visual, electronic, nonverbal written / visual - document creative process with original art and blog entries oral / nonverbal - analyze and produce professional talks with "ideas worth sharing" a la TED electronic - connect collaborators via social media http://www.leeannhunter.com/invention/

"I teach a course in the spring called Information Fluency... It's an upper division undergraduate course pitched to students who are planning to go to graduate school, giving them a chance to learn more about the way the literature of their field works as well as generally how to use library and internet tools for research."

Join us for a fascinating, lively discussion as we talk with Char Booth about her book, Reflective Teaching, Effective Learning: Instructional Literacy for Library Educators.  Discussion includes becoming a reflective teacher and master of instructional literacy, and how both the book's pedological frameworks and practical worksheets both help inform this process. And we also learn about Char's most embarrassing moment of teaching! Char Booth is the Instruction Services Manager & E-Learning Librarian at Claremont Colleges Library. She blogs at info-mational, http://infomational.wordpress.com/, and tweets at @charbooth.  Char recently won the 2012 ACRL Rockman Publication of the Year Award, and begins as an ACRL Immersion Faculty Member this year.

Having just opened the Learning Commons at the University of Iowa, this has been an interesting read!

Big collection of free e-books from NASA, including history, biography and lots and lots of science. Many of them have great archival photos, too.

Thanks, Sara. I shared this on our Sciences Library Facebook page and Twitter feed.

"Our goals include to: Develop strategies libraries can use to identify types of publishing services and content that can be created and curated by libraries. Assess trends in digital content creation and publishing that can be useful in libraries and suggesting potential future projects. Identify efficient workflows for distributing content for free online and with potential for some cost-recovery in print on demand markets."

Research tutorial from UC-Irvine; sections include Knowledge Cycle, Searching, Citations

This is great, Sara. Thanks for sharing!

It's no secret, I love Barbara Fister. This is a great blog post that reminds me that I have had a very different experience with the creation, organization and distribution of information than many of the students I work with today. I need to reevaluate my assumptions.

This research was designed to address a gap in our understanding of information literacy education by adding student perceptions to the question of how to ensure that all students develop the information literacy skills they need as part of their educational experience. The findings from this study provide important input for the design, development, and implementation of information resources and services, particularly those aimed at reaching students with non-proficient information literacy skills. All AIL workshop materials from this study are freely available for educational use from the Information Skills Workshop Materials section of this site. Proper attributions should be given to the researchers (Melissa Gross and Don Latham) and to the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) for their support in developing these materials. Commercial use of these materials is not permitted.

The Attaining Information Literacy Project has focused on identifying first-year college students with below-proficient information literacy skills, gaining an understanding of those students' self-views and perceptions of information literacy, gaining an understanding of their instructional experiences and preferences, and developing an intervention that will address their instructional needs. Focus groups were conducted with students with below-proficient skills to determine their instructional preferences. The findings from the focus groups indicate that students place a high value on personal relevance in the knowledge and skills they are learning, and they prefer a combination of demonstration and hands-on activities, interaction with the instructor and other students, and the availability of supplemental instructional materials in the form of handouts. In addition, they feel that incentives to participate in instruction are crucial and that a number of communication strategies are needed to advertise effectively the availability of instructional sessions.