Location

Portland State University, Portland, Oregon

Start Date

7-24-2014 3:15 PM

End Date

7-24-2014 3:35 PM

Subjects

Information literacy -- Study and teaching -- Congresses, Library instruction

Description

Teaching a for-credit information literacy course can be viewed as hitting “prime time” for some librarians, but the courses can be as disjointed and problematic for the instructors as one-shot sessions. Projects are a hodgepodge of student-chosen or instructor-assigned “info lit” topics that fail to underscore the biggest problems for students in research: Developing a research question and writing a paper are difficult without enough background knowledge to understand the topic. At semester’s end, instructors may be feeling discouraged and wondering what students actually learned. Solution: Start the semester analyzing one topic to build a knowledge base for discussion and research, before allowing the students to pursue individual topics related to the central theme. Suggestions for how to select a successful theme to re-energize your teaching will be discussed.

Persistent Identifier

http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/14483

LIW handout.pdf (111 kB)
This a handout to accompany: "Unifying Ideas: Building For-Credit Information Literacy Around Themes to Optimize Student Learning"

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Jul 24th, 3:15 PM Jul 24th, 3:35 PM

Unifying Ideas: Building For-Credit Information Literacy Around Themes to Optimize Student Learning

Portland State University, Portland, Oregon

Teaching a for-credit information literacy course can be viewed as hitting “prime time” for some librarians, but the courses can be as disjointed and problematic for the instructors as one-shot sessions. Projects are a hodgepodge of student-chosen or instructor-assigned “info lit” topics that fail to underscore the biggest problems for students in research: Developing a research question and writing a paper are difficult without enough background knowledge to understand the topic. At semester’s end, instructors may be feeling discouraged and wondering what students actually learned. Solution: Start the semester analyzing one topic to build a knowledge base for discussion and research, before allowing the students to pursue individual topics related to the central theme. Suggestions for how to select a successful theme to re-energize your teaching will be discussed.