Normal and Alive

Packing up my office to move and found a sticky note where I'd copied down something that G. Orwell said about us. "The fact to which we have to cling, as to a life-belt, is that it is possible to be a normal decent person and yet to be fully alive."

Taurus

LIB 101

Fridays, 9-10am

Day 1 1/15
Rules/Syllabus
Trails Test
Homework: fill out worksheet about academic history, learner attitudes and research experience. One article summary of a recent news story (last 2 years) about information literacy (what questions did you have after you read it, what experiences have you had that are related).

Day 2 1/22
Into: quick write about goals for the class
Activity for What is Info Comp (maybe the notecards in groups with State/Explain/Example or 35)
Readings defining information
Homework: read Siva, research and summarize who he is, what people say about him that influence your understanding of his article

Day 3 1/29
Activity for Generations and Technology (Quotations activity)
Siva
Homework: read an article about info use in jobs

Day 4 2/5
(SCIL Works, Long Beach)
Communities and information
How do people find out?

2/12 President's Day

Day 5 2/19
How google works
Defining trengths and weaknesses (these should be general enough that they can be applied to any info tool)

Day 6 2/26
Student interviews about info seeking and use
Developing hypotheses about inquiry
homework: read articles about adult literacy levels, comment on my blog post about literacy; post summaries of interviews because we'll come back to them later

Day 7 3/5
Literacy

Day 8 3/12
Tools
homework: find one scholarly article, two popular articles and three websites on the same topic and fill out eval sheets for each

Spring Break

Day 9 3/26

Day 10 4/2

Day 11 4/9
CARL -- In class essay

Day 12 4/16

Day 13 4/23

Day 14 4/30
LOEX

Day 15 5/7

Finals

********

What about sociopolitical concerns about who gets to create knowledge?

Guests to be interviewed about how they relate to information to create their own knowledge, what they're curious about, what information they seek out for themselves:
Hal, Jon, Matt, Dick, Elizabeth... any other women?

Elmborg -- Social/political
http://slis.uiowa.edu/~elmborg/Literacies-Large-and-Small.pdf
Hensley -- Inquiry
Swanson?

Use Hal's anti-plagiarism lesson about Chris Anderson

"A slight adjustment of perspective"

"We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance?"
A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit, 2005

I'm in school now and constantly under the pressure of studying and writing that's not getting done. At the same time my interests are sharpened. My desire for time to read and think about my own ideas is stronger than it ever is when I actually have the time. I long to be untroubled but I know now that I never experience the perfect moment of thinking and being when I am unfettered. So I'm working on 1) not getting mad at myself for longing for time, 2) enjoying the feeling of heightened engagement because it's a pleasurable feeling if I don't chase it away with my stressed thoughts. Yoga is helping with this, therapy is helping with this, but mostly it's just knowing myself better that's helping with this. The feeling of being under the gun and the feeling of having tantalizing possibilities just out of my reach (and sometimes at my finger tips) cannot be parsed so I have to enjoy the part that I love while I'm stressed and it's here.

Why face-to-face might matter

http://www.livescience.com/culture/090604-human-behavior-evolved.html

This article is about the role of population density in the evolution of human intellegence and the transmission of ideas and skills. Maybe this is why it still matters to be in classrooms together.

On the Ethics of Realness and Credibility

A chapter in the book Communication Ethics, Media & Popular Culture (originally published in 2005) might be useful for bringing our concern about ethos and credibility into a cultural context. Dan Molden's "Eminem and the Rhetoric of 'Real': The Implications of 'Keeping it Real' on Ethics and Credibility" makes an effort to situate our current concern for realness and the interest in figures who confront the fakeness of society (like Eminem and Jesse Ventura). Is this connected to our students' sometimes backwards understanding of credibility, authority and bias? The section "Real Ethics?" seems especially to start asking some of the questions that are related to our larger project.

in our library P94. C5725 2007

Research Process Case Study

Allie is going to write about her experience building the GEL unit around Kuhlthau's research process. So I'm supposed to do the lit review and theoretical foundation stuff. The lit review should be what's been done like this and the theoretical foundation should be metacognitive scaffolding. What else is metacognitive scaffolding called? Should we also get into reflective judgment? What about competency theory or threshold concepts?
++++

sense-making, 1st yr experience, ISP

Book to order

Get Marketing Today's Academic Library: A Bold New Approach to Communicating with Students by Brian Mathews for the library collection

BSI Grant Research

I should:

• Interview participating professors at my school about how they used the results
• Plan a pre/post deployment in fall 2009
• Contact the TRAILS test makers about how they've seen the test used and if they have overall percentile figures
• Contact Mercer Community College about how they used the test and results
• Check to see how the ILT from James Madison U has been used in case there's an analogy with my results
  

My paper should be focused for a developmental education audience and include plans for how I will implement the findings from my research in LIB 101 and my support efforts for the Freshman Academy.

LIB 2 idea for copyright/ethical use

google books
Shepard Fairey's Obama poster

CARL Advocacy

I need to get in touch with Amy and Tracey to see if CARL has any support to offer for getting the libraries at community colleges counted for apportionment to the college. If this is a problem at the level of the system office, then it could be changed if people get interested in it.

focus

my husband should write a paper on what is meant by "find a focus" in the research process. I saw in "Research on the information seeking behavior of young adults" by Theresa Szeliga a gap in the library literature on what finding a focus actually means when students are expected to use their preliminary research to decide on a focus.

Look into it

J C says she's trying this. http://www.comminfolit.org/index.php/cil/article/view/Spring2008AR2
I should look into it.

Popular Relativism

http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Guarding-the-boundaries-3979

This link is to an article that proposes some reasons why moral relativism has proliferated. It might help me to extend what I'm trying to learn about Booth's "good reasons." Especially there's the problem of what happens when the average person believes that something should need to be proven before it can stand. Really we should just be trying to discern "good reasons," instead.

Knowledge is...

what we are justified in believing.

That's Rorty's summary of Dewey's philosophy and it answers a lot of questions for me.

Readings for LIB 2

Editors. (2003). Peer review. Library & Information Science Research, 25. 359-361. I don't remember if I already used this, but it's a good description of the process.

Harrison, D. (2008). Scholarly voice and professional identity in the Internet age. Thought & Action, 24. 23-33. It's a good description of the uses of blogs and reflects on the difference between writing for popular and scholarly audiences.

Lewis, H. (2009). Not your father's censorship. Chronicle of Higher Education. An article on the potential for quasi-monopolies like google/youtube to censor.

http://www.chillingeffects.org/

article I saved about newspaper retractions of retracted medical journal articles

http://www.isetl.org/ijtlhe/pdf/IJTLHE141.pdf about using the critical incident questionaire in an online class to assess group development

Flex Week 2009

Introduction
a. IC Resource for BSI
b. Assignment Consultations, Scaffolding

Defining Information Competency
identifying deficiencies
students as information users
a. Academic Literacy (+ lifelong IC), IC and CTE, distinct from Computer Literacy
b. Information Need, Evaluating Sources, Avoiding Plagiarism
c. ACRL Standards and Discipline Specific Standards, Connection with Writing

Information Competency as a core requirement
a. Matriculation
b. GE Requirement

BSI Grant Funded Pilot
a. Basic Plan
b. Sample questions

When we talk about students plagiarising or using inappropriate sources we're talking about deficiencies in their Information Competency, but it's the same basic problem when we talk about students wanting easy answers, not taking responsibility for directing their own learning, not making an argument in their papers and supporting it with evidence, or clinging to comfortable beliefs instead of thinking critically.

Distinguish between Information Competency and Computer Literacy: Powerpoint can be a powerful tool for communicating information. Computer literacy involves the ability to create a powerpoint presentation and a highly skilled user will even be able to make it animated or more navigable than the average powerpoint. Information Competency involves the ability to consider how the format of powerpoint influences the type of information that can be easily communicated. It also involves considerations about what information to include in the presentation in order to convince your audience of your position. And niether of these skill sets will help a student who does not have natural ability to make good aesthetic decisions like selecting a pleasing color pallette and attractive font.

Further Reading

ASCCC Academic Literacy Statement
the table from "Collaborative Dialogue: Repositioning the Academic Library" by Campbell, N. F. and Wesley, T. L. in portal: Libraries and the Academy 6.1, 2006.
Ward, D. (2006) Revisioning Information Literacy for lifelong meaning. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 32(4). 396-402.
Blummer, B. (2007) Utilizing WebQuests for Information Literacy instruction in distance education. College & Undergraduate Libraries, 14(3). 45-62.
Shapiro, J.J. and Hughes, S.K. (1996) Information Literacy as a liberal art. Educom Review, 31(2). 31-35.
McMillen, P.S. and Hill, E. (2004) Why teach 'research as a conversation' in freshman composition courses? A metaphor to help librarians and composition instructors develop a shared model. Research Strategies, 20. 3-22.
http://www2.morainevalley.edu/default.asp?SiteId=10&PageId=236
Swanson, T. (2006) Information Literacy, personal epistemology, and knowledge construction: Potential and possibilities. College & Undergraduate Libraries, 13(3). 93-112.
Klingberg, S. (2006) Information competencies checklist: a resource for inter-segmental collaboration. Reference Services Review, 34(4). 486-490.
Wright, C.A. (2000) Information literacy within the general education program: Implications for Distance Education. The Journal of General Education, 49(1). 23-33.
Henri, J. and Dillon, K. (1992) Learning to learn: Reflections upon enquiry, information literacy and critical thinking. The Australian Library Journal. 103-117.
Norgaard, R. (2003) Writing information literacy: Contributions to a concept. Reference & User Services Quarterly, 43(2). 124-130.
---. (2004) Writing information literacy in the classroom: Pedagogical enactments and implications. Reference & User Services Quarterly, 43(3). 220-226.
Yancey, K.B. (2001) WPA outcomes statement for first-year composition. College English, 63(3). 321-325.
Elmborg, J. (2006) Critical information literacy: Implications for instructional practice. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 32(2). 192-199.
Holliday, W. and Li, Q. (2004) Understanding the millennials: Updating our knowledge about students. Reference Services Review, 32(4). 356-366.