CiL: Information Literacy & Instruction

Kathleen Stacey, Montgomery College; Chad Boeninger, Ohio University

Kathleen discussed the “one-shot” information literacy session and the limitations of such sessions: we have too much information to present so we have to choose what to include and what to leave out. Interesting. I’ve never thought of it that way. For Kathleen, a successful one-shot session has clear objectives, has a specific, associated task, and includes a hands-on component. Her suggestions for what to include in a one-shot session include:

• lots of how
• some what
• minimal why
• the smallest number of steps to get results

As for what to leave out of the session:

• advanced features (Boolean, nesting, wildcards, truncation– put all this stuff in the handout)
• evaluation of resources and results
• personal information about you as well as your opinion(s)
• jargon (marc, LC, etc.)

Chad turned his attention to wikis, his talk was titled, “wikis in the classroom: powerful tools for library instruction”. He began by outlining his goals for instruction, which includes teaching tools to accomplish a project, teaching research/information literacy concepts, and begin a relationship and dialogue between librarian and student. It’s interesting that Chad’s goals are almost diametrically opposed to Kathleen’s, my guess that it has something to do with the fact that Chad deals with a specific clientele (business school students) that he probably gets to see/deal with more than once (if not in the classroom, then at least in the library?), making it important to build a relationship with those students.
Chad’s information literacy challenges include:

• most classes are 50 minutes long
• teach about 300-500 business students each quarter (15-20 classes)
• business school has 1700 students
• penetration of library instruction in classes is spotty
• front-loaded info lit may not be relevant later in the term or the academic career
• variety of projects means instruction must be scalable
• location of instruction can vary
• class requests may be spur of the moment

For chad, it came down to the traditional research/subject guide and the limitations of those guides: they are redundant (same resoureces listed in multiple guides), there is no interlinking, you have to edit the same content in multiple locations, searchability is low, and timely updates are difficult. So he turned to wikis! He set up The Biz Wiki in 2005 to replace the traditional subject guide using Mediawiki. He has also experimented with using the wiki to teach the resources and noted that he has found it to work better than class handouts.

Chad closed out his presentation discussing the obvious advantages of a wiki, which includes keyword searchability, flexibility, easily updated content, and the community-building aspect.  He did note that he hasn’t made use of the latter advantage yet as he is the only person who edits the wiki, but the potential to have librarians, faculty, and students build the content is amazing.

I heard this a lot during various sessions at the conference: wikis are great because they build community and a large contributing community will ensure that it’s self-correcting, etc. (the same advantages you hear about wikipedia). What surprises me, somewhat, is that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of libraries doing this yet – i.e.: opening up their wikis  to their user communities (think: radical trust!). If you’re doing this at your library, I’d love to hear about it.
[Technorati tag: cil2006]

Amanda, this semester I’m using pbwiki as the base for a course guide for an undergrad class. The professor and the students have editing privileges (but it’s password protected, so no spam) and it’s going ok for a first attempt. I think students will have to get used to working with each other before something like a wiki course guide could be really successful.

The wiki: http://gsuhist3000.pbwiki.com/; I’ve also posted a bit about it at my blog: http://historylibrarian.wordpress.com/2006/03/21/course-page-wiki/.

Not quite “radical trust” as yet, but I think a step in that direction.

Oops, the semicolon got into the url. Here it is again:
http://gsuhist3000.pbwiki.com

Hi Amanda,
It’s interesting that you should point out that my goals in the classroom are a little different than Kathleen’s. I suppose the primary factor that contributes to our differences is that Kathleen generally has one-shot sessions, and I generally have multiple opportunities to meet with students. My class sessions are generally very tool-driven with a few “nuggets” of information literacy, while I am able to instill more information literacy concepts in the follow-up reference appointments. In many cases, I do see some students in library sessions multiple times, but this is not always the case. Because I am teaching a very specific population (business students), I can sell myself as a potentially valuable resource. Sometimes the sales pitch works too well, and I’m bombarded with reference questions to the extent that I get no other work done. But I figure, I’m here to help the students, so most of the other projects can wait.