Brittany Austin
Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising, SF Campus; Student at San Jose State University
Assistant Librarian & MLIS Student
Adam Elsholz
South San Francisco Public Library
Library Program Manager
You Shared WHAT on Facebook?: Using Social Media and Pop Culture References to Teach Information Literacy Skills
Most college students share information online on Facebook, Twitter and other social media channels, but the quality can be questionable. Surprise students by revealing the parallels between social sharing and academic research! Using real-life examples from Facebook and other internet sources, learn how to walk students through the basics of website evaluation and plagiarism. Connect with students offline by talking about what happens online – fake news articles, satire sites like the Onion, when bias goes bad, ranked search results, Katy Perry thesis statements and more. Engage the students with group work and active participation. Also, learn how to navigate social media to find out what’s popular with your student population and make references to relevant content. Teach students how to save face online… and hopefully write better papers and cite better resources in the process!
H. Michelle Chen
School of Library and Information Science, San Jose State University
Assistant Professor
Enhancing Academic Librarianship Education with Information Visualization
The advances of web and content management technologies have presented both opportunities and challenges to academic libraries, which requires new library instruction for a more effective learning experience for academic librarians. An academic librarian strives to support the mission of his/her institution, which ranges from student instruction to academic or scientific research, by identifying, retrieving, presenting, and communicating appropriate and relevant information from various data sources. However, nowadays these data sources would come with high complexity, cross disciplines, and large scale, which makes it challenging to follow emerging academic fronts and identify key information. In my poster, I will focus on presenting some cutting-edge concepts that could be included in academic librarianship education. Specifically, I will discuss three “information visualization” tools that support academic libraries with powerful visual displays. These tools include 1) AquaBrowser, a web search engine that incorporates visualized web of related search term, 2) Visual Explorer, a service offered by Microsoft that shows visually citations, and 3) Reimagining Dendrograms, a dendrogram tool that shows how frequently a particular word appeared within a particular timeframe. I will present the usage of these tools in enhancing and supporting academic librarian activities. I will also articulate the advantages of introducing these visualization tools to academic librarians and how these tools can address one of the assumptions for the future of academic libraries listed by the ACRL research committee in 2007: “there will be an increased emphasis on digitizing collections, preserving digital archives, and improving methods of data storage and retrieval.”
Dory Cochran
Utah State University
Reference & Instruction Librarian
Connecting with Our Students: Developing Audience Awareness to Energize Pop Culture Use in the Classroom
The inclusion of popular culture in library instruction is an innovative way to engage with students’ emotions and tap into existing knowledge. Amy Springer and Kathryn Yelinek discuss how incorporating Jersey Shore into information literacy lessons energized their students’ learning and exemplified the need for instruction librarians to try new teaching methods. Likewise, Nedra Peterson promotes using popular culture in library instruction, but she cautions librarians to be aware of how students’ cultural perceptions can create misunderstandings that need to be addressed when using popular culture in the classroom. Additionally, a recurring theme in the literature is that pop culture references must register with students if they are to successfully impact learning. The writers above note the need for this connection, but it is often an assumed point in the literature that is not given great attention. Connecting pop culture references to the knowledge of our students might seem an obvious point, but figuring out how to connect is not an easy task and requires trial and error. As such, this task deserves greater practical and scholarly attention. In my role as an instruction librarian I have experimented with using and presenting popular culture in my teaching. Whether through board game analogies or music, I’ve catered pop culture use to the interests, disciplines, and learning goals of my students. My poster will map how developing audience awareness positively impacted my teaching and will aid other librarians by providing innovative teaching examples.
Kali Davis
J. Paul Leonard Libary at San Francisco State University
Assistant Librarian
Hesper Wilson
J. Paul Leonard Libary at San Francisco State University
Assistant Librarian
Re-envisioning the Online Tutorial: Moving from the Static to the Dynamic
In response to our growing student population and increasing number of lower-division enrollees, combined with fewer librarians and increasing workloads, the librarians at San Francisco State University have developed a course-embeddable online learning tool to supplement lower-division information literacy learning. SF State has had an information competency requirement since 2000, which, until now was fulfilled by a static online tutorial that has been of limited value to students. The new online tutorial can be embedded into courses and offers students the opportunity to conduct authentic assignment-specific research while introducing them to information literacy competencies, thereby situating their IL learning in a meaningful context.
The tutorial itself uses a variety of technologies. Instruction videos are created using video editing and screen capture software (Camtasia), are hosted using social media (YouTube), and then embedded within a survey using the survey tool, Qualtrics. The tutorial teaches the student to use the library’s OneSearch (our Xerxes/Summon discovery service) to find reliable academic resources.
Each segment of the video introduces a new step and allows the students to move through a beginning research strategy tailored to their own research topic. The tutorial culminates with the student capturing citations for two relevant scholarly journal articles. Upon completion, a summary of the student’s results is forwarded to the student, the student’s professor, and the librarian.
The poster will share the tutorial format and structure; results from a student focus group; information on how the tutorial was made, including what technologies were used; and the plans for implementation.
Mary Ann Naumann
Pepperdine University
Research & Reference Librarian
The Peer Review Process as Performance Art
Finding that my instruction about peer-review tended to naturally fall around the mid-point of my one-shot sessions, I sought out a unique way to present the material, get students out of their seats, and get these important concepts to stick. My experimentation led me to create and produce a peer-review play.
A “cast” of students is selected from the class and brought to the front of the classroom to “act” out the peer-review process. Using actual documents created in the peer-review process (e.g., the reviewers’ comments and the authors’ responses from an open peer review journal article), the student cast is given scripts to perform. Playing the narrator, I interject myself into the performance, providing commentary and highlighting important aspects of the process.
Not only has this method served to shift momentum during the instruction session and engage students (both cast and audience), but it has also elicited insightful comments and questions from students about the peer-review process. My role is morphed from sage on the stage to participant in the learning process. My students’ role shifts from passive recipients to active participants.
The peer review play is a tool and technique any librarian can easily integrate into his or her instruction. The open peer review journals I have discovered are also open access. The time required to prepare to use this technique in class is minimal – the script is taken directly from the pre-publication documents themselves – but the benefit from shifting the roles of instructor and students is great.
David Patterson
College of Marin
Reference and Instructional Librarian
Becoming Researchers: Community College ESL Students, Information Literacy, and the Library
This qualitative case study explored the information literacy acquisition of 23 students enrolled in a learning community consisting of an advanced ESL writing class and a one unit class introducing students to research at a suburban community college library in California. Students encountered difficulties while finding, evaluating, and using information for their ESL assignments. These problems were substantial, but more noteworthy were the strategies that the students, their ESL instructor and their instructional librarian crafted in response. The learning community structure enabled a number of important strategies. Strategies by the instructors included integration of the two courses’ curricula; contextualized learning activities; cross-over teaching by the instructors; explicit instruction followed by guided workshop sessions. Some student strategies were persistence in asking questions, dictionary use, re-reading, and a resourceful disposition. Joint strategies included dialogue to clarify research strategies and to understand difficult text, student-crafted research techniques that were observed by instructors and shared with class; and an affirmation of the students’ emerging research practices. This study adds to our understanding of one particular area of academic discourse acquisition in a second language—how ESL students learn to interact with information in the context of community college. This study’s findings refute the idea that ESL students must wait to become researchers until their English is college-ready. ESL students in this study discovered new language forms, new texts, new ideas, and new research practices simultaneously, in large part because of the relationships that developed over time among the students, instructor and librarian.
Caitlin Plovnick
Sonoma State University
First-Year Instruction & Outreach Librarian
Carolyn Seaman
University of California, Irvine
Library Assistant, Education & Outreach
Exploring the Boundaries of Embedded Librarianship: Lessons Learned and Revisions Envisioned
The concept of an embedded librarian offers tantalizing possibilities to extend instruction beyond one-shot sessions and assist students and instructors at point of need. Online and hybrid classes have opened up new avenues for librarians to integrate their services into classes, free from the time and space constraints of a physical classroom session. This same freedom raises questions about how deeply to embed. What should we offer, where do we need to set limits, and how do we know if we’ve overstepped our bounds?
This poster will reflect on our experience embedding in lower-division composition classes at the University of California, Irvine. By taking advantage of a changing curriculum and new learning management system, we were able to greatly increase our involvement in these classes. However, this involvement did not demonstrably lead to enhanced use of library resources. We have since refined our approach to account for available time and projected needs, and have taken steps to improve our partnership with instructors so that we can continue our involvement to greater effect in future classes.
We will examine best practices for embedded librarians and share our own recommendations for improving and refining the experience.