Thank you to our poster session presenters! Click on titles to view the presentations.
Misinformation Literacy: STEMming the Tide of Popular Misunderstandings
Caitlin Plovnick, First-Year Instruction & Outreach Librarian, Sonoma State University
Scientific communication is an area where information literacy instruction shows tremendous value and relevance to both scholarship and daily life. The spread of science misinformation, whether by faulty reporting, pseudoscientific claims, or simple misunderstanding of original research, has serious consequences. Addressing this requires creative dexterity and a willingness to engage with a rapidly changing information landscape. This poster recommends a series of assignments that librarians can develop with STEM faculty to draw connections between the scientific method and information literacy in order to investigate common scientific misconceptions, develop and practice asking informed questions, and foster communication between scholarly and general audiences through different types of presentations and media. These assignments, designed to explore different venues for scientific communication, are well suited to adaptation as new modes of communication emerge. They encourage communication and presentation skills that are beneficial to both scholarship and any professional workplace, and can also be used to encourage increased engagement with STEM topics.
Something for Everyone: Understanding and Applying Accessible E-Learning Strategies
Laura Francabandera, Senior Instructional Technology Specialist, Credo Reference
Amid the current environment of rapid change in education and technology, institutions and libraries often encourage e-learning to leverage its high impact and relatively low cost. The rush to implement e-learning objects, however, frequently excludes many students with disabilities who are unable to engage with technology in the same manner as the majority. While this truth may be easier to accommodate in an in-person setting, virtual learning environments pose much more of a challenge for students with disabilities. In the online environment, the instructor must design each lesson to be accessible to every student without the benefit of face-to-face interaction. By utilizing emerging technologies (both proprietary and open source) instructors are able to create online learning objects that are equally accessible to all students. This poster will impart a brief overview of the importance of providing accessible e-learning. It will identify different types of disabilities and the challenges affected individuals face when they engage with technology, including any particular assistive technology. Finally, it will offer a collection of tips and techniques for creating accessible e-learning objects, as well as a basic accessibility checklist.
Whirling and Twirling: Spiraling Information Literacy Throughout the Core Curriculum (+ Information Literacy Assessment Rubric)
Shawna Smith, Assistant Director for User Services, Rivier University
This poster presents the ways in which Rivier University includes and assesses information literacy throughout its interdisciplinary core curriculum. Rivier revised its undergraduate core curriculum in 2012, adopting “Journeys of Transformation.” The library staff worked in collaboration with faculty to embed information literacy throughout the core. The Core has many distinctive features, including the ways in which the curriculum–both skills and content– will spiral through subsequent years. This enables us to introduce, reinforce and then have students master information literacy skills over four years. The poster also presents analysis of assessment results from three tools. 1) An information literacy skills quiz completed by all full-time, first-time students as part of their orientation to Rivier University, this provides a baseline assessment of students’ information literacy. 2) Course-embedded information literacy skills assignments throughout all four years. 3) Results from the evaluation of presentations at academic symposiums with a library created rubric.
John Watts, Assistant Professor, Undergraduate Learning Librarian, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and Susie Skarl, Associate Professor, Urban Affairs Librarian, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
With the recent focus in higher education on high impact classes, such as the first-year experience (FYE), librarians find themselves concentrating their efforts on first-year students over upperclassmen. This poster will illustrate how librarians worked to integrate themselves into the College of Urban Affairs’ Second Year Seminar (SYS), a 300-level, research-intensive required course focusing on civic engagement and urban social issues. During a 2014 library retreat, all instruction librarians created a curriculum map of key learning outcomes that build upon one another across the General Education Curriculum for their respective liaison areas. The team of librarians working on the Urban Affairs SYS plan decided to build on FYE skills by introducing students to the Bizup’s BEAM method, a process for categorizing information in terms of how writers use them in their texts. Librarians and teaching faculty then collaborated to teach students the BEAM method in a library instruction workshop. To assess their comprehension, the librarians asked students to choose an article they found during the workshop and apply the BEAM method to the article.
Training for the future, training for now: Student Assistants at the Sonoma State University Library
Nicole Lawson, Public Services Librarian, Sonoma State University Library
The Sonoma State University Library strives to perpetually reimagine public services spaces and staffing to create a more flexible, responsive, and dynamic model to meet the needs of the university community. As a part of this process we have radically changed our student assistant hiring and training program over the past two years. In Fall 2013 we began hiring all students under one general job description and expecting them to gain the skills and knowledge to work in any of five different public services roles throughout a given week. A major part of this new program was a new hybrid training program which incorporated in-person and online components. In Fall 2014 focus groups and a survey were conducted to gather feedback on how students prefer to learn and what skills they think are most important to their jobs in the library and in their future employment. Moving away from the traditional student assistant model has been a challenge, but each iteration is an opportunity to lead the public services team to be more comfortable with the new model.