instruction

Loex 2008 goes online!

Monday, April 28th, 2008

I got this email about LOEX 2008 Encore from Catherine Pellegrino at Saint Mary’s College and wanted to spread the word:
The annual LOEX conference is trying something new as an experiment this year: three of their breakout sessions will be presented as live, interactive webcasts a few weeks after the conference: http://www.loexconference.org/2008/virtualsessions.htm
I think this is […]

Chutes and ladders

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

In spite of the fact that I’ve had one of those all-day sinus headaches, I’m walking on a cloud. Starting April 1, I’m going to be the Head of Instructional Initiatives here at Norwich, which means that I will lead and coordinate all instruction (and most assessment) work at the library. I’m also going to […]

Building 21st century librarians AND libraries

Sunday, March 9th, 2008

There were three recent posts that got me thinking a lot about the growing necessity to have tech-savvy people in public services positions. The first was Dorothea Salo’s post about how many librarians outside of Systems see learning about (or doing anything with) technology as being something outside of their sphere of responsibility. The second […]

Getting out of a rut

Sunday, February 17th, 2008

Since our Coordinator of Public Services left, I’ve been the liaison to the social sciences along with being the liaison to the School of Graduate Studies (whose programs are all online). That means that I’m basically the liaison to over 2/3 of the Norwich population, but it made good sense because of my strong background […]

We have wiki!

Wednesday, January 9th, 2008

Library Research Guides wiki

Originally uploaded by librarianmer

A while back, I wrote about the challenges I had in finding the right platform for our subject guides. Well, I’m pleased to say that I just linked to our subject guides from the front page of the library […]

At the top of my must-read list

Wednesday, January 9th, 2008

I can’t wait to get my hands on this!
Information Literacy Programs in the Digital Age: Educating College and University Students Online
Edited by Alice Daugherty and Michael F. Russo, ACRL
Information Literacy Programs in the Digital Age: Educating College and University Students Online describes significant and innovative online instruction programs in a straightforward, narrative way, focusing […]

When are we doing enough?

Saturday, December 1st, 2007

Since I got to Norwich, my main priority has been to ensure that the distance learners have access to all the information they need to do research through the library. I have information all over the place about our resources and services. I’ve created screencast tutorials, HTML tutorials and FAQs. Some of the tutorials are […]

Online learning and its impact on public libraries

Wednesday, October 17th, 2007

I’ve been wanting to comment on this thought-provoking post by Carleen at Woodsy + Wired (a pretty new blog) for a few weeks now and just haven’t had the time. But almost every day, her post has been on my mind.
In Effects of distance learning on public libraries, Carleen writes about her library’s struggles […]

Should we take off those training-wheels?

Sunday, October 7th, 2007

no more training wheels

Originally uploaded by shadycat

I’ve been reading a number of interesting posts on the “training-wheels culture” from Dorothea Salo, Nicole Engard, and Emily Clasper. As I’ve been doing a lot of teaching — both online and in-person workshops — it’s an issue I’ve […]

Respect my Authority

Tuesday, June 12th, 2007

When I read Michael Gorman’s two-part blog post (yes, I said blog post; if that isn’t the height of irony…) to respect the wisdom of the expert over the wisdom of the crowd, I thought of two people: Ayn Rand and Eric Cartman. The piece had all of Ayn Rand’s black-and-white, either-or thinking as well […]

Do they care what they’re looking at?

Sunday, November 5th, 2006

About a week before I left for my vacation, Paul Pival, Ken Varnum and David Rothman had an interesting distributed discussion about how students are perceiving the research literature and are evaluating the quality of documents given that, online, everything looks virtually the same (and even more so when you’re looking at an RSS […]

Zotero - is this what we’ve been waiting for?

Saturday, September 23rd, 2006

I got my library a trial of RefWorks this summer (with the way our distance learners do school work — often at home and work — it makes much more sense for us to make a Web-based citation manager available to them), but it didn’t really meet with an enthusiastic response by the students and […]

Selling information literacy — reflections after one year

Saturday, July 29th, 2006

The other day, I got an e-mail from a reader of my blog: “You mentioned in one of your more recent posts that you’ve learned what works and what doesn’t in “selling” information literacy to faculty. Could you elaborate? I suspect that I will have to be doing a lot of that in the near […]