2012 – Information Wants To Be Free

Self-efficacy in retention and how we can help build it

A little while back, I wrote a post about the role of narratives in our lives. The stories we tell about our lives that inform the way we see ourselves…

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The entrepreneurial library

Years ago, I visited the libraries at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. After lots of conversations, the one word that stuck with me was entrepreneurial. The library faculty there…

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Getting out of your own story

When I was a psychotherapist, I was drawn to narrative therapy and cognitive therapy in my own work with clients. Both support the idea that the way people view and…

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Living our values

I have wanted to write about so many things that have come across my desktop lately, but work and getting ready for a major trip to New Zealand with my…

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The devil you know in first-year instruction

It's pretty clear from the comments on my recent posts that many of us have a sense that the sort of information literacy instruction we're providing is not having the…

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Behavior vs. belief and changing culture

At LOEX of the West this summer (a fantastic conference, btw), Joan Kaplowitz did a session where she started by asking attendees what words they associate with assessment. I won't…

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Broad vs. deep in information literacy instruction

When I was at Norwich, my focus was often on increasing our instruction stats. My Director wanted to see us doing more instruction and being in at least two classes…

instruction librarianship

Setting priorities

In academic libraries, there are usually so many levels of priorities. There are the priorities of the university. There are the priorities of the library. Each unit probably has its…

instruction librarianship

No, we can’t do it all

So many of us struggle with determining priorities in teaching. Few of us have a workload that would allow us to do everything we would like to do. We hear…

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Up to my neck in… well, everything.

You know you're a real blogger when, no matter how absurdly busy the rest of your life is, the thing you can't do that you miss the most is blogging.…

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Classic Blunder #2 – Assuming resistance is a bad thing

I remember when I was in library school, a lot of people talked about librarians who were resistant to change and would try to derail your exciting and innovative projects.…

classic blunders instruction librarianship management

Classic blunder #1 – Let’s just try it and see what happens!

There are a lot of popular assumptions people make in this profession that lead us to make classic blunders. These can be assumptions about the change process, assumptions about our…