Tag Archives: Library instruction

Teaching Critical Reading

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LIB 1015–the really really bad source.docx
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In my LIB 1015 class today, I had a good experience with a new in-class activity I designed that aimed to teach students how to read critically. Over the weekend, the students were to have read a chapter from The Little, Brown Handbook titled “Reading Arguments Critically.” When they got to class, I did a quick lecture to spotlight the key parts of that chapter. After my overview, I handed out an essay that I told them was my own creation. My aim, I explained, was write a really bad essay that they would illustrate what kind of bad writing to look out for as detailed in the chapter they had read.

For the activity, they broke out into groups, read the article, and then identified the passages that raised red flags. After fifteen minutes, I asked them to report back to me on what principles outlined in the book chapter had been violated and where those violations were to be found in my essay. The students really responded well to the activity and found most of the weak spots. We got a lot of good conversations going, too, that dug deeper into the ideas in the book chapter than if I had merely asked them to discuss the chapter on its own. Another way that I could do this assignment would be to require them to each write a really bad essay and identify the offending passages and what rule or principle was not followed.

The inspiration for this assignment came somewhat from Steve Lawson’s post last week, “Bizarro Bibliographic Instruction,” which I highly recommend.

Class Participation and Course Blogs

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This fall marks the second time that I’ve taught my library’s three-credit course, LIB 1015: Information Research in the Social Sciences and Humanities (my course website). I’ve been struggling this semester with how to draw out the students who never raise their hands in class to participate in any class discussions or to ask a question. Classroom participation is a big part of each student’s grade (25 percent), as my class has daily hands-on activities that are intended to create discussion as well as practice in key abilities and strategies connected to ACRL’s information literacy standards and to the overall learning goals for the class.

I’ve had a course blog for the first time this semester and haven’t been quite sure how I want to use it. Now I’m beginning to think that maybe I can offer my students a blogging option for participation. I might tell them that if they are not ready to speak up in class, they can still get credit for participation by posting to the blog or commenting on someone else’s post. I suspect that some people who might have really great things to ask about or comment on in class might be shy; offering them an option to contribute on the blog might give them a space where they feel more comfortable expressing themselves. I should note that I was inspired to think of my course blog this way after reading Erica Kaufman’s post, “The Anxiety of Print This Out” on the cac.aphony blog which talks about times when student writing on blog posts is better than the papers that they turn in.

Remix Culture and Lawrence Lessig

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I’m finally getting around to reading something longer than an article or blog post by Lawrence Lessig. In preparation for my fall course I’ll be teaching here at Baruch College, “Information Research in the Social Sciences and Humanities,” (the course site from spring 2010 is still up), I’m trying to find more material that will make remix culture a theme for the course. This three-credit course has essentially the same learning goals you might create for a one-shot course for a first-year composition class; the real difference is that we get to take a deep dive into topics that we would only just skim in the one-shot.

This fall, my class will be part of the learning communities program here at Baruch, which means the twenty-two first-year students in my class will also be block scheduled so they are in other classes together. As part of this program, I am teamed up with another professor teaching one of the classes the students are taking, an introduction to ethics class in the philosophy department. The point of contact between our two classes will be issues of ethics; while the philosophy class is distinctly aimed at approaching ethics at the theoretical level, my class will delve into applied ethics. Specifically, I want my students to delve into the ethics of information use and reuse by having them try to delineate the boundaries between sharing, remix, reuse, homage, collage, plagiarism, originality, etc.

The music of Greg Gillis, better known as Girl Talk, will be the springboard for some of the discussions I hope to have. Gillis is known for building songs out of hundreds of samples of other songs. Last spring, my class talked about this for one highly productive day following our viewing of a documentary that features his work (RIP: A Remix Manifesto). I’m now reading Lawrence Lessig’s 2008 book, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, to see if there is a chapter we might read in class. When I am done with that book this week, I hope to dive into Henry Jenkins 2006 book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, for more ideas.