Tuesday 26 February 2008

How to teach stuff

It's not particularly Web 2.0 but it made me laugh and there's lot of good advice : it's a little document by John Baez which a friend of mine passed on to me. I hope I haven't got like the last point - yet.

Monday 25 February 2008

Wikipedia and how to use it in IL

Michael Lorenzen in his Information Literacy Land of Confusion blog has made an excellent and thoughtful post on the situation with Wikipedia. Students will use it, should be told about it, and instructors can use it as a tool for critical thinking and evaluation.

Wednesday 13 February 2008

Handbook for Information Literacy Teaching (HILT)

I know this is not Web 2.0! But we owe the HILT Group of Cardiff University a big vote of thanks for making their excellent handbook available free on the web, under Creative Commons. We don't need to keep on re-inventing the wheel (how often have we heard that!) yet too often we don't take advantage of other's experiences. This is NOT intended for anyone to read from cover to cover, but to refer to and get ideas.
Promoting to schools and students
Library orientation
Lesson planning
Lesson formats
Teaching aids (like their IL resource bank or Intute) Nints on Powerpoint, handouts
Lesson delivery
Evaluating your teaching
Assessment
A whole host of supporting documents, lesson plans, feedback forms, marking schemes etc.

Really useful. Thank you again!

Tuesday 5 February 2008

Information Literacy : not for wimps, or how to untangle spaghetti

This very interesting post from Lis Parcell, tells about the course Information Literacy : Strategies for Success, led by Sharon Markless, held in Late January in Wales. She mentions the 30-40-30 rule: for any new initiative : if you are lucky 30 per cent of people will accept the change, 40 can be won over under the right conditions, and 30 will resist whatever you do. So that's what we can expect with acceptance of Web 2.0 by librarians??Interesting.

Information Literacy through fantasy football

This is a new approach : Librarians' sport of choice: Teaching information literacy through fantasy football C&RL News, January 2008Vol. 69, No. 1 by Paul Waelchli. Could be fun...

Shelving Books

At first sight this might not seem to have much to do with Web 2.0! Came across Carnegie Mellon University Library's game arcade the other day and it has a game on it which is very dear to my heart. It's called Within Range. They have to pick a pile of books off a trolley and shelve in the correct LC order. What a pity its not Dewey! Come on someone : do a Dewey version.
In fact, years ago, while I was at London South Bank we did do one : in our Information Quest tutorial and it worked rather well. It's still there. I always wanted students to be able to put a book in the correct place. Never easy when the Dewey numbers got really long...Those Dewey editors who thought up those long numbers should have been made to do a bit of shelving....