Dana, I think you’re right… the semester long course makes it much easier to approach some of these topics. With a one-shot library instruction session, you have to make the faculty member happy with what you’re teaching, and they might have different ideas about the research skills they want their students to have. For what it’s worth, I often work in things like RSS by comparing them to the Facebook news feed or talk about alerts using google news alerts for personal names to make journal/database alerts more interesting. The trick (for me) is finding out what’s interesting enough to the students to provide a hook for the research skills and theories.

This is exactly the conversation we’ve been having at my university regarding our semester-long class. The problem I’m having is that we have a unified curriculum, and while my inclinations are more towards your thinking, that is not necessarily the same for my colleagues. This semester we had students submit written assignments via individual blogs through WordPress. There was a bit of a learning curve early in the semester, but by the end of the semester, it seems they enjoyed it. But my colleagues want to do away with it the blog and have students submit assignments via Blackboard. Our class isn’t about blogging, but I feel they learn so much by having to do their homework via blogs.

I did have some success with this during our session on news sources. We talked about Google News, Lexis Nexis, and Library Press Display. They got the concept that they can use Google News most of the time (and it’s better than a regular Google search), but that Lexis Nexis is where they should go for comprehensive searches or when they aren’t allowed to use the internet for an assignment. Framing it in those terms seemed to help them get it.

A like-minded colleague and I are both teaching a winter session version of our class, one hour a day for about three weeks. It’s a time for us to experiment more with this newer approach. At the end of this semester, I was disappointed to realize our students still couldn’t differentiate between a website, a PDF, and a journal collection online. I like the idea of teaching life-long skills, even at the expense of library resources.

Great post. I’m way behind in my blog reading so missed the survey. But I would say it sounds like you’re on the right track. While we do have a duty to help students in the here and now to be able to use our resources and succeed in their academic career, the simple fact is that without a solid base of theoretical skills like critical evaluation, knowing the practical stuff like the where and how of searching library resources can be rendered useless.

The real challenge as I see it is making the theoretical stuff interesting and relevant, and making sure students have the chance to put those theories to practical use so they can see the real-life value of learning them. This is very hard when not given the benefit of a semester-long course (which I don’t have). As you point out – the time issue is always the one that forces us to sacrifice a lot of theoretical stuff…

Peace,
Dana