I teach a one-credit information literacy course as part of my job. Many semesters, I’ve had mostly juniors and seniors, so I’ve adjusted my curriculum to be less about how to use our specific library and more about how to think about the information environment and how to change to be ready for whatever’s coming next.
However, this semester I have freshmen. On the first day I told them “here is the world of possibilities for what we can cover” and described all the content I’ve taught over the years, from basic information literacy skills to the big picture theories. Everyone wanted practical information.
So, I’ve rethought how I’m teaching this class. For the first half of the semester I’m doing structured classes focusing on specific skills. As I lead the class through lecture, discussion, and activities, I have them fill out a worksheet. At the end of class I collect the worksheets and use that for attendance and participation grades (and each sheet is worth points, too). So far, it’s working well. People are paying closer attention, and largely people aren’t distracting themselves with other websites during class. If you want to see what we’re up to, we have a blog.
Posting the worksheets to SlideShare changed the formatting a bit. In both cases it’s just front and back of one page, and when there are blank lines, the formatting got very confused… if you download the files, they should display correctly. Here are two sample worksheets:
As I make them I’ll post them to my SlideShare document space, in case you’d like to modify or use them, too.
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Comments 2
I really like these, I think I can find a use for something similar in my ENG courses when we get to discussing research.
Posted 09 Sep 2009 at 9:17 pm ¶These are fantastic, and so are all the assignments on the blog. You are an inspiration!
Posted 23 Sep 2009 at 5:57 pm ¶Post a Comment