Ask the Masses: Guide on the Side

Becky asks:

Does anyone have any experience using Guide on the Side? http://code.library.arizona.edu/

I am new to the world of online/interactive tutorials. I have been looking at Articulate Storyline, and while I think this product is helpful for some topics, I like the idea of a "live" experience with a database if I am creating tutorials.

Any other ideas, suggestions? What software do you use and why?

Share your answers/observations/experiences in the comments section below!

Ask the Masses: Screencasts and Online Instruction

We've had a couple of submissions for Ask the Masses, and we'll be rolling those out over the next several weeks, in addition to our wonderful guest posts.

Katelyn asks:

What software do you use to do screencasts of instruction?  How much instruction do you put online?

Share your answers/observations/experiences in the comments section below!

Ask the Masses: Analyzing and Understanding Scholarly Journal Articles

We are posting a few of the questions from the Solution or Sympathy portion of the IL Interest Group session held during the spring 2015 IPAL Conference. There were several wonderful questions that were submitted but, unfortunately, we ran out of time to discuss them all. Leave your solution or sympathy response in the comments and help keep the great sharing going!

Helping students to analyze scholarly journal articles. What to focus on? How to assess their abilities in reading and evaluating them?

Share your ideas in the comments!

Ask the Masses: Laptops and Student Distraction

We are posting a few of the questions from the Solution or Sympathy portion of the IL Interest Group session held during the spring 2015 IPAL Conference. There were several wonderful questions that were submitted but, unfortunately, we ran out of time to discuss them all. Leave your solution or sympathy response in the comments and help keep the great sharing going!

Students glued to laptops. Current response: Have them turn it off or sit in front row. Note: since I prefer to take notes on a computer, I do not deny students this opportunity. It is the students who are obviously “gone” that I address.  Which other approaches are there?

Share your ideas in the comments!

Ask the Masses: Students not "Getting" IL

We are posting a few of the questions from the Solution or Sympathy portion of the IL Interest Group session held during the spring 2015 IPAL Conference. There were several wonderful questions that were submitted but, unfortunately, we ran out of time to discuss them all. Leave your solution or sympathy response in the comments and help keep the great sharing going!

Course-based: what if you get halfway through the course and find out they aren’t “getting” info. lit?

Share your ideas in the comments!

Ask the Masses: Narrowing Topics

We are posting a few of the questions from the Solution or Sympathy portion of the IL Interest Group session held during the spring 2015 IPAL Conference. There were several wonderful questions that were submitted but, unfortunately, we ran out of time to discuss them all. Leave your solution or sympathy response in the comments and help keep the great sharing going!

Students who have trouble narrowing down topic for research project -- when running a broad search and browsing through results or subject headings doesn’t help.

Share your ideas in the comments!

Ask the Masses: Active Learning in an Inflexible Space

We are posting a few of the questions from the Solution or Sympathy portion of the IL Interest Group session held during the spring 2015 IPAL Conference. There were several wonderful questions that were submitted but, unfortunately, we ran out of time to discuss them all. Leave your solution or sympathy response in the comments and help keep the great sharing going!

We have traditional long tables with computers in our IL classroom. How can we better facilitate active learning in an inflexible space? (Aside from stealing Drake’s chairs) :o)

Share your ideas in the comments!

Ask the Masses: Fixing the Librarian as Babysitter Problem

We are posting a few of the questions from the Solution or Sympathy portion of the IL Interest Group session held during the spring 2015 IPAL Conference. There were several wonderful questions that were submitted but, unfortunately, we ran out of time to discuss them all. Leave your solution or sympathy response in the comments and help keep the great sharing going!

Professor uses you as a “babysitter” and does not have an assignment. Is there a go-to assignment when the professor has no plans?

Share your ideas in the comments!

Ask the Masses: Professor Says Students Need It but Won't Use It Later

We are posting a few of the questions from the Solution or Sympathy portion of the IL Interest Group session held during the spring 2015 IPAL Conference. There were several wonderful questions that were submitted but, unfortunately, we ran out of time to discuss them all. Leave your solution or sympathy response in the comments and help keep the great sharing going!

Criminal justice professor asking for a “primary/secondary” sources lesson when he’s not sure why. Just that they “must” know it without the department ever using those terms. (Language/vocabulary prof. is using not matching what they’ll need in the future.)

Share your ideas in the comments!

Ask the Masses: Grading for Embedded Classes and One-Shots

This week's AtM question relates to something I've been spending a lot of time doing lately: grading/assessment.

My question is:

At what level are you involved with grading and formally assessing student assignments/projects in the classes you work with? Do you provide feedback, but leave grading up to the course instructor? Do you grade library assignments? Do the course instructors count library assignments or activities for course credit? Let's have a conversation about assessment and grading!

Ask the Masses: No student left behind

Time for another Ask the Masses question. Looking back at some of the responses for my teaching evals last week, one comment in particular stood out.

A faculty member said that sometimes my instruction tends to "favor the folk who pick up on things quickly," but that I'm sure to try and not move on until everyone has caught up.

The comment has gotten me thinking. How do you go about doing IL instruction, which tends to be hands-on, with a group of users that has skill levels across the board? I realize I try to teach closer to middle and get students going on the project and try and pick up the stragglers one-on-one, but that doesn't always feel like the best way to go about it.

So I turn to the rest of you, ideas??

Ask the Masses: Evaluation Classes

For this week's Ask the Masses, I want to ask you about your favorite lesson.

What is that one information literacy session that you just can't wait to deliver? Why is it your favorite? Do you get to teach it often?

I really look forward to reading some of these answers.

Ask the Masses: Teaching Energy

We've all been in this situation, no matter how committed to or excited you are about your job. How do you recoop spent energy after a particularly draining instruction session? There are some classes that are exhausting but energizing at the same time. The students' energy and your energy are combining to help them learn and you see those light bulb moments happening. Sometimes there are classes that simply exhaust you. How do you recover so you have the energy you need to be successful in your next session (whether it's immediately after a particularly draining session, or a little later in the day)?

Ask the Masses: Encouraging reading and it's domino effect

This week I'm asking my own question!

Our campus is encouraging and promoting a "culture of reading" this year. Some of the faculty have jumped on the reading train and are assigning particular books for class. Others have allowed their students to pick a title themselves (relevant to their course) and read and write about it. Even the traditionally non-reading courses have gotten in on the act: computer graphics students are illustrating short stories they're reading.

I'm really excited about people jumping in to this. My question is what other ways can we encourage professors to add reading elements to assignments? And how do we do so without simply turning our information literacy sessions into "how to find a book on the shelf" ones?

Ask the Masses: Call for Questions

Greetings iLOVE readers! 

It is that time of year again: the start of the academic year! That means campuses are bustling, computers are humming, keyboards are clicking, and instruction planning and delivery is happening! 

We'd love to help out by offering up our ideas and posting your IL questions to the rest of the iLOVE readership so they can share their ideas, suggestions, tried-and-true activities, and so much more with the community, but in order to do that we need your questions. All are welcomed to submit their questions and observations using the link below. (You know the ones... The "Has anyone else run into this?" types of scenarios, or the "How and the heck am I going to do this?" questions, or the "I have something that works, but am looking to mix things up or do it better" situations.)

http://ilove-instruction.blogspot.com/p/ask-masses.html

We're looking forward to hearing from you! 

Ask the Masses: Integrating Services within the Library

Jenny asks:

Our library has an opportunity to participate in a new faculty orientation next month. We will share a day (10 a.m.-3 p.m. including lunch) with the writing center and academic technology (also housed in the library). Our Director of Academic Technology recently attended a conference where integrated technology, library, teaching and learning centers were the norm (here is a related article if you are interested). We would like to collaborate more with the academic support services housed in the library to come across as a unified whole to support teaching and learning.

In what creative ways has your library collaborated with instructional technology, the writing center, and other academic support services? How have you conducted new faculty orientation to the library, and what worked/didn't work? Thanks so much for your input!

Ask the Masses: What journals do you read?

This week's post was about Google Reader and its untimely retirement.  In the post, I spoke about having the opportunity to weed my RSS feeds. This got me thinking. Are there any open access library journals I am missing? What do other Iowa librarians reader in the way of scholarly journals?

For the sake of discussion, this is what I subscribe to:

• Library Technology Reports may not be open access, but it's available in Academic Search Elite which the state provides access.
• Communications in Information Literacy (Open Access)
• Evidence Based Library and Information Practice (Open Access)
• Library Leadership & Management (Open Access)
• Library Hi Tech (Academic Search Elite)

I know there must be more out there worth reading.

Ask the Masses: Instruction Evaluation Tools

Anne Marie asks:

I am looking for examples of 2 evaluation tools (hopefully online & short):

1) students evaluate librarians' teaching (was the session effective in helping you with the project, how comfortable did you feel with the librarian, etc.)

2) teaching faculty evaluate librarians' teaching (did the session meet your needs, did the students' projects improve, etc.)

I'm happy to look at those from other institutions you may know of. Thanks!

Share your answers/observations/experiences in the comments section below!

Ask The Masses: Credit Instruction

Julius Asks:

Does anyone else have a credit library course? I'm very interested in learning how many of these courses each librarian is able to teach. We've been discussing how many credit courses are too many for a librarian. I have dreams of growing my program to have several 8-week, 1-credit courses each term. The terms are 16 weeks, so I should be able to squeeze them into the schedule.

Alternatively, how many one-shots does each librarian teach at your school?

Ask the Masses: Reference Statistics

Dan C. and I were talking today about our current reference stats form (we use Google Forms here at Grand View), and he had a great question about what others were doing and how they're using that information.

Dan asks:

At what level do you keep track of reference/interaction statistics? We keep track of it by medium (how the questions were received: phone, Blackboard, etc.), day/time of day, type of question, course number (if known), but do others keep track of things in more detail? We agree that collecting too much data can be overwhelming, but having some extra data can help shed light on different areas not previously considered. How precise are your fields of entry and what data do you collect? Are there things specific to instruction that you collect? And has this more precise data proven to be more beneficial to you as you examine and plan your instruction (and how so)?

Share your answers/observations/experiences in the comments section below!