It’s been eight months since I was in Portland for Library Instruction West. As I wrote last summer, LIW was the best conference I’d ever attended, in that everyone with whom I spoke was engaging and engaged. It was a bunch of instruction librarians set to the “on” position, and the ideas that were sparked […]
Earlier this week, the ACRL Board voted to file the Framework for Information Literacy (PDF), which means, amongst other things, we can finally stop calling it the “Draft Framework” (thank goodness). I’ve been following this process pretty closely for the last year and a half, and have written about it, presented about it, talked with
We Made It. Let’s Keep Going. Read More »
I am a librarian who teaches. I love what I do for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is I spend my days watching people empower themselves with information. I get to be there when learners discover something new and incorporate it into their worldview. I sometimes forget how much fun, and
Affect, Evidence, and Oppression Read More »
A couple of weeks ago I was signed up to visit an English Composition class to talk about peer review. The instructor is a good friend of mine, and I’ve been developing this lesson for the last few years, so I was feeling pretty good about things. Then, the morning of the class, I learned
Last week, Inside Higher Ed posted a very short article about Purdue University, which investigated the relationship between use of the campus gym and student GPA. The study found that students who visited the gym roughly once a week throughout the semester had higher GPAs, and the gym is now seeking to prove “whether there
Correlation, Causation, and Confounds Read More »
First, if you haven’t already read Nicholas Schiller’s excellent post on assessment, go do that. I can wait. Done? Great. Let me just say how well he articulated how “assessment” can be a loaded term, and how our profession needs to be mindful of how we approach it. Nick paraphrased another colleague, who had said
Assessing without Standards Read More »
One time I heard an anecdote, likely apocryphal, about a meeting of allied leaders during World War 2. Roosevelt was having everyone drink martinis, which spurred a discussion about the appropriate proportion of gin to vermouth. Churchill poured himself a measure of gin, then, while looking at the French delegation, waved the bottle of vermouth
Waving the Framework Read More »
I’ve been working on a research project for the last six months with a few colleagues on my campus. Although the paper is nominally about graduate students in a Teacher Education program, a lot of my thinking has gravitated toward the notion of “lifelong learning.” There are lots of definitions and concepts associated with that
What is Lifelong Information Literacy? Read More »
Finally back at work after a week away, trying to decipher 15 or so pages of notes from Library Instruction West. There are so many new things I heard and learned, and I’m sure I’ll come back to other specifics later, but here are some of main themes I observed in the sessions I attended
LIW 2014 Reflection Read More »
I grew up in Florida, where one old adage was that “the south is a place, the north is just a direction.” I guess the idea was that while there are regional identities, they’re much more centered on specific cities and states, and that the south, uniquely, has a wide-reaching character. And I mostly subscribed