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Against Simplicity

Earlier this semester I was in an assessment meeting with a bunch of people from my department, going through student work samples and evaluating them with a rubric. The specific assignment had involved students comparing two articles–one from The Atlantic and another from a scholarly journal–and asked them to compare things like style of writing, …

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Is Information Enough?

Tomorrow I’m flying to Orlando to attend ALA Annual. I’m participating on a panel with some brilliant people, and I’m really excited to see some old friends, but I’m also having a hard time reconciling how I feel about the whole endeavor. I know that several of my colleagues requested this conference be relocated in …

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Locations and Residents

I wrote this entry as part of the December 15, 2015 CritLib chat about #feelings. The first time I ever used the #critlib hashtag, I was sitting on a bench in the Park Blocks at Portland State University. It was the second day of Library Instruction West, and I was getting ready to give a …

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M’aidez

The last six weeks have been a bit of a blur. Between ACRL, LOEX, and wrapping up the semester, I’ve mostly been focused on what was immediately in front of me, and haven’t had a chance to slow down and look around. Now that the academic year and my two big presentations are behind me, …

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Back West

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 …

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On and Off

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 …

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