Poetry, Politics, and Research

Check out this great lesson plan on Allen Ginsberg: poetry & politics, sponsored by American Master’s (PBS). There’s a lot that could be tweaked in these lessons to combine library research, internet research/evaluation, technology skills, and critical thinking skills. In my Lib300 class, students are each assigned an American roots musician to research. [...]

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Just the Facts, Ma’am

I’ve been working on designing the “Dear Someone/Persuasive Letter” assignment to use this fall, and stumbled upon this great site from Annenberg called Fact Checked. There are a ton of great lesson plan ideas that incorporate information literacy skills.
Here’s what the site has to say about itself:
“Our aim is to help students learn to [...]

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Since I Laid My Burden Down

In collaboration with Jazz-rock Foundations professor, Chuck Mancuso, I have had success in using the Anthology of American Folk Music in my Lib100 class. While students were learning about the roots of rock and roll in MUS206, they were each assigned a musician (some students were assigned folklore related topics or a specific genre [...]

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Dear Someone,

My friend and colleague, Elizabeth Kelley, gave me the idea for this assignment (which she uses in her Foundations of Inquiry course). Students are assigned to write a “letter to the editor” on an issue of their choice (the “editor” can be any person they choose…the President, the Mayor, Danny Wegman, etc.) However, [...]

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Shattered Glass

I’m attaching the lesson plan and handouts for a lesson on plagiarism/ethics of information (adapted from Carol Anne Germaine.) The lesson uses the DVD “Shattered Glass”, which is about the reporter Stephen Glass, who was caught fabricating stories for The New Republic. It’s a great way to talk about the ethics of digital information [...]

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The Healthy Skeptic

One idea that I’ve been playing around with is using “The Healthy Skeptic: Cutting through the Hype about Your Health” by health journalist Robert J. Davis as the basis for an assignment on cynicism, skepticism, bias, and evaluation of resources. Davis does an incredible job of researching current health claims (dairy, green tea, supplements, diets). [...]

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Digital Rhetoric

Communication has changed. The world has gone digital and the access to information seems more important than whether it is authoritative or not. This of course depends on your meaning of authoritative.
As librarians is it our responsibility to explore new modes of teaching information literacy by looking at the way digital information communicates its message?
http://www.digitalrhetoric.org
It [...]

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Out of the Stacks

We could all use a little imagination in our Library Instruction sessions! What innovative activities have you successfully used in a 50 minute workshop class?  What has really worked for you while teaching full credit classes?  Please share your epiphanies with us by posting to our “Out of the Stacks” page. 

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