This year, I spent another afternoon with the MacShads (Shad Valley students @ McMaster) along with my co-facilitator, Susan.  We wanted to take an opportunity to do some non-library, non-information literacy instruction, free from all fetters of normal expectations. So, what we came up with was to riff off of the MacShad’s overall theme project topic: Canada’s aging population.

To this end, we looked for interesting multimedia that dealt with the topic, and built part of the session around that. The videos we sourced were about depopulation, filial  piety, ageism and ‘curing’ aging. These topics were all very good for sparking interesting lines of questioning and follow-up discussion. Part two of the three-hour session was originally to be a design exercise in creating an ‘age-friendly city’. This was scrapped, because it tread too close to the design challenge the students were working on. Instead, we tried our hand at leading a debate. There were two topics (and four teams, one for each side of each topic). We made clear rules and guidelines for the debate, which propelled it along nicely. Also, I was happy to get a chance to use the Thode Library ThInK Space as it was designed for, as an active learning classroom.

I think that the workshop was fairly successful. The Shads always impress with their knuckle-down work ethic, and there was some good laughs, too.

[Small update: The report that the Shad co-director got from the student leaders was that the students were sleepy during the videos, but better during the discussion. Not exactly the glowing praise we were going for!]

Workshop Slides

Debate Rules

Multimedia Used

White Coat/Black Art podcast – Ageing, Ageism and the Silver Tsunami

A presentation I made for a quick and dirty introduction to what impact factor is, how it is calculated, where to find it, and some discussion of its problems. The class might have had 10 students in it (max), but it was very difficult to engage them in a discussion about what kinds of flaws the measure might have, or how else you might measure it. I went into the audience and sat next to the students until they started participating! Might as well make them feel awkward, too.

Technically, my first information literacy class. The first hour and a bit was taken up with this ‘lecture’, which included some opportunity to discuss evaluation criteria for websites, and a source jeopardy game.

Part II, the second hour and a half, required the students to find, collect, checkout, photocopy, print, and cite. They did this as a group, and some had to leave our location to visit another library. In effect, this was an opportunity to ‘troubleshoot’ common problems with me in the room.

Library 101 for iSci 2009

Information Sources Location Activity.