I had a brief, but enjoyable, visit to the Western Conference on Science Education at UWO (July 6-8, 2011). I attended on the Thursday to share with educators in attendance some of the things we’re experimenting with in the Science Literacy component of iSci. The format was interesting – speakers were paired up by topic similarity, and after those there was a discussion period lasting about a half hour. I was paired up with Francis Jones out of UBC, who was doing some very cool things in a second-year Earth and Ocean Science course to develop ‘scientific skills’. Some of the things that Francis and we are trying overlap, and some diverge, but that’s where great idea sharing can happen. I’ll be getting in touch with Francis to get more detail on a few areas, particularly his approach to students developing a good scientific question.

My presentation is below. I was particularly chuffed when one of the attendees told me that I had the best designed slides at the conference.

Explaining Science: Embedding Science Literacy into a Research-Based Undergraduate Program

An advanced search strategies presentation for iSci. Including boolean!

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.