PREZI ALERT!

Craziest Library Instruction Module You've Ever Seen!

Maybe?

I have been on a serious blog hiatus due to instructing and movie creating for an Art100 course and the Cherry Hill project. I knew what I was in for with the Cherry Hill project, but I wanted to top the year before, and am pretty sure I did. The new "movie" is more than twice the length of the last, includes voices and great information, but is actually too big to post online. (Working on that.)

As for the learning modules for an online Art100 course, I got extremely ambitious when asked by a wonderful instructor if I could take the reigns on teaching and assessing the students for the first 4 weeks on the research process, finding resources, and plagiarism and citation. It was about 4 times the work that I thought it would be, but I am SO glad I did. I was very naive in thinking that I could just create and construct 1 or 2 interactive videos every week for a month. (Each accompanied with a short quiz.) Sometimes people are frustrated by naivete, I find that it commands innovation within myself. I'm not going to NOT do it, after all.

Hopefully this will be helpful to my fellow librarians that are trying to figure out how to ramp up their library instruction this fall. I try to accommodate different learners when I'm constructing these and attempt to keep things light while conveying the importance of each activity. The following is the first instruction module; an introduction to the research process. I did email and attain permission when I used outside video. The students completed an accompanying quiz for each of the modules. The initial feedback has been very positive, so I hope that you feel ever so slightly inspired. A couple of my lovely librarian colleagues have used it for professional development activities, and I only ask any other librarians for large sums of money. However, if you do not have large sums of money to give to random art librarians, I just ask that you give me a little credit.

If you're new or newISH to Prezi, please make sure that you watch the first video on how to use Prezi so you don't miss anything. It may take a moment to load once you press the play arrow, so give it a moment. If you want to watch it again, you may need to refresh the page. I hope you enjoy!

The Research Process on Prezi

Keeping the Angry Birds at Bay: The Art of Delicate Librarianship

Many people have their own opinion about the way governance should work in their country. Given the U.S.' current divided political climate it can be very difficult to find anyone that doesn't have strong opinions on either side. Librarians, of course, have their own opinions and ideas, as well. However, expressing them, on the job, is not always acceptable. Sure we get together and sign petitions and picket and email like angry birds when our budgets are threatened, and thereby our jobs. However, outside of budgetary concerns, we're really supposed to be kind of mum when interacting with our patrons on political issues. So, when an interesting political movement comes along, of which many people have questions and are looking for resources, we have to provide suitable information while trying to be, or at least appearing to be, neutral. No matter what side of the spectrum we lean, this can be a challenge. 

So this came up recently for a couple of us, and I love the result. We've started doing some really general resource guides, (I hate using the term LibGuide because only librarians know what that means and we're not making these things for each other -or at least we shouldn't be most of the time). As a sort of off-shoot of the marketing committee we've decided to try to post resource guides on our web page about newsworthy and/or hot button topics. Professors are often discussing these events in their classrooms and so providing a tool like this is a great marketing tool, as well as instructional and research tool.

Amanda Youngbar, my partner in crime on this endeavor, made a few suggestions and we both got really excited about creating one for the Occupy Wall Street movement. Seeing as how this group has stirred up a lot of debate we wanted to be fair to the group, those genuinely interested in understanding the movement, as well as those opposed. After looking at a number of guides already available, we also realized that with something like a "movement" there is an ebb and flow to the news information available. So we felt challenged to try to provide resources that continually aggregated information on OWS, as opposed to just a news article here and one from there, that would be outdated in a week. Unfortunately we were unable to pin-point a site from the opposition that continually aggregated news pieces, so the guide might seem a tad unbalanced. That said, we added a disclaimer at the top, introducing the guide and asking those that examine the links, to do so with a grain of salt.

And so blossomed our immediately popular Occupy Wall Street Resource Guide. I must admit, that this might be the first time I've been a part of putting a resource guide like this together, to which even I return repeatedly for the information. It was really nice to participate in something of a somewhat delicate nature that seemed to come out so well. The popularity of the guide soared from the moment we started publicizing it. I hope it continues to provide the information people are looking for on this topic and I think we provided a nice template for addressing hot button issues in the future. Cheers, Amanda!