Wed 31 Aug 2011, 11:10 pm
A philosophy of librarianship? Here are some up-past-my-bedtime thoughts. It’s hard to beat Ranganathan’s Five Laws. They are surprisingly durable and flexible. A librarians’ goal when working with people isn’t to create little librarians, just as a doctor shouldn’t expect patients to become little doctors. The goal is to help people be more mindful, more [...]
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Tue 30 Aug 2011, 11:14 pm
Last month, Jason Griffey wrote Writing, ownership, and blogging. Last week Meredith Farkas wrote The changing professional conversation. Last Friday, Roy Tennant pointed and nodded at Meredith’s post when he wrote Farkas on the Changing Professional Conversation. The upshot of all three posts is that the authors feel pulled in many different directions by all the [...]
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Tue 30 Aug 2011, 8:49 am
I always enjoy listening to faculty talk about student writing. Often I hear professors say they are disappointed that even some of the good student writing they get doesn’t exhibit more critical thinking. Instead of papers with a clear thesis and argument and evidence, they see a lot of papers that were what one of [...]
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Thu 25 Aug 2011, 2:27 pm
This week, I have seen a lot of discussion around two measures of information literacy. The first is the ERIAL report that studied Illinois college students and their information-seeking behavior, while the second is Alexis Madrigal’s post at The Atlantic, Why Using Control+F May Be the Most Important Computing Skill. I have a few thoughts rattling [...]
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Tue 23 Aug 2011, 2:15 pm
It happens every summer. I spend a few months feeling a bit adrift, spending too much time alone in my office, working half-heartedly at a few projects. I start to feel like a bad librarian, a bad employee, a bad person. Then late August hits. And there’s always a day – this year it came [...]
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Mon 22 Aug 2011, 4:20 pm
When teaching college students, most professors want to put the emphasis on concepts and critical thinking rather than skills and facts. The conceptual is the “higher-order” thinking, making the skills of reading and writing and researching seem a bit beneath consideration. I know that I, too, would rather talk to students about how to think [...]
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Thu 18 Aug 2011, 8:42 am
Thanks, John Dupuis, for re-tweeting Bonnie Swoger’s link to this guest post on The Thesis Whisperer on Researching then and now. Texts cry out to be read as you meander past them on library shelves. Amazon’s claim that others who bought a particular book also bought the following operates similarly. Serendipity and inefficiency are powerful tools. [...]
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Wed 17 Aug 2011, 10:25 am
Note: Today is the sixth anniversary of the start of See Also…. If you look at last year’s anniversary post, it wasn’t much of a party. It was both an honest statement of how I felt at the time and an overreaction based more in my unhappiness than in logic. This year I wanted to [...]
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Thu 11 Aug 2011, 12:32 pm
I signed up for the WebJunction online conference Trends in Library Training and Learning 2011 solely to hear Char Booth‘s keynote, Instructional Literacy and the Library Educator: Reflective Habits for Effective Practice. And she delivered with a talk that mixed high-level thinking about teaching and learning with fairly simple and specific things I can do right now (or [...]
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Thu 4 Aug 2011, 10:45 am
It’s somehow comforting when I see other online communities wrestling with the same things that librarians talk about. I consider myself a fringe member of the role playing gamers community, and usually when I see things that resonate for me in that group, they are issues related to creating and maintaining the online community itself. [...]
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