LACUNY Instruction Committee event: Rethinking Relevance

At the request of Robert Farell, one of the co-chairs of the LACUNY Instruction Committee, I am passing along the details about a March 21 event.

Library Association of the City University of New York (LACUNY)
Instruction Committee Spring Program

“Rethinking Relevance – Technology and Pedagogical Points of View”
(FREE REGISTRATION)

Keynote Speaker:

Tom Eland
Chair of Information Studies, Minnesota Community and Technical College

Respondents:

Deborah Richman, Vice President, Collarity (Palo Alto, CA)
Ann Grafstein, Coordinator of Library Instruction, Hofstra University
Jeff Gutkin, Director of Academic Computing, Wagner College

When:

Friday, March 21, 2008 — 9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
(Lunch will be provided following event)

Where:

Borough of Manhattan Community College
Richard Harris Terrace (main entrance level)
199 Chambers St.
New York, New York 10007

Mr. Eland will be speaking on how technology has impacted the role of librarians as “disciplinary discourse mediators.”

Mr. Eland is chair of his institution’s Information Studies department and is known for having one of the most developed and innovative information literacy programs in the country. Mr. Eland teaches liberal arts classes in Information Studies that critically analyze the claims of information society advocates; the role of the mass media, the alternative press, and dissident groups and ideas in shaping American society; and the history of ideas and print culture. He also teaches classes in, and coordinates, the MCTC Library Information Technology degree program.

Respondents include:

Deborah Richman, Vice President, Collarity (www.collarity.com)
Currently working in the area of search development at Collarity, a Palo Alto based social search engine developer, Ms. Richman is also a regular contributor to the website Search Engine Watch. She has been employed with Looksmart, and About.com among other companies and recently presented a paper at the 2007 Special Libraries Association Conference entitled “Social Search Comes of Age.”

Ann Grafstein, Coordinator of Library Instruction, Hofstra University
Ms. Grafstein (MLS, University of Western Ontario, Ph.D., McGill University) is the Coordinator of Library Instruction at Hofstra University. She has spoken on information literacy at scholarly conferences, and was an invited speaker at the 4th Annual Scientific Symposium in Frankfurt, Germany in 2004. Her article “A Discipline-Based Approach to Information Literacy” that appeared in the Journal of Academic Librarianship in 2002 received the 2004 ACRL Instruction Section Publication Award. Her article entitled “Information Literacy and Technology: An Examination of Some Issues” was published in portal: Libraries and the Academy in 2007.

Jeff Gutkin, Director of Academic Computing, Wagner College.
Previously he was the Instructional Design Librarian for Wagner College’s Horrmann Library. Having received his MLS from Queens College GSLIS, he is currently completing a PhD in Educational Psychology, with a focus in Learning, Development and Instruction at the CUNY Graduate Center and an “Interactive Technology and Pedagogy” certificate under the direction of Stephen Brier. He is also the production editor of the Association of College and Research Libraries’ Library Instruction Round Table Newsletter.

RSVP by Friday, March 14 to:
Elizabeth Namei
email: enamei@lagcc.cuny.edu
phone: 718-482-6019

New report on Research behavior

Researchers and Discovery Services: Behaviour, Perceptions and Needs
commissioned by the Research Information Network in UK at
http://www.rin.ac.uk/files/Report%20-%20final.pdf

from Nancy Macomber via CULIBS-L

Using fake websites to teach evaluation of sources

One way to help students in your workshops and classes appreciate the value of evaluating web sites when doing research is to show them a real shocker (such as the white-supremacist created Martin Luther King web site, which I won’t link to it here and help boost its Google ranking further) or a fake or spoof web site. If you are looking for some new sites to use, check out this list from Philip Bradley on his web site (while you’re there, take a look at his blog, too, which I find indispensable).

Assignments That Work! Brooklyn College Announces New Information Literacy Project

Creating information literate students is not the sole province of librarians, but rather a partnership between library and classroom faculty. Nonetheless, librarians sometimes lament, “If only classroom faculty would give students assignments that cause them to use the information literacy skills librarians are teaching!”

The Brooklyn College Library announces a new information literacy project, Assignments That Work! Originally conceived by Professors Mariana Regalado (Brooklyn College), Tess Tobin (NYCCT), and Miriam Laskin (Hostos) through LILAC work, this initiative includes a data bank of assignments that promote the development and exercise of information literacy skills (presently under construction in DSpace – http://www.dspace.org/), accompanied by a spring 2008 lecture/workshop series. When it debuts early next year, the data bank will be seeded with assignments identified by Brooklyn College Library faculty for their particular effectiveness in building and strengthening information literacy skills. Classroom faculty (first at Brooklyn College, later throughout CUNY) will be invited to contribute their own assignments to the data bank, which will be searchable by discipline.

CUNY library and classroom faculty will be invited to the spring lecture/workshop series, funded by the office of the Dean of Undergraduate Studies. Team members for the Assignments That Work! project include Brooklyn faculty Mariana Regalado, Jane Cramer, and Stephanie Walker. For more information, please contact Mariana Regalado at Regalado@brooklyn.cuny.edu.

Survey of library instruction

If you’ve got five minutes to spare, take Carleton College’s survey of library instruction.

Found via Steve Lawson’s See Also… blog.