Digital timelines enable us to tell stories visually by connecting non-linear moments: events, reactions, and experiences. This assignment includes a lesson plan and worksheet for teaching with timelines. Timelines work best when they are created as a project for a course, since they take time to develop. Project ideas include: alternatives to the research paper in humanities and Literature courses; embedding timelines in website projects where students also create bibliographies of secondary sources; and library archival projects to showcase student work or a collection with an open-source tool if space or platforms are limited.

The lesson plan and worksheet are designed around Knightlab TimelineJS, but can be adapted for use with other timeline tools. Also included is a guide for selecting a timeline tool for instructors.

This is a lateral reading 75 minute long lesson plan and worksheet assignment that introduces online source evaluation to undergraduate students, preferably first years. Lateral reading involves researching the content of a source as one reads it and this technique is popular with online fact checkers and journalists.  The lesson plan calls for instructors to demonstrate lateral reading live (or via recording if asynchronous) using resources found on Google.  It then asks students to repeat the steps using the worksheet as guide with research topics of their choice (they also search using Google). There is a reflection piece that the end that asks students to consider if they would recommend the sources they evaluate to the community at large.

This lesson is intended as a one hour, single-session overview of one aspect of information literacy: evaluating the trustworthiness of resources, particularly online. The lesson is designed for a group of 10-25 adults in a public or academic library, or is also suitable for high school students. Instructor will teach students how to investigate a source and apply three small but powerful information literacy tools to evaluation: SIFT, PIE, and SMELL.

Background information, assignment, and reflection on analyzing popular information.

Background information, assignment, and reflection on analyzing information received from the news.

This video was put together to offer health sciences students a brief introduction to critically thinking about their resources in order to evaluate how appropriate they are for use in their work. It was important that the learners understand the complexities of using specific resources and why it is important to always critically evaluate materials. This includes a discussion of critiques of gatekeeping surrounding peer review, how damaging and discriminatory research can still get published, and how to ask crucial questions to subvert dominant narratives. The video primarily points to our research guide, which is linked below as well, in order to help plant the seeds of this conversation without overwhelming learners in the moment. You will find all materials for creation of the video as well as the closed caption script and the video itself here so that you can adapt it to your needs.

The Penn State Berks Privacy Workshop Series focuses on privacy issues for students in the past, present, and future.  The Privacy Workshop spotlights privacy practices and concerns in the current moment; Digital Leadership explores future implications of past and current digital behaviors; Digital Shred provides tools to evaluate and mitigate the damage of past digital behaviors; and Digital Wellness focuses on privacy across the lifespan - bringing together the past, present, & future by finding a balance of technology & wellness, while aligning habits and goals.  Each workshop is grounded in theory – countering approaches that overpromise user control in the face of information asymmetries and the control paradox – and embrace students’ autonomy and agency by avoiding prescribed solutions, and instead encouraging decision-making frameworks.

This assessment asks undergraduate engineering students to review, rate, and explain their decisions relating to the credibility of information resources and information containers. Students are asked to review various resources as well as containers. After reviewing, students assign each resource or container with one of three ratings: green (always credible), yellow (potentially credible with further investigation), or red (never credible). Last, students explain their decision in relation to each resource or container. Ideally this task is given twice during a semester, before and after information literacy instruction.

Developed in order to move students away from an outdated checklist approach to evaluating online content, we developed this tutorial to teach students how to read laterally and think critically. This tutorial consists of several small chunks of microlearning activities including an assignment. Students can complete as much or as little as they feel they need.

The assignment has students search the same topic in Google and the Web of Science or BIOSIS database. They are asked to pick one result from each search, identify its components (title, author, year) and identify the container of the information (journal, book, news, etc.). They are then asked to compare and reflect on the different results.