This is a simple activity intended to warm up students, break the ice, and introduce the concept of keyword searching. Ask students to come up with a single word search that gives zero results. It’s harder than it sounds. It may be too elementary for graduate students or upperclassmen; use your judgement about students’ abilities and familiarity with searching. This activity can be a great segue in to a lesson on keyword development, Boolean operators, popular terminology vs. technical jargon, and the differences between different kinds of databases.
Assignments
Posted on August 20, 2019
Author: Natalie Mahan
Discipline: Multidisciplinary
Information Literacy Concepts: Finds Information (ACRL 2, SCONUL 3&4, ANZIL 2&4, ANCIL 5), Searching as Strategic Exploration (Frame 6)
Posted on August 13, 2019
Author: Elizabeth Salmon
Collaborators: Lindsay Davis
This lesson is intended to increase students’ awareness of content types and how various source types are created in order to 1) assist them in accurate citation practices and 2) help them to effectively select and evaluate sources using basic indicators such as purpose, audience, authorship, and additional factors that shape the creation of the source.
Discipline: Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing
Information Literacy Concepts: Authority is Constructed / Contextual (Frame 1), Information Creation as Process (Frame 2), Information Has Value (Frame 3)
Posted on August 9, 2019
Author: Faith Rusk
Collaborators: Cathy Meals
In this activity, students review correct in-text citations for a particular format, then practice writing their own examples. These examples are submitted anonymously via a google form, allowing for the collective and collaborative review.
Discipline: Multidisciplinary
Information Literacy Concepts: Information Has Value (Frame 3), Scholarship as Conversation (Frame 5)
Posted on August 9, 2019
Author: Faith Rusk
This activity helps students collectively practice summarizing, paraphrasing and quoting. To begin, students have a conversation as a class on any topic of their choosing. The instructor transcribes the conversation and then as a group, the class examines the conversation and write summaries, paraphrases and quotes.
Discipline: Multidisciplinary
Information Literacy Concepts: Scholarship as Conversation (Frame 5)
Posted on August 6, 2019
Author: Chelsea Nesvig
This assignment/activity works to pair students in fully online or hybrid courses in order to discuss, via phone or messaging app, any topic of choice. In this example, students in a 100-level composition course discuss their research topic of interest with their partner and offer each other suggestions for refinement. This assignment could be adapted in a variety of ways to support other research assignments or projects.
Discipline: Library and Information Science
Information Literacy Concepts: Defines Information Need (ACRL 1, SCONUL 1&2, ANZIL 1), Research as Inquiry (Frame 4)
Posted on July 30, 2019
Author: Melanie Hubbard
The following are a series of scaffolded assignments that led to the creation of “Labyrinths of Times,” an online digital project: http://labyrinth.english.lmu.build/. Aspects of it, including the scaffolded approach, are helpful for teaching students how to write for the web.
Discipline: English
Information Literacy Concepts: Information Creation as Process (Frame 2)
Posted on July 30, 2019
Author: Melanie Hubbard
This assignment uses Palladio to create a network based on Italio Calvino's Invisible Cities.
Discipline: English
Information Literacy Concepts: Research as Inquiry (Frame 4)
Posted on July 30, 2019
Author: Melanie Hubbard
An introduction to Voyant text analysis tool.
Discipline: English
Information Literacy Concepts: Research as Inquiry (Frame 4)
Posted on July 12, 2019
Author: Lindsay Davis
A "jigsaw lite" activity to help students recognize that the information tools and systems they use in their everyday and academic lives are not neutral as existing power structures are reflected in the creation, organization, and access of information. Students work in small groups to read an assigned article about bias in a tool, source type, or system and answer questions to share with the larger class.
Discipline: Multidisciplinary
Information Literacy Concepts: Authority is Constructed / Contextual (Frame 1), Information Creation as Process (Frame 2), Information Has Value (Frame 3)
Posted on July 10, 2019
Author: Peter Catlin
A classroom activity and lesson plan for first-year students. Your students will learn to differentiate between different categories of items -- such as Popular/Scholarly, or Primary/Secondary/Tertiary -- by playing this fun and easy game.
Discipline: Library and Information Science, Multidisciplinary
Information Literacy Concepts: Defines Information Need (ACRL 1, SCONUL 1&2, ANZIL 1), Information Creation as Process (Frame 2), Searching as Strategic Exploration (Frame 6)