Developed in order to move students away from an outdated checklist approach to evaluating online content, we developed this tutorial to teach students how to read laterally and think critically.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.

When writing a research paper, it can be easy to overlook the human side of scholarship – how being cited in a study (or not) can have real, material consequences, and how social structures can systematically exclude certain people from scholarship. This activity and lesson explores these ideas and gives students strategies for making their literature reviews more inclusive.

All told, this lesson takes about 50 minutes to an hour -- 20-30 minutes for the readings and pre-workshop activity, and 30 minutes of discussion. 

An open access MOOC in French to bonify the information literacy skills of university students (with Moodle).

Many academic and public libraries display their unique archives and special collections materials in exhibition spaces. With an array of primary sources and visuals, special collections exhibitions offer a wonderful venue for experiential learning of constructed narratives and perspectives. This Exhibition Explorer Card Deck is designed to guide students to experience close viewing of special collections materials through explicit steps for thinking rhetorically and critically in an exhibit space. The Exhibition Explorer Deck consists of eight cards, including one card with basic instruction on how to use the deck, five cards asking students to answer specific questions about the exhibit, and two cards with short activities to promote mindfulness as students move through the exhibit space. Each card is double-sided with an activity title on one side and questions/activities on reverse. This exhibition exercise can take place complementary to or independent of hands-on instruction sessions in departments of archives and special collections. Also, it is adaptable to use in various kinds of exhibitions in libraries, museums, and other learning spaces.

In-class Visit Lesson plan with Exhibition Explorer Card Deck:

Working in pairs or small teams, students visit the Archives and Special Collections exhibition. First, students shuffle the Exhibition Explorer Card Deck, then they work through each activity card in a random order. The shuffling of cards encourages serendipitous discovery of the exhibition, in which each student group conducts the exhibition activities following different orders of cards in the exhibit space. (15-20 minutes)

After students complete all the activity cards, the course instructor and/or special collections librarian facilitate a group discussion in the exhibition gallery. Students are asked to share observations from the exhibit exercise. Each group selects the activity card they find most engaging or confusing and share their responses to that card. Students are also asked to reflect on the connections between the exhibit exercise and applications for rhetorical thinking. (15-20 minutes)

BEAM Me Up is a one-shot session that works well in addition to a search strategies class, but can be done without. This session asks students to use the BEAM framework coined by Joseph Bizup to organize and synthesize research materials to create a complex and well-supported argument. Rather than evaluated sources using a checklist, the instructor using BEAM asks students to consider how the information will be used (and to consider how authors use information to build arguments). Adaptors may want to replace the sources given here with ones relevant to the students' curriculum. Our students are asked to create an argument that considers the city they live in, i.e. Memphis. I chose Stax Records because of its rich history locally and nationally, and because of its importance to the civil rights movement. I wanted to use a topic the students would find interesting and chose a variety of source types that I hoped would engage them both personally and intellectually. With credit to Brannen Varner, Michael Harris, and Joel Roberts.

This low-stakes, in-class assignment is designed to help first-year seminar students learn about important library resources and present their findings to their fellow students. In teams, students complete a series of authentic research tasks (called challenges) such as selecting and citing images from our digital collection and using our discovery tool to find books on the library shelves. Each team is also assigned a unique challenge to learn more about the library. Students spend the last twenty-five minutes of class designing a quick presentation in Canva and using it to teach each other about what they learned through their unique challenges.

The goal of this activity is to explore spaces, services, and information literacy (IL) concepts through problem-based scenarios, guided discovery, and peer teaching. Ideal for orientations for K-12, undergraduate, transfer, or graduate students, but can also be used for instruction requests with no clear research assignment or at the start of a research project. Students work in groups to find solutions to a scenario using guided directions and tools, and then teach the rest of the class based on their findings. The activity takes approximately 30-45 minutes, including student presentations, depending on class size and complexity of scenarios.

This is a participatory, variable lesson frame ready for you to modify to suit your instruction needs. This lesson and it's variations focuses on encouraging students to see themselves as information creators and part of the scholarly conversation and can also variously include conversations about about the scholarly information cycle and/or authority depending on instruction constraints and configuration.

This activity provides an interactive, student-centered, fun opportunity to explore skills of critical thinking and evaluation of resources. By allowing students to connect those things that they already know (even if they don’t know they know it) to larger concepts, we encourage them to trust themselves and to begin to develop their intuition as scholars, moving away from checklists and formulas for resource evaluation and toward a thoughtful critique of sources based on individual need and use.