During this activity, students work with their lab partners to apply Mike Caulfield’s “Four Moves and a Habit” to a piece of science information they have found on the open web.

During this activity, students work with their lab partners to apply Mike Caulfield’s “Four Moves and a Habit” to a piece of science information they have found on the open web.

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 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.

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. 

How can we facilitate first-year student engagement with critical Framework concepts, especially in a one-shot class? This active learning activity is designed to teach source evaluation in a 50-minute class. The activity, which incorporates elements of problem-based learning and uses a flipped classroom approach, was added to our institution’s first-year experience course. Prompting students to consider a local issue, the activity requires students to evaluate sources represented as “source cards,” choose sources they would use in the context of the assignment, and justify their decisions. Motivated by the challenge and relevance of the activity, students work cooperatively to consider questions at the heart of the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy. 

Quiz your students on library terminology and concepts using this Library Jeopardy! template. This activity can be done for in-person library instruction sessions, or via Zoom/live virtual instruction sessions.