Environmental science students critically analyzed the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) website and its treatment of climate change during the Trump, Obama, and Bush presidencies. This library “warm-up” activity was designed to raise awareness of data fragility and the long-term accessibility of government websites. As future science professionals, it’s important to think about how this impacts scientists and their work. Students were introduced to several tools including: The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, End of Term Archive, and Data Refuge.

A one-shot or seminar class on fake news tied to source evaluation. Examination of the factors at play in the creation of misinformation; insight into how to select sources; tools and strategies for evalutating content of stories, authors, and news outlets.

What is “fake news” anyway? Are we living in a post-truth world? These University of Michigan course materials will provide opportunities to discuss and analyze news production, consumption and evaluation. Students will develop the critical thinking skills necessary to be an informed citizen; understand how their worldview affects their interpretation of the news; and create a personal strategy for fact-checking and evaluating the news.

This concept map and activity explores how various sources of information are created, accessed, and shared. Students collaboratively define what makes a source traditional, emerging, public, or exclusive. Students are given a type of information source to map on the grid according to each axis, and provide a rationale for their placement.

This activity is designed to support teaching at the intersections of scholarly communication and information literacy. The choose-your-own scenario activity, designed in LibWizard, can be used in a flipped classroom setting or in a traditional classroom. The choose-your-own scenario activity is inspired by and adapts questions from: Hare, S. & Evanson, C. (2018). Information privilege outreach for undergraduate students. College and Research Libraries.

This lesson was co-developed by Daniel Ransom and Nicole Branch. This is an intensive APA workshop that could be broken into parts. It covers both APA citation and formatting, with a protest theme. The workshop was conducted as a stand-alone, outside of class workshop at Holy Names University in 2014 and 2015. Though Occupy is now dated, the theme of protest could be adapted to something more current. We didn't think it would be possible to make APA citation engaging, but this lesson did just that. It was especially popular with nursing and education students.

This lesson was developed for a Photography course on the theory and psychology of photography (non-majors and majors both take this course). This lesson is typically presented at the beginning of a course section on the aesthetics of photography. It was meant to challenge their assumptions about art, information (online) as a commodity, and copyright practices of artists. Students may be asked to look up Richard Prince before class or during, as the lesson suggests.

Lesson plan for a 1-hour introductory Communication Studies theory class. Emphasis is on getting students to use the appropriate tool for their information need while considering indicators of authority. Collection of exercises requiring students to do the following: 1) look up background information on a communication theory; 2) chase down further readings; 3) find a scholarly article that applies a communication theory using the ComAbstracts database.

UPDATE: PLEASE USE SIFT & PICK INSTEAD!

Students often depend on citation generators provided by databases, library discovery tools, and websites when tasked with correctly formatting their references. However, these generators often make mistakes that students don’t notice. This activity will help students to look critically at the citations provided by citation generators and to find the mistakes. This will both help students learn the citation style of their discipline and to look more critically at seemingly quick fixes during the research process.