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.

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. 

Using three example excerpts on citation practice and the experiences of specific scholars, attendees will interrogate and discuss how whiteness and other oppressions impact citation practice using a series of questions. 

This article describes an active-learning exercise intended to help teach copyright, fair use, and Creative Commons licenses. In the exercise students use a worksheet to draw original pictures, create derivative pictures on tracing paper, select Creative Commons licenses, and explore commercial usage, fair use, and copyright infringement. Librarian-instructors may find the completed worksheets to be useful aids to supplement copyright lectures; student perspectives will be integral because they are generating the examples used in discussion. Although a scholarly communication librarian developed this exercise to help introduce some basic copyright information to an undergraduate studio art and design class, the exercise can be performed in a general educational setting.

Recommended citation:

Boston, A. J. (2020). Copyright, Fair Use, and Creative Commons: An Active-Learning Exercise for Studio Art Students. Journal of Copyright in Education and Librarianship, 3(3), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.17161/jcel.v3i3.8193

A primer on how to read academic articles by guiding the class through a series of questions. Give students 5-15 minutes per slide to answer the questions (individually or in groups) before talking about their answers to questions with the whole class.

This lesson on journal prestige could be taught by itself, as part of a series on scholarly communication, or as a small part of a larger lesson on information prestige.

This is an activity to get students to think critically about the sources and information presented in a Wikipedia article. Students are asked to look up an article on their own topic, or a topic related to the course, and examine the content and the “Talk” page to see what issues the article has related to Wikipedia’s 3 guiding principles for content: point of view (objectivity/bias), verifiability (quality of sources cited), and evidence of original research. NOTE: This activity works best for topics (people, events) that are current public debates and/or controversial.

This lesson on the nature and cost of scholarly publishing could be taught by
itself, or as part of a series on scholarly communication, or as a small part of a larger lesson on
information privilege.

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

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.