Carolyn Caffrey | Librarian

This is part of an introductory first-year class to the university where students are introduced to the library and asked to think critically about how information is organized using the framework of critical cataloging. After watching a short video on the idea of classification and its problems with fixing identity categories, students analyze and categorize selected book from the collection, and then reflect on how knowledge is organized and their choices as authors.

A toolkit with various instructional materials to teach media and news literacy. Includes an online activity "Fairness and Blanace" where students watch a short video on journalistic standards and answer discussion questions. Then, students can take one or both interactive tutorials on "Lateral Reading" with a focus on fact-checking and/or "Evaluating Information" based on an…

This assignment was created for a credit bearing course for first year students. It's designed to help students take what they've learned about algorithmic bias from the course lectures and readings and apply it to their own search practices. They also critically analyze search results for advertisements and compare DuckDuckGo to Google. [You could also look at this assignment as an adaptation of Jacob Berg's wonderful, "Googling Google," assignment at https://www.projectcora.org/assignment/googling-google-search-engines-market-actors ]

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. From 2018-2020 this took the place of an interactive survey with…

This group activity can be used in a variety of disciplines and contexts. Pass the Problem aims to have students provide feedback to other students on database and keyword selection. By having students critique each other it works to build critical self-reflection during the research process (it's also pretty fun!).

The following activity is meant to assist learning the concepts of strategic search. It introduces the idea that sources contribute different perspectives to an argument and that scholarship is a conversation. It can be used for any discipline but is particularly well suited to introductory writing courses.