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Turning Educational Standards/Recommendations into Information Fluency Courses

Turning Educational Standards/Recommendations into Information Fluency Courses. A case study. A. Ben Wagner, Univ. at Buffalo – SLA Baltimore 2006. A Gift from the gods. October 2005 - American Physical Society & Assoc. of Amer. Physics Teachers

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Turning Educational Standards/Recommendations into Information Fluency Courses

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  1. Turning Educational Standards/Recommendations into Information Fluency Courses A case study. A. Ben Wagner, Univ. at Buffalo – SLA Baltimore 2006

  2. A Gift from the gods • October 2005 - American Physical Society & Assoc. of Amer. Physics Teachers • Report of the Joint APS-AAPT Task Force on Graduate Education in Physics • http://www.aapt.org/Resources/upload/TFGradStudies.pdf

  3. Executive Summary Recommendation “…that [physics] departments require communication training and information literacy/fluency in their graduate programs.”

  4. Getting the Ball Rolling • Dec. 2005 - Contacted department chair who was not aware of the report. • Lesson 1: Don’t assume faculty have time to track all the developments in educational standards. • Spring 2006 - Agreed to test concept with a series of 4 workshops for physics grad students. • Spring 2007 – Develop a 1-credit course under auspices of the physics department.

  5. Spring 2006 Workshops • Heavily promoted to faculty & grad students • Taught 2 sections to maximize attendance (5:10-6 pm Tue. & 2-3 pm Wed./ 4 weeks) • Pizza party promised if they came to all 4. • Emailed reminders nearly every week

  6. Spring 2006 Syllabus • Information Cosmology: Navigating the universe beyond Google (Inspec vs. Google, basics of searching) • In top 5 Google results for ‘quantum wells’: Britney's Guide to Semiconductor Physics http://britneyspears.ac/physics/fbarr/fbarr.html

  7. Figure 1. Graphical solution for finite barrier quantum well & energy levels Note: This illustration from “Britney’s” web site was used as a negative role model, showing the effectiveness of taking the students directly from a site with stupid stuff like this to a quick, precise index term search of INSPEC. The students actually got excited about the power of controlled vocabulary searching. - ABW

  8. Spring 2006 Syllabus 2. Enrich your studies & teaching: Knowing where to begin (AccessScience, Knovel, review articles, Bison Catalog) --Choose their own topic to use for rest of the course. 3. Diving in deep: Researching projects & theses (Inspec, SciFinder, arXiv, Web of Science) 4. Finding Data & other hard-to-detect species (properties, dissertations, govt reports, etc.)

  9. Feedback • “I learned much more than I thought I would.” • Wanted to be more “efficient” in finding info. • Wanted to do “searches other than Google” • Enthusiastic about 1-credit course – could take more time to learn and do own searching.

  10. Lessons • Be pro-active and think marketing. • Track activities of major societies (esp. teachers of…) educational standards/recommendations. • If there are no info fluency recommendations in place, point out what other disciplines have recommended (keeping up with the Jones).

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