Information Literacy as a Collaborative Tool

The Seminars

The genesis of collaboration in IL at Dominican

• Freshmen Seminars
• 30 years of collaboration between seminar faculty and librarians
• Background

Time for a change

• bored and annoyed students

• irritated faculty
• frustrated librarians

A brilliant idea and a lot of hard work

• move from Seminars (instruction in a vacuum) to English 102 (freshmen composition)
• change formal information literacy foundation requirement to reflect the move to English 102
• layers of administration for approval of change
• some background

English 102

The result

• English 102 -- 1 session, at least, 2 or 3 recommended, assessment using TILT tutorial and quizzes.
• The Challenges
  • working with different faculty, no uniformity in assignment or themes
  • Assessment -- tilt quizzes and results -- managing and interpreting and student perception
  • 1 session -- not enough

More collaboration and hard work

• researching assessment tools
• writing proposals and communicating change (buy in)
• approval

Assessment

The next result

• More sessions, an assignment, support materials
• Still challenges, but better
  • assessment is time consuming! but appears to be worthwhile.
  • rubric created for annotated bibliographies
  • relationships and partnerships created with Eng faculty
  • student buy-in

Always a work-in-progress

• challenges of teaching IL and not just how to do an annotated bibliography...
• using RefWorks as part of instruction? useful? overly time consuming?
• using new technologies in teaching -- blogs and wikis for support materials?

More Opportunities

Marketing and Outreach

 

Positive Effects

• increased opportunities and awareness of instruction across undergrad curriculum
  • building on foundation in Eng 102
  • steady, even increased, requests for instruction across curriculum
  • increased interest in workshops for specific tools -- RefWorks, JSTOR, new Lexis interface
• more opportunities for collaboration with faculty -- multi session instruction has increased with faculty request multiple sessions and follow ups for specific assignments. 
• more faculty sharing assignments with librarians (not enough, but more)
• some collaborative assignments (mostly with GSLIS) but an excellent start
  • subject guides and GSLIS 704 students (intro reference)
  • wiki
  • assessment by faculty member but benefits the library (and therefore the DU community)
• Student collaborations -- Banned Books Week events sponsored by the library and partnered with LISSA and Education Club