A significant amount of the work we do in libraries is to help bolster information literacy. Part of this is situating learners so that they understand that many disciplines have acknowledged authorities in the sense of well-known scholars and publications that are widely considered “standard,” and yet, even in those situations, some scholars would challenge Read More…
Category: Teaching & Learning
Libraries and Self-Care
People often assume that libraries = books, and that library workers are especially good at … books. I view my work as connecting people to information at the time they need it, where information is broadly defined: books, certainly … but also access to tax forms, where the voter-registration sites are (last day to register in Read More…
Finding and Using Open Resources
Finding openly licensed resources is not difficult, and with the help of Washington’s Open Attribution Builder it is very easy to correctly attribute the work to its’ author. In Google Images, use the “Tools” button after you run a simple search to limit your results to openly licensed images. Choose a license from the drop Read More…
Study on College Students’ use of News
Project Information Literacy (a nonprofit research institute that I work with) just released a large-scale study of how college students seek, interact with, and understand news. For this study, we surveyed just under 6,000 college students about how they encounter, evaluate, process, and share news in their daily lives. One of the major findings is Read More…
Intro to instructional design
What is instructional design? Looking back at my interview for my position as UW Tacoma’s instructional design librarian, one question stands out: How do you explain instructional design to other people? There is, of course, a short answer. Instructional design is an iterative process that guides the development and delivery of instruction, from the earliest Read More…
Open Access Week 2018 at UW Tacoma
Open Access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, free of most copyright and licensing restriction. – from Open Access (MIT Press) by Peter Suber, This year, the UW Tacoma Library is partnering with the UW Libraries Scholarly Communication Outreach Team to host a series of events for Open Access Week. Through these activities, we seek Read More…
Evaluating Information
A recent New York Times article caught my attention: “Hoaxers Slip Brestaurants and Dog-Park Sex Into Journals”, the title reads. What struck me, however, was not the provocative title, but rather the hoax itself. By getting a fake article published in a peer-reviewed journal, the hoaxters were purposefully showing that the cycle of fact-checking Read More…
Launching the UW Tacoma Library blog
Over the Summer of 2018, the Library decided to launch a new platform so that we can better share all of the amazing ways we connect with our communities in support of the missions of UW Tacoma and the UW Libraries. Our goals with this blog are simple: Tell stories about the Library and its Read More…