All,
There has been a thread in several postings about whether we should expect people who use a catalog to learn anything or not. Accepting either side has huge consequences. The traditional library method of having information literacy workshops doesn't work since they are not taken seriously by anybody, and people forget everything the moment they leave the room. (That's my experience anyway!) Still, I have had some ideas and have put them into practice.
If you get into my catalog at http://www.galileo.aur.it/cgi-bin/koha/opac-main.pl, you will see in the upper row something that says: "Take a Two-Minute Tutorial." This leads to an (as yet unorganized) list of the tutorials I have made. There will be a lot more. You can also click below to reveal the turorials available that relate to whatever page you are on. Clicking this invokes an alternate style sheet that displays hidden sections. Some are on using specific tools and their quirks (Book Review Digest) and others are more general, such as evaluating resources.
If you click on any of these, you get some *very basic* tutorials, and I am making sure that the 2 minutes really is two minutes or less. So, if you look at a specific record, e.g. http://www.galileo.aur.it/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?bib=19275 and click on "Show tutorials for this page" you will see things about citations, retrieving materials, working with online resources, my extend search, controlled vocabulary and so on. I also believe that it is important to be able to hide the tutorials as well, so I made that an option.
So far, people seem to like them and especially the fact that they are two minutes or less. If I start to lie and make it 5 or 10 minutes or so, people will hesitate to click. Finally, if people want a deeper discussion, they can go into my information literacy book placed in the library wiki and I make many links into it.
Best of all, it's free! I think online training is possible and should not simply be dismissed out of hand. I'd be interested in any comments.
Jim Weinheimer
Received on Thu Mar 19 2009 - 05:23:07 EDT