Jim Weinheimer said:
"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 not always true. My youngest son had poor info literacy skills in high school, and always came to me for help in researching high school term papers. This continued through his first semester at the University of Utah. Then he took a "how to succeed in college" Ed Psych course at Utah that had an info lit component. He told me that the librarian who taught the info lit part was great. My son never again asked me to help him with library research. In fact, one time when he came home for a break he started talking about Boolean logic. :-)
Bernie Sloan
Sora Associates
Bloomington, IN
--- On Thu, 3/19/09, Weinheimer Jim <j.weinheimer_at_aur.edu> wrote:
> From: Weinheimer Jim <j.weinheimer_at_aur.edu>
> Subject: [NGC4LIB] An attempt at online training
> To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
> Date: Thursday, March 19, 2009, 5:18 AM
> 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 - 21:08:57 EDT