Comments on: hey, have you been somewhere you’ve never ever been before

By: Stephen Francoeur

Stephen Francoeur — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 14:37:36 +0000

Maura: Lunch is a great idea. My enrollment isn’t what I’d like it to be either. First day of class, only 60% of registered students showed up (I hear that some students blow off the first day of classes, assuming that nothing important happens.)

By: maura

maura — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 13:19:27 +0000

Thanks for the link to your course LibGuide, Stephen. Looks like a great class. I like the iSkills resume — maybe I’ll try that next time (assuming there is a next time — our enrollment is quite low [as per usual w/new courses] so I’ll be pounding the pavement to market the course more before registration starts for the fall). We should have a post-mortem lunch after the semester ends (or post-mortem blog posts, at least).

William, I heartily appreciate the affordability of your text — most of our students get financial aid so it’s important to me that the book won’t break the bank for them (and will be useful to consult for research they do in their other courses, too). I’ve heard other faculty complain that they sometimes have a hard time getting students to read, so the style of your book is also a good fit for my course: easy to understand with funny bits in there too. Thanks for your comment and well wishes!

By: William Badke

William Badke — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 05:30:44 +0000

Both of you are right, of course. Textbooks tend to lock you into a method and generally don’t cover everything you want to cover. They are also deadly if you follow them slavishly instead of considering them as an essential content base for core ideas.

Launching off into all those key issues like open access, copyright, privacy, and so on is great – an opportunity to personalize the issues that make the core of research method the nuanced thing it needs to be.

I doubt it’s just a textbook/non-textbook isse. We use toolslike a good textbook to put concrete material in the hands of students for whom our classroom instruction may seem like words blowing in the wind. To hear, see it and practice it is what makes information literacy work. But I teach the other issues as well. And I refuse to publish my work with those rapacious textbook companies who believe $150 is a better price than $18.95 (or $6.00 for the PDF version).

All the best with your course.

By: Stephen Francoeur

Stephen Francoeur — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 02:42:58 +0000

I didn’t realize you too were teaching a 3-credit library course for the first time this semester. I had my first class meeting last Thursday, too. I decided to go the no-textbook route and will see if it pans out; I’m wondering if my planning for the course has connected all the dots in ways that a textbook can.

You can see my course website, which I set up using LibGuides, and download my syllabus at http://guides.newman.baruch.cuny.edu/lib1015