The semester started last Thursday, and our library’s course started too! I’ve had a busy month prepping for the course and worrying whether it would run, so it was great to finally get to the first class. All the nervousness that I thought I’d have suddenly vanished the morning of, too, which was a bit of a surprise to me. Ultimately I’m really looking forward to having an entire semester to work on big meaty information literacy* topics with the students, so I think that excitement drove the butterflies right out of my stomach.<\/p>\n
* Shhh, we’re not calling it IL to the students, though — too jargony. The official course name is Research & Documentation for the Information Age<\/a>.<\/p>\n I know what you’re thinking: what about the work? Isn’t it an enormous amount of work to teach a 3-credit course? Well, yes and no. It’s true that course prep expands to fill the time available, and when I was finalizing the syllabus this month I probably let it take more time than it should. But now that the semester’s begun I’m going to have to find ways to be more efficient with course prep, and I think that the syllabus and course outline is detailed enough that I should be able to prepare without deep-ending.** I’ll be responsible for fewer other instruction sessions and reference shifts than last semester, too.<\/p>\n ** Overpreparation is an issue for me in lots of workstuff, so I should really use the course to help me practice figuring out when to stop.<\/em><\/p>\n It’s also true that I had a few moments this month when I desperately wished for one big giant textbook for the course. I’m using one text (Research Strategies<\/a>, by William Badke) — it’s got a good overview of the research skills I want to cover, is written in an approachable style, and is under $20. But I also want to talk about things like privacy and access and evaluation and preservation and ethics and copyright and fair use and open access and documentation and non-text media and practical applications of all of this, which is bigger than this book, nice as it is. I’m still as anti-textbook and pro-open access<\/a> as ever, but I do appreciate how much more time it takes to plan a class without one.<\/p>\n All in all, I’m totally stoked*** to teach this class.<\/p>\n *** A couple of weeks ago a CUNY colleague asked if I was from the West Coast, and referred to me as “mellow but organized.” Which cracked me right up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The semester started last Thursday, and our library’s course started too! I’ve had a busy month prepping for the course and worrying whether it would run, so it was great to finally get to the first class. All the nervousness that I thought I’d have suddenly vanished the morning of, too, which was a bit […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[19,11,18],"class_list":["post-818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-library","tag-teaching","tag-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=818"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/818\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":824,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/818\/revisions\/824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mauraweb.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}