First Week Readings

I found the reading extremely informative and encouraging. I found myself, while reading, trying to reason through practical ways to get students to change the way they think about libraries. For example, I thought about starting out with a simple question like, “why do your professors reject Wikipedia as a source for your papers?” After receiving answers, I thought perhaps I would ask, “what is a peer-reviewed journal, and why is that an acceptable source?”

While these are broad and perhaps bad questions, I felt like maybe they would be beneficial in introducing students to ‘why libraries exist’. This article also made me think critically about my 10 minute teaching session next week. I want to do my session on the boolean operators in Scout advanced searching. I want to explain what the AND and OR features do, and why they are useful. I started thinking about it in terms of a visual graph, with words leading to different databases. Perhaps this is all getting a little too MLIS, but I feel like it would help if students understood why search terms are not always successful, and how the OR function can help them turn up more relevant searches. I also found myself wondering if I could plan searches for this session. For example, I could give my students a phrase to search, say ‘capital punishment’. I could then ask them to search ‘capital punishment’ OR ‘death penalty’. Through demonstration, I could possibly help them understand why this type of search is beneficial.

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