Part of my summer internship with GIS involved my own curriculum mapping project. The project was to begin some basic curriculum mapping for the college where I am going to be serving as the Electronic Resources and Reference Librarian. Since the college has their own educational framework my plan was to map a course from their core curriculum to the college’s framework and to ACRL’s Framework. I also began an attempt to map the two frameworks to each other. However, I was unable to get a copy of a syllabus and the college’s catalog did not provide in-depth learning outcomes for the course; and I would have liked to map an individual assignment. So instead of mapping a course I began to map the goals of the entire Core Program. Mapping at a high level like this proved challenging, but was also very helpful. I am glad I was able to do this project because it allowed me to put into practice some more of what I worked on at the beginning of the summer, and the internship readings. It also gave me a much better understanding of the college’s Core Program so I can arrive on campus with some more well formed thoughts on how I can serve the community as a new librarian.
Author: jrlancaster
Qualitative Research
By way of introduction, much of the first half of my curriculum mapping internship with GIS has involved some data collection and a good bit of data transformation. The data transformation process involves creating a structure for what will become a visual tree, and transferring much of the data collected by various instruction librarians into Excel in such a way that it can be visualized. Seeing what these trees look like has helped structure some of the more complex academic departments.
The second half of the summer will largely be focused on using NVivo to do qualitative data analysis of syllabi. This is a project to which I am looking forward. I believe that NVivo will be a valuable software to learn. And qualitative research is the type of research I am most interested in performing during my library career. Some of the aspects of qualitative research I enjoy are: the group nature of the research, the inductive approach, the open ended aspects of the research, the more flexible nature of the research process, and the iterative approach, among others. I am looking forward to learning how NVivo works, and seeing what we will find in our qualitative analysis.
Curriculum Mapping and Me
As a student in the School of Library and Information Studies program here at UA we are provided with the opportunity for an internship; my internship this summer is with Gorgas Information Services. Working with the Instruction Coordinator Librarian I am assisting with the Curriculum Mapping project with which the library has been involved. This project involves assisting in data collection on required courses, data transformation of information collected by other librarians, and other projects as assigned.
As part of our weekly reading we read an article by L.H. Charles—“Using an Information Literacy Curriculum Map as Means of Communication and Accountability for Stakeholders in Higher Eduction” (log-in required)—to examine the connection between the map and information literacy, and the benefits the curriculum map had to the wider university community; especially the university administration.
The reading was also helpful as I prepare to move to my first professional library position this August; I hope to do some basic curriculum mapping for that school—likely more like the way that it was discussed in the Charles article than the more detailed mapping that we are doing here at UA. The themes in the article, and my work with UA’s data collection and transformation, will couple together nicely with some initial mapping work for the school to which I am going.