We had our second scout module on Thursday, and overall I thought mine was kind of a mixed bag. A few things worked out well. For one I thought showing how using natural language (in this case just using a question instead of keywords) doesn’t really work well on scout. For the first scout module I had a question in mind that I knew brought back a first result that wasn’t relevant, but for some reason when I used that search during the presentation it didn’t retrieve that exact article (I must have just worded the question slightly different on accident). This time I asked scout a question about cultural life in the antebellum south and the first return was an article about soil science and geology, so I thought that was helpful in showing some of the differences between how you search on scout and how you search on Google. I also thought the keyword searches that I did after that worked fine, and that also showed some of the differences between scout and other search engines. Freshmen presumably understand Google and are comfortable using it, so I think comparing and contrasting the two is one way to help them start to understand scout.
I did think my second presentation was a bit too similar to my first. I don’t know if that really matters since it was just practice, but I intended to do something kind of similar but with an emphasis on just finding books, and I’m not sure that really came off as the point of it. I had the same problems with getting in too much of a hurry and forgetting some parts of the presentation. I’ve tried not to have too much of a script for these things because I thought it would seem too scripted and mechanical, but the next time I do something similar to this I’ll at least have some sort of outline. I think I was better at not spending so much time behind the podium for this module, and I feel like I do better when I’m out in front of the class. At the podium I always feel like I’m slouching down, like it would feel a bit more natural if I was a couple inches shorter. Overall though I thought it went better than the first module.