Davidson’s librarians often experience a tension in our information literacy instruction: we want to prepare students to do well on a particular assignment (for example, finding sources for a research paper), but we also want to teach them to think critically about their information use generally (for instance, considering the political, social, and ethical impacts of information). This tension is reflected in our Information Literacy Vision Statement: “We recognize the importance of … [Read more...]
Davidson College’s New Open Education Initiative
December 16, 2015 By
Last week, the E.H. Little Library, in partnership with the Center for Teaching and Learning and Digital Learning Research & Design (DRLD), announced five new $500 stipends for faculty interested in integrating Open Educational Resources (OER) and Open Pedagogy into their Fall 2016 courses. Each faculty member that receives a stipend will be required to integrate free and open course materials into their course. Librarians will play a vital role in this process by helping faculty find, … [Read more...]
Teaching Information Privilege
October 1, 2015 By
As the Assistant Director for Information Literacy at Davidson, I spend a lot of my time thinking about how to teach students information literacy. In my experience, our students and faculty often equate information literacy with the ability to write research papers, so our librarians frequently are asked to teach skills and concepts that will help students succeed on specific academic assignments. We value this important educational role, but we also know that an information literate person … [Read more...]
Welcome Sarah!
September 2, 2015 By
Please welcome Sarah Crissinger, our newest research librarian at Davidson. Sarah started working with the Information Literacy team in mid-July. Originally from Ohio, Sarah received her Bachelor of Arts in English and Women’s Studies from Wright State University in Dayton. She just graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a Master’s of Science in Library and Information Science in May. While at Illinois, she held graduate assistantships in the reference and … [Read more...]
Higher Ed at Altitude: Notes from LOEX 2015
May 6, 2015 By
Cara Evanson and I attended the LOEX Conference last week in Denver, Colorado. LOEX is a conference focused on library instruction and information literacy. As always, the conference was excellent and we had trouble choosing which sessions to attend! Fortunately, with two of us attending this year, we were able to divide and conquer. We attended sessions on topics such as using primary source materials in instruction, advice from teachers turned librarians for improving instruction, and graphic … [Read more...]
