Recent library sessions for the School’s TAFE students

I gave some classes to ESL groups recently in the city. I mentioned last year that I really enjoy these classes, mainly because I find the students so interested and engaged. I find much the same thing with the Foundation studies students and Diploma of Further Education students.

Such students come into the Library (at Carlton and Swanston) for tours, catalogue sessions, database sessions and sessions on evaluating internet sites. Along the way they learn to analyse their research topics, develop key words for searching, become familiar with some key resources (such as Factiva for newspaper articles and Australian Public Affairs full text for local magazine and journal articles), and learn how to access the material. These are a terrific group of programs and teachers, and the research topics are often interesting and stimulating for students.

Here are the guides and tutorials for these areas (I’ve already mentioned that we will be putting together a further guide for VCE soon).

• Foundation studies resources
• Library skills for foundation students
• ESL (English as a Second Language)

Two Libguide tutorials

I have used our new Libguides software to develop a couple of teacher education subject guides. I have also used these to develop two online tutorials.

The most recent tutorial to be developed is Library Skills for Foundation Studies. We have been teaching quite a lot of foundation studies classes over the last couple of weeks. There are 14 groups in the first intake which means 28 hours of library research skills classes (phew); that doesn’t even count the library tours and the catalogue exercise that each group gets. Anyway, the online tutorial has proven invaluable for giving students somewhere to go to reinforce the things they learn face-to-face in class. This tutorial also gives both the teachers and the students an overview of what the sessions involve.

The other is a more general Library Research Skills for Education Students tutorial and is based on the different aspects of information literacy: the skills and knowledge around analysing a research need, being aware of resources available, forming search expressions, searching and modifying searches in key resources, accessing and managing information.

I’m a fan of libguides because they utilise a number of different applications and allow quick updating and changing of information. If you have any suggestions or want them linked into your online course let me know.

Academic study and the use of internet sites

I am running classes for Foundation Studies at the moment on the evaluation of internet sites. Students brainstorm criteria to use for evaluating the scholarly suitability of internet sites and then use that criteria to make judgements about several example sites.

Issues that have cropped up have included the use of sites like Wikipedia and YouTube; the different types of professional, commercial and educational websites; the use of portals that have already made evaluations of websites; the way dated information affects different subject areas.

The second half of the class then looks at advanced Google techniques: the advanced search page, using Google to search particular sites or domains, searching terms within the titles of pages etc.

I am happy to run such classes for any of the programs within the School. Given that students are going to use Google it makes sense that we emphasise the need to be critical and proficient in the way they use it.