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)

Citations and referencing for new students

I gave a session for one of the other librarians recently for first year students in GSSSP. Its good to do this because it gives you an insight into the techniques and approaches of other librarians. The session involved handing out the components of a citation on cards and getting students to come to the front and construct various citations on a whiteboard. These included citations to books, books with more than one author, edited books, journal articles, journal articles from a databases, newspaper articles and wesbites. I think it went well and idea well worth borrowing for students in education.

Reading citations and referencing in APA or Harvard finds its way into quite a few of my sessions. The first years are asked to identify APA citations, have a go at looking them up in the catalogue and report back to the group on what they find. The Foundation studies students need to be able to identify the different components of a website and then put them into Harvard. Recently I have found that with the Grad dips it is very useful to get them to understand the different parts of a journal citation before we even have a look at the databases. It sometimes surprises me that even postgrads in Endnote classes struggle a little with citations.

This is just one small but important part of helping scholars become information literate. We like to think it is well worth lecturers and teachers giving some consideration to embedding sessions that teach these types of knowledge and skill into the structure of their programs.

Regular classes at different library sites

In addition to the classes that I give to students by arrangement with lecturers there is also an ongong schedule of classes that anyone can attend at the different local sites. You can review these and book online by selecting the Book Library tours or classes link from the homepage. Bundoora Library has just posted some quick 15 min sessions in using the catalogue and finding journal articles.

PISA for higher education

The latest NTEU Advocate (p.6) has a report from the EI Higher Education and Research Conference in Malaga. The Advocate article reports on “propsals from the OECD for the introduction of a new instrument for higher education which measures ‘graduate attributes’”. I’ve had a look around and found the relevant conference paper and initial OECD proposal. This is apparently part of the OECD’s Thematic Review of Tertiary Education and will be based on the OECD Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which currently looks at 15 year olds. There is also a discussion of the idea (including problems) in an article from last year’s Inside Higher Ed.

All this is of some interest not only to academics but also to libraries because there have long been discussions within the library world on the development of an instrument to measure information literacy. We’ve always seen information literacy as a key area where the Library can contribute to the schools producing graduates meeting key atrributes.

Information literacy is important to lifelong learning in the way it involves skills and knowledge students use to negotiate their way from an information need to searching, accessing, managing and creating new information, while along the way being able to identify and utilise the array of resources now available to them. Some kind of instrument to measure graduate attributes would perhaps allow us to guage the effectiveness of our efforts.

Recent TAFE library sessions

I have recently given research skills sessions to students studying both the Diploma of Further Education and the ESL program at the Carlton campus. I enjoy these sessions, mainly because the students are usually sharp and engaged. We focus in these sessions on the idea of analysing a topic and developing keywords, on the types of resources that are available to them, on a couple of different resources such as Factiva and Australian Public Affairs Full Text (APAFT), and on how to reference material found in the Harvard style.

In the ESL session yesterday students were researching cultural and architectural landmarks in Melbourne — a great topic for students new to our city. Factiva is useful here as it allows us to search major Australian newspapers across about 10 years. APAFT is one of the best, largest and well-established Australian social science databases that also gives us some good information about architectural landarks, the use of public space, historic buildings and so on in Melbourne.

There is lots to learn in such a session: it can be a challenge sometimes just navigating your way around the different lists of resources and knowing which to choose, typing in your keywords as structured search expressions, reading citations and referencing, using find it links to get the full text or to check the catalogue, being able to save PDF files. These were just some of the issues I covered with this lively and interested group. It was also great to have two of their teachers attend to help and advise as we went along.

How to teach a library catalogue without sending the students (and us) to sleep?

I have been giving lots of information skills classes to various programs recently. The first year B.Eds get a 50 min catalogue session, which I’m sure doesn’t sound to them like the most rivetting kind of class that they will attend. However, we have tried to make it more problem-based/student-centred in recent years.

We give students three citation examples (in APA style) — a book, a journal article, and a book chapter — and ask them to identify what the citation is and then have a go at looking it up without any prior instruction. We then ask them to share with the class what they found and demonstrate how they went about it.

The class encourages them to ask questions, try things even if they don’t work and learn off their fellow students. We emphasise how their reading lists are made up of similar citations and how they can use the catalogue to identify these. If some students actually fail to find the item or can’t quite work out which part of the journal citation they are meant to put into the catalogue then this gives them a reason to stay in the room and engage with what’s going on.

Along the way, they see the catalogue as en entry point not only to holdings information but to e-Books, online journals, and digitized eReserve material.

We also give them a chance to use the various options for looking up books on topics that come from the themes of their courses. We ask them to select one of the items they have found and have a go at identifying the author, title, publishing details and cite using APA.

The hope is that students will have a better opportunity of realising the relevance of this type of session over a session that had them instructed from the front of the class.

Research skills for education students

As people are currently planning courses I thought I’d just quickly note how I saw the Library contributing to research skills in the various education programs.

The School’s active library borrowers

We ran a report recently on the number of active borrowers by School during 2007 (the report is purely on the different class of borrower not on individuals). There were 1957 students from the School that didn’t borrow a book this year, 1334 who borrowed at least one book and 233 who borrowed over 30 books. This is generally consistent with other Schools and reflects the changing patterns of library usage with the array of online resources now available. Still, it does emphasize the importance of strong and relevant print collections and the importance of research skills sessions for new students.

I’m always very happy, of course, for teachers and lecturers to get in touch either about the library sessions or title recommendations for the collection.

Endnote sessions for the School of Education

I have scheduled Endnote sessions for staff and postgraduates next week at the Bundoora and Swanston campuses. These sessions cover Endnote from the very basics to more advanced features. By the end of the session participants should be able to:

• Create Endnote libraries and manually enter references
• Insert those references into word documents as APA citations
• Use Endnote to search library catalogues and retain references located
• Import and export saved searches from library databases

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.