What They Learned in Class

I taught a "one-shot" session of The World of Mass Communication this semester. It's a 100-level class designed to introduce students to the School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

I went in to talk about doing better Google searches AND to show them some of our spiffy news databases. I created a LibGuide for the class which got a lot of use that day in class an a wee bit of use following the class.

As usual, I asked the class to write a bit about what they learned in class. Because the class had over 300 students, we were not able to talk about what they learned. Instead, the professors asked students to write in Sakai (our course management system) a sentence or two about what they learned.

Professor Boynton sent me a copy of what they said. The comments themselves were helpful, but I also enjoyed looking at what they learned in a word cloud.


I was happy to see that several of the things they said they learned were topics I had taught in class: "I learned how to use quotes in google to get more exact search results" and "I really like the chat option that the library offers so that many of our questions can get answered!"

One of their assignments was to find a blog and analyze it over the course of the semester, so I taught them that they could do a fancy Google search with inurl:blog -- which is why that phrase shows up in the tag cloud.

The class was great fun to teach, and the word cloud helps me analyze what they learned in my session.

Infographic: Research on Students' Research Habits

The good folks at the University of Washington's Project Information Literacy created a great infographic of their findings about 11,000 college students' research habits:

For the text-based learners among you:

• 70% use Wikipedia 
• 92% use search engines

Other resources students use for course research:

• 88% library databases
• 83% instructors
• 30% librarians (emphasis mine)

What's most difficult about doing research?

• 84% getting started

and check out the 12 adjectives students use to describe how they feel about research assignments!

For more, check out the Project Info. Literacy website, where you can read an article from College & Research Libraries about Alison Head's research, watch a video, and more!

Working with Students, Non-traditionally

I've branched out into non-traditional librarian-student interaction, and it's been a great success.

This spring, I collaborated with JOMC professor Spencer Barnes and his Infographics students. Dr. Barnes asks the students to create (amazing) infographics over the course of the semester. In the past, I have worked with him and his students to find great statistics for their work; my favorite sources for them are the Statistical Abstract of the United States and Statista; see the full list of sources on this library course page I created for JOMC 182: Infographics.

That's the traditional part.

Here's the non-traditional part: I thought it would be fun to graphically display some library statistics for UNC's Library Snapshot Day, and I asked Dr. Barnes if his students would be able to design something for me. He graciously agreed to let "library statistics" be one of the three topics students could tackle for their final project.

I am so pleased with the results! Three students participated, and my favorite is this, by sophomore Marissa T. It's a striking representation of library service, collection, and "library as place" over the past year or so.

This summer, I'm working with professor Lois Boynton and students in her JOMC 232: Public Relations Writing class. The Park Library is their semester-long client, and they are working towards increasing students' awareness of library reference services. I'll blog about their efforts once their project has finished.

Non-traditional student interaction is as rewarding as traditional student interaction, AND it's helped me enhance the Park Library. Win, win, win.