The Value of Free and Deep Web Resources (aka Google vs. Databases)

This is designed to introduce students to the wonderful world of periodicals, in their great variety, and to how they will appear in different databases. It also begins the work of building their skills at evaluating information sources, determining perspective.

This assignment follows from a presentation that shows high school and early college students how information gaps function. The presentation uses information regarding the dwarf planet Pluto as an example, then prompts students to apply the tools they've learned to investigate an information gap in solar energy policy: solar energy AND communities experiencing high poverty rates.

(Thanks to Amanda Meeks at Northern Arizona University for sharing her insight into her development of an avatar-based method for promoting empathy in classrooms and for allowing their use in other learning spaces, including clinical settings.)

In this assignment students work in groups on closely reading international policy documents, noting substantive changes in a policy area over time, and ploting those changes in the timeline tool, TimelineJS.

In this exercise students use the Voyant word analysis tool to analyze Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. (Any literary work would work.)

This assignment leads students through an analysis of media coverage of the 1965 Watts uprising. The intention is for students to learn more about the uprising and how a database can be used as a digital humanities tool.

This assignment requires students to apply their knowledge of antisemitic tropes to tweets with the final outcome of the assignment being a short analytical paper and a presentation.

As part of the research process, students need to learn how to organize and synthesize their sources. This short lecture, followed by a matrix outline given to every student, gives students the opportunity to focus their research question even more and to add their own ideas to the conversation of research within their chosen topic.

This activity is designed to support teaching at the intersections of scholarly communication and information literacy. The choose-your-own scenario activity, designed in LibWizard, can be used in a flipped classroom setting or in a traditional classroom. The choose-your-own scenario activity is inspired by and adapts questions from: Hare, S. & Evanson, C. (2018). Information privilege outreach for undergraduate students. College and Research Libraries.