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Teaching has been an important part of my life for over 14 years. I’ve moved from the regular classroom to the online classroom in more recent years, and while my official title has been College Composition Instructor, I’ve really been actively involved in teaching information literacy. This sudden insight occurred to me one day as I was trying to explain the results of my ILS 680 research project to my boss. Up until that point, I had just thought I was helping my students get the best resources they could for their research papers.
In order to help them do that, I created lectures, handouts and assignments to help them navigate the library. Some of the courses I took in the MLS program helped me create better lectures and more effective assignments. For instance, in ILS 642, Management of Electronic Resources and Services, our final project consisted of creating a library lesson. I turned in this particular version, Final Project, and added it to my College Composition II course at Front Range Community College; however, within 4 months, our library had added new and exciting databases along with a new way to access the databases, so it was necessary to revise the lesson: Final ProjectA. And, for CCCOnline, the original library lesson evolved into a listing of libraries and other resources that students can access from their WebCT courses: http://ccconline.org/faculty/ResrchLibs.htm.
Evaluating resources is another important skill. Before beginning my MLS studies, my students were required to evaluate a web site. This however, usually required the student to more attention to the web site’s aesthetics than the actual content. In ILS 503, one of my assignments involved evaluating two different web sites using Richard Harris’s CARS Evaluation (http://www.virtualsalt.com/evalu8it.htm). Once I completed the Web Evaluation assignment, I was impressed at just how useful the evaluation criteria really was, and how it could be applied to both print and web resources, so I threw out the old web evaluation and created a new one that required students to use CARS to evaluate a web source and a print source. Here is the College Composition II assignment students are required to do: Unit 5 Assignments.
The Writer’s Garden, the digital library I created for ILS 551, Digital Libraries, has also proven invaluable to my instruction. It pulls together many useful web pages, dealing with all aspects of writing and teaching writing, into one searchable collection. Others involved in the teaching of writing have found my digital library useful as well; firstwriter.com, the Internet TESL Journal, La Mansion Del Ingles and Sprachcaffe have all contacted me about including links to their web sites on the Writer’s Garden, and have offered to place links on their pages to mine.
Last updated to add CSS Stylesheet on March 5, 2005, by Mary L. Cash