The Contextual Nature of “Un-Research”

September 19, 2019September 18, 2019 ahosierLeave a comment

At this point, I’ve written a few things about the contextual nature of research and offered some thoughts on how to bring that idea into information literacy classrooms. I’ve also mentioned that my opportunities for changing my own teaching in the way I’m advocating for are somewhat limited at the moment.

Then I realized that some of these ideas actually have connections to something I tried in the past and wrote about in an article that was published in Communications in Information Literacy called “Teaching Information Literacy Through ‘Un-Research.’”

Selected Resources: Understanding Millennial Learning

September 17, 2019September 12, 2019 ahosierLeave a comment

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

You may not be aware of this, but every year the ACRL Instruction Section Teaching Methods Committee puts out two lists of Selected Resources, one focused on teaching methods and instructional design and the other focused on assessment. These lists feature articles and other materials that have been published the previous year that are worthy of note. It’s a resource that doesn’t get as much use or attention as it should, so I’ve decided to assign myself the homework of making my way through each item on the most recent lists and write about them here.

First up: “Understanding Millennial Learning in Academic Libraries” by Stan Trembach and Liya Deng (https://doi.org/10.1080/10691316.2018.1484835).

I was once a world famous magician

AsideSeptember 16, 2019September 16, 2019 ahosierLeave a comment

This month’s issue of College & Research Libraries News features a short article I wrote on my experience using improv in the classroom. Here’s a preview: A wise improv actor once told me that when students come to class, they expect to be bored. Unfortunately for information literacy instructors, there may be no place where […]

10 Books Project: Self-Editing for Fiction Writers

September 10, 2019 ahosierLeave a comment

So I’ve mentioned before that in my quest to read and analyze 10 popular books on creative writing to see how/whether they talk about the role of research in the creative process, not every book is a good candidate, but I’m being a completist about it anyway because you never know.

Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne & Dave King is the ninth book on the list. Below are some thoughts.

What #OwnVoices tells us about the importance of research to the creative process

September 5, 2019 ahosierLeave a comment

Image by tookapic from Pixabay

I first learned about the #OwnVoices movement in young adult literature earlier this year when Amelie Wen Zhao made headlines by pulling her work from publication due to criticism of “problematic content.” The movement made headlines again a few months later when Kosoko Jackson, a vocal member of the movement, was forced to pull his own book for similar reasons. Since then, there have been several thinkpieces about the movement and the motivations of the people behind it, including questions of whether what they’re doing constitutes censorship when it leads to books being pulled from publication.

As I understand it, what the #OwnVoices movement is demanding is that stories about marginalized groups should only be told about members of those marginalized groups. This seems to be a reaction to the fact that, historically speaking, books about marginalized groups tend to be written by privileged white people. At least, the ones that get published and get awards. The stance of the #OwnVoices people is that these stories should only be told in the voices of those who have actually experienced marginalization.

I am not particularly comfortable with what the #OwnVoices movement does or how it does it or cancel culture in general. But it seems to me that the movement was born of a legitimate grievance and one that points to just how problematic the myth of the artist as an inspired genius can be.(1)

Studies of Research: “I’d Say It’s Good Progress”

September 3, 2019September 3, 2019 ahosierLeave a comment

Image by Wokandapix from Pixabay

I spent some time recently answering some of the questions that came up about my presentation at the ACRL 2019 Conference in Cleveland way back in…wow, April. Now that all of that is done, I want to change the focus a little to other presentations and papers that came from that conference. Specifically, ones that focus on the study of research.

I’ve mentioned before that one of the cool things about the study of research is that it’s already out there, in so many forms and in so many fields (not just library and information science!), even if that’s not what the researchers doing this work would necessarily call it. I saw a lot of examples in the ACRL Conference program and I hope the researchers whose work I plan to talk about for this series don’t mind that I’ll be applying that label to what they do, but in each case I’ll try to make it clear why I’m doing that.

So let’s take a closer look at “I’d Say It’s Good Progress: An Ecological Momentary Assessment of Student Research Habits” by Emily Crist, Sean Leahy, and Alan Carbery.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch is secretly about the ethical use of information

August 29, 2019 ahosierLeave a comment

Image source: Wikipedia

One of my favorite pieces of scholarly literature in the library and information science field is an article by Emily Dill and Karen L. Janke called “New Shit Has Come to Light: Information Seeking Behavior in The Big Lebowski.” It is exactly what it sounds like: a study of the information-seeking strategies of the characters in The Big Lebowski.

I think of this article every time I watch Hedwig and the Angry Inch because every time I watch Hedwig, all I can think about is how, underneath all of its other themes, it is, at its core, a lesson about the ethical use of information.

Let me explain.

(The following includes spoilers for Hedwig and the Angry Inch, both the movie and the play.)

Studying Research

Research is not a basic skill