Tag: Librarianship

Using the annotated bibliography as the “establishing shot”

ahosierLeave a comment

Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

Lately I’ve been reading some scholarly literature from the writing studies field for a project I’m working on. I’m always fascinated by the parallels I see between how writing studies practitioners/scholars and information literacy practitioners/scholars talk about what they do and the challenges they face. I really think we need a space for practitioners and scholars in these two fields to talk to each other about their work.

Anyway, I found what I think could be an interesting new parallel in the article Documenting and Discovering Learning: Reimagining the Work of the Literacy Narrative by Julie Lindquist and Bump Halbritter.

This article has me thinking: what if the research we ask students to do in information literacy classes came at the beginning of the course instead of at the end? What if we used it as an “establishing shot”?

Let me explain.

Read More »

Thoughts on the Leadership Institute for Academic Library Managers at Siena College

ahosierLeave a comment

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend the Leadership Institute for Academic Library Managers at Siena College, featuring sessions on emotional intelligence, strategic thinking, communicating effectively, leading change, leadership style, and developing teams taught by Paul Thurston, David Liebschutz, Melinda Costello, and Erik Eddy. I found this to be an incredibly valuable experience where I learned far more than I have space for here. But I wanted to at least reflect on a few key points, things that I learned not only about leadership but also about myself.

Read More »

ACRL Questions: Talking to faculty about the contextual nature of research

ahosierLeave a comment

Image by TeroVesalainen from Pixabay

This is a new post in an ongoing series where I’m answering questions that came up during my ACRL presentation “Research is Not a Basic Skill.” Previous posts discussed student proficiency versus student confidence, models for teaching the contextual nature of research, why we’re talking in terms of “research” instead of “information literacy,” and the relationship between some of these ideas and critical information literacy.

Today I’m going to spend some time on talking to faculty about the contextual nature of research.

Read More »

Defining research

ahosierLeave a comment

Image by Hebi B. from Pixabay

I’ve been talking quite a bit here so far about research and I realize that I haven’t really defined my terms. On the one hand, “research” is a term that doesn’t seem to need defining. You know it when you see it. For example, when you type “research” into Pixabay, the images that come up show things that are recognizably related to the idea of research. There’s a guy staring at a bunch of notes pinned to a board. A microscope. A book with some glasses resting on it. A woman sitting at a computer while sipping from a cup of coffee. Stacks of books in a library. Another woman in a white coat in a lab. Beakers. Charts. Graphs.

Research. Obviously.

But maybe it’s not so obvious.

Read More »

I created a Skillshare course and I feel weird about it

ahosierLeave a comment

Image by Michal Jarmoluk from Pixabay

So in May, I completed the Skillshare Teach Challenge, which is where you spend a month creating a course for the Skillshare platform. I first discovered Skillshare after searching for a viable side gig to replace one I’ve been doing for a long time that I knew needed to come to an end. The materials on Skillshare make a big deal about how their top teachers make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year through their platform, which I took with a large grain of salt and actually if you dig deeper, you find out that productive teachers on Skillshare who release about one course a month make around $300 a month, which still seemed overly optimistic for my case. Anyway, I had an idea for a possible course and I wanted to try it out.

The course I created for the challenge is called Working with Scholarly Articles. Here’s the referral link, if you’re interested: https://skl.sh/2YTGicb

And here’s how creating it went.

Read More »

Librarians are failed writers

ahosier2 Comments

Image by vicki4net from Pixabay

I’m not sure at what point in your college career you’re supposed to start seriously thinking about what you want to do for a living after you graduate. I suspect if I asked my students now, they would tell me that this is something they were expected to figure out in high school. That they’ve entered college with an eye toward earning whatever degree is most marketable in whatever field is currently experiencing a lot of growth.

For me, there was never any question about what I wanted to study. I’d known I wanted to be an English major since approximately the sixth grade. But it took until my junior year of college for me to realize that I needed to figure out what, exactly, I wanted to do with that degree once I graduated. So I left it kinda late.

Knowing this, I went to a writing professor of mine for advice. I told him I had looked at a number of possible career paths, including librarianship.

“Don’t become a librarian,” he said. “Librarians are losers. They’re all just failed writers.”

Read More »