Upcoming Reads

Currently on my read pile:

Armada by Ernest Cline

The Hellsblood Bride by Chuck Wendig

For the Win by Cory Doctorow

Daemon by Daniel Suarez

Gone Tomorrow by Lee Child

Ed's Mini Book Review - The Kill Society: A Sandman Slim Novel

I love me some Sandman Slim. Let that be known up front. Full of witty, smarmy-ness and sometimes obscure, pop culture references. But, to be honest, I couldn't tell you much about the story line of the last few books. I chewed them up for Stark (Sandman Slim) and the pop culture references.

This go around, I was all in. I dug the story and various plot lines and legit wanted to see how it all turns out. Who is the mysterious leader of Havoc, The Magistrate and what is behind his "quest"? Is Stark going to get a new hook-up? I was there, pillar to post and my only big knock is that I think it ended too quickly. There I was, 400 pages in and I still felt cheated. I wanted more, I wanted to see where things took Stark next, but I guess I have to wait until next year.

Overall, an excellent outing for Sandman Slim and I can't wait for the next one.

My Grade: A-

LL

Bye Bye BI

The powers that be decided that the prime real estate that our Bibliographic Instruction Lab occupies would be better served being a student art gallery. You heard that right folks, a student art gallery. It's not like library instruction isn't central to what academic libraries do, right.

It's depressing watching them dismantle the lab. Now we will have to share the lab in the media center, in the bowels of the library, for all the library instruction. Sad to watch this library slowly being stripped away.

Is anybody out there?

Almost a year since my last post, and now I am back. Now this time I am going to live up to my pledge to write on here (honestly I will).

Lots of things cooking in the last year and I will write about them all, well most of them anyway.

First up will be my teaching/research in the academic library field, then maybe some book and/or movie reviews. Maybe even a video game review or two.

Posterizing!

So I get this invite to serve on this committee-type project that is looking to assess students information literacy skills though their term papers. The term papers are referred to as, and I am not kidding here, "artifacts" and thus the Student Artifact Study (SAS) is born. This entailed grading papers just looking at the Information Literacy components of the papers, compiling the data, analysis and reporting of all this.

Once the report was done, and it wasn't all that easy to get everyone on board with the final product of the report, there comes word of an assessment, yes everyone in academia's favorite word, program that the university is putting together. It gets gently recommended to me that this would be a great venue for a junior faculty member, such as myself, to gain some campus wide exposure, so I get the hint and start formulating a plan for world domination. At least campus domination anyway.

So I get in touch with another junior faculty member that was on the committee with me, and we decide to posterize our report and make some handouts assuming our proposal gets accepted. It did get accepted and we did do the poster and fun handouts. The fair is next month and I am keeping my fingers crossed that I don't make a fool of myself at the session. I envision coffee spilling at some point.

LL

Flip (and not Wilson)?!?

Image via WikipediaSo check this out blog peeps (all 4 of you). I am looking at jumping on the, FOTM in education, bandwagon and running a flipped classroom. My little spin on it will teaching an information literacy class, which is really a seven week workshop and see if there is an difference in the results from other times that I have run the class before. I wonder if in such a short time frame that the flip design will produce the results that I have been reading about in other "traditional" classes.

I've got some time to create the videos since the class doesn't run until the Fall. You can check out some info on Flipped Classrooms over at Ted or the Khan Academy which has a lot of video examples of flipped lessons and some videos talking about the flipped design.

LL

I Will Post More, I Will Not Fall Behind!

I Promise, I promise.

I have about four entries that are in the works and they've been in the works for a while. I would finish them now but the battery on the MacBook is at 9%. I'll keep up to date, I will I will.

Ok, enough of that. Back to the writing....or the charging of the MacBook.

More to come from the LL!!!

(I like referring to myself as the LL, makes feel like The Rock.)