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.)

Ed's Mini Book Review - Deadline by Mira Grant

Deadline gets me back into the zombie swing of things though, like its predecessor, its a zombie book that is not really a zombie book but it has zombies....sort of.

The set up is, there was a zombie outbreak over a decade ago and life has normalized as much as it can in a world where zombies are real. The virus is still out there and outbreaks can happen if you "amplify" for whatever reason thus becoming a zombie. Blood tests are abound to make sure you won't amplify so we're talking about major paranoia. Add in the shift in news and media since the outbreak, as the established media poo-pooed stories of zombies so no one really trusts them anymore. Enter the blogger, your man on the street so to speak with a mic and a camera who is going to give the news to you as it really is, no filter.

That's the world of Deadline, and it's predecessor, Feed. This book shifts the narration to Shaun Mason from his sister Georgia Mason from the first but it still follows the Mason blogging crew as they investigate, more like get swept into, another conspiracy involving the Kellis-Amberlee virus, the virus that caused the zombie mayhem. I was eager to see this play out as Shaun is the risk taker of the two with Georgia being more practical. I thought we would get a more actiony story this time around but that really isn't the case. This was more of the conspiracy tale and there were points where the paranoia is ratcheted up and one point in particular stands out as the tension builds and you feel the paranoia the characters feel and then...well I'll leave that for you to find out. My one big disappointment with this book however is that Shaun turns into a bit of a whiner. All right, we get it already dude, no need to whine for the whole book. He was the tough, reckless action man in the first book, here he is just a whiney little bitch. I was hoping someone, anyone, me perhaps, would slap him and snap him out of it. Some character try but he goes back to whine central. That and the "cliffhanger" ending is pretty much telegraphed.

A solid entry but not as great as I hoped.

My Grade: B-

LL

Ed's Mini Book Review - The A, B, C Murders by Agatha Christie

Image by iknow-uk via FlickrIt's hard to believe that these mysteries were written almost a hundred years ago but let me tell, you, they do stand the test of time. If you've read my reviews or even just seen the types of books that I read, you can tell that I have a taste for the fantastic. Whether they be zombies, wizard detectives, or British exorcists, the stuff that's right up my alley tend to be a little out of the ordinary. The Agatha Christie mysteries are fairly ordinary mysteries on the surface. No zombies or wizards or vast governmental conspiracies but they are all out of the ordinary in how well done they are and how they keep you wanting to finish the mystery and see if you've had it pegged all along.

My first encounter with an Agatha Christie mystery was back in the 80's when my family just got cable and Evil Under the Sun was on HBO almost every day it seemed. That was where I was introduce to Hercule Poirot, played by Peter Ustinov, and has drawn me to read the Poirot mysteries almost thirty years later. Now the premise of The A, B, C Murders is one that you may be familiar with since it has been copied in some form ad nauseum. Poirot is taunted by a killer who sends him letters proclaiming Poirot cannot catch him as he murders people according to the alphabet. What I really liked about this Poirot mystery was the feeling that Poirot was a bit helpless and and was stumped. From the other Poirot books that I've read, and from some other mystery books, shows or movies, you can fall into the lull of knowing the good guy is going to prevail and in the end you know Poirot will figure it out but Christie does a masterful job of leading you along with Poirot wondering how long he will be stumped.

No spoilers here so read her books, I command you! Another excellent entry into the series and it has even gotten me to add some Miss Marple mysteries to my read pile.

My Grade: A-

LL