NELIG Blog

Presenter: Ann Perbohner, Dartmouth College
Description from program: Just In Time Teaching (JiTT) is an instruction method that creates a “feedback loop” where students are engaged in pre-class cloud computing based active learning exercises, and the ensuing in-class time together. Student responses are then used to form the basis or starting point for a classroom discussion led by their librarian. This presentation will include instruction ideas that can be implemented right away with little or no cost.

Ann Perbohner is a Physical Sciences Librarian at Dartmouth and tends to think of her users as remote because of distance between collections and services. She teaches mostly in first year seminar classes, and instructors are supposed to have a librarian in each course.

Ann’s story is probably familiar to many librarians: presented with an agenda for library instruction “you must cover this, this and this”, she began by using handouts – paper handouts – and by trying to schedule classes at the most opportune research moment. Ann covered all the requisite bases, printing the handouts on colored paper, targeting them to the specific topic, using all the tricks of the trade to get the students’ attention. She was most excited by her lime-green handout on the “Life Cycle” of scholarly information. But here’s what she discovered: the students fell asleep, the professors were worried about time, and she never had time to cover everything.

Ann decided to use her “Life Cycle” handout as inspiration to change her methods, after one of her students asked a simple question: “What’s the take-home message of this?” She thought: Why not live the information life cycle? As a result, she decided to push more and more of the teaching of library instruction onto the students themselves, and move away from covering the mechanics of doing library research towards discovering how information is organized, selected, and re-used.

Enter JiTT – Just in time teaching -  which is being actively promoted by Eric Mazur after he discovered that students were passing exams and getting good grades without really understanding the material.  The same thing could be happening in our instruction sessions.  Techniques of JiTT include:

• develop question for students before class
• post those questions online!
• questions should be open-ended
• explore students’ prior knowledge
• explore students’ beliefs and attitudes
• instructor reviews responses right before session
• excerpts from responses are basis for class session
• students become active participants in creating focus of the session
• uses research guide (libguide) as supplements or illustrations

Enter cloud computing to achieve some of these goals.

• To distribute the pre-session questions, she uses SurveyMonkey . The answers to the questions have been very revealing.  She found that students are more confident than skilled, and that they can get easily confused by our paths to information and our “cute names” for things.
• Instead of the multiple handouts she used to print and distribute, Ann now uses LibGuides to present the information and points the students to them.
• Ann turns the answers to their questions into a word cloud - a visual representation of their responses and questions and what is most important to them. 
  
• Mind maps can also be integrated into the class to illustrate the process of research, instead of the rote path to compensate for the “forgetting curve”. To bring it all together, Ann turned her Life Cycle of Scholarly Information into a mind map so that students can visualize it themselves and really learn how information is organized and delivered.

The concept of a “Google Jockey” – someone who is a participant in a class session who surfs the internet for terms, ideas, or Web sites mentioned by the presenter – has been employed in classes, a form of extreme reference and on-the-fly research.  You have to be comfortable with failure and the possibility of not finding anything!

But Ann’s new mantra is: Fail early, fail often. It motivates us to discover and learn and employ new technologies that will ultimately help our students become better researchers. We may even be able to break through social boundaries and relate to students in a new way.

Ann measures success by the number of contacts following the class, and through faculty response, along with more traditional assessment methods. She also find students are more likely to answer/ask questions anonymously.

So what’s the take away message of this session? Think outside the box – think into the clouds and remember the ultimate goal: to teach students be better researchers.

References are available at http://researchguides.dartmouth.edu/nelig2010

Blogged by Veronica Kenausis, Western CT State University