NELIG Meeting - 12/8/2006

Rensselaer at Hartford hosted the group’s first meeting testing Elluminate virtual conferencing software.  This software allows multiple sites to link to the host location with audio and projector feeds, as well as chat-based communication, on a real-time basis.  There were a total of 69 NELIG members from five group sites and a few individuals located throughout New England:

• Providence College – 17 participants
• Bowdoin College – 2 participants (others had signed up, but attendance was low due to a snowstorm
• Springfield College – 14 participants
• Keene State College – 17 participants
• Rensselaer at Hartford – 15 participants
• Individual Sites – 4 participants

NELIG co-chair Kendall Hobbs welcomed all participants to the December meeting and thanked Cecilia Dalzell for hosting the meeting as well as for her work in arranging the test of the Elluminate software at the different locations in New England. 

Announcements from the NELIG co-chair:

Kendall Hobbs announced that everyone at the meeting in Hartford and at each satellite location was invited to participate in the business meeting following the morning presentation and discussion to discuss (via Elluminate voice and chat) the 2007 annual meeting to be held at Assumption College on Friday, June 8.

“LSC 150 – Virtual Library Resources and Skills”

Presenters:

• Susan Slaga - Assistant Librarian, Central Connecticut State University, slagas@ccsu.edu
• Emily Chasse - Reference Librarian, Central Connecticut State University, chasse@ccsu.edu
  presentation
       notes for presentation
  syllabus
       class schedule

Susan Slaga and Emily Chasse discussed their work on converting CCSU’s information literacy course to an online environment using WebCT.  The original for-credit format of the class was a demonstration of library resources that began in 1995 and was further developed as the campus added computers.  Participants in the current WebCT Vista class can be freshmen through seniors and the class can be used to meet the university’s general education requirements.  The lessons are built into fourteen individual modules and cover a tour of the library, the online catalog, how to construct bibliographic citations, how to find basic reference sources, advanced database searching techniques, how to evaluate web sites, plagiarism, and RSS feeds.  Susan and Emily assess the students using a pretest of skills, weekly assignments, a midterm exam, and a final exam or project.  In addition to homework assignments, lecture notes and grades for the class are posted to WebCT.  Emily also uses the e-mail, chat and threaded discussion functions available through WebCT for her information literacy classes.  Textbooks used in this class are “The College Student’s Research Companion” (Arlene Quaratiello) and “Student Guide to Research in the Digital Age: How to Locate and Evaluate Information Sources” (Leslie Stebbins).  Susan and Emily have also created the Basic Information Literacy Tutorial (BILT), http://mylibrary.ccsu.edu/TILT/, modeled after TILT (the Texas Information Literacy Tutorial).
 

“Information Literacy 101 – The Making of an Online Class”

Presenter:

• Libby Knapik - Instructional Services, Sacred Heart University, knapike@sacredheart.edu
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  syllabus

The impetus to establish an information literacy class online was the result of a NEASC (New England Association of Schools and Colleges) review.  Libby was hired in August 2004 to create an information literacy class from scratch for the fall semester (commencing 3½  weeks later).  She piloted the first class in Fall 2004 and now has six to ten sessions each semester.  The core curriculum at Sacred Heart will include information literacy classes beginning Fall 2007 (which will increase the amount of classes to approximately twenty-five per semester).  To accommodate this growth, the class is now being converted to an online environment using Blackboard.  For the conversion, she formed a team of librarians and staff which helped her to translate each week’s objective into modules and write narratives for each lesson.  In rewriting the course, she reorganized the sequence of lessons to assess web sites before lessons covering database searching, and she built in weekly quizzes rather than having a final exam.  This allowed her to cover more material over the course of the semester.  The final project now is built on the weekly assignments by adding content to an annotated resource guide that includes both print and web-based sources.  She also uses a pre-test before the first class and a post-test after the last class to assess the learning progress of the students during the semester.  She evaluates the class results regularly to reinforce concepts when needed and make changes where necessary if the evaluations indicate problems with students comprehending the material.

Respectfully submitted,
Diane Klare
NELIG Secretary
2006/2007