22 May 2008

Where is the Busy Bee? Busy.

One might think that when students leave campus, work slows down. Not so. The last three weeks have been a whirlwind at Champlain as we held the Faculty Collaborative. As part of this three week event, I hosted a workshop on the power of Annotated Bibliographies in generating better researched, more well written and more organized research papers. The 12 faculty that attended all were very supportive and interested in both using annotated bibs but also incorporating an exercise I developed into their class time to bring the bibliographies to life for students.

I then participated in a discussion on The Role of Technology in our Classrooms. It was a fascinating discussion and certainly made me think about the write up I am doing of CiL presentation on taking 2.0 to Faculty. One of my key points is about faculty perceptions of technology and this talk made me focus in on that topic once again.

But for the last week, I have been pushing info lit on our General Education faculty (the Core Division, as we call them at Champlain). Champlain redesigned our gen eds a year ago and first year of the new curriculum was reviewed, discussed, and revised. There was a lot of positive feedback on the information literacy efforts. By far the biggest challenge is trying to remind faculty that information literacy is not just about finding information for a research paper. It is a life skill, rather than something you just do for school. But the faculty at Champlain is so extraordinary in their willingness to collaborate that I have no doubt that we will make great strides in our efforts.

So what am I getting at? Like the rest of you, I've been busy. But I have been also feeling guilty about not taking the few minutes I've had at my computer to blog. But between ACRL Immersion, which I will be prepping for and attending in late July, and designing the 2nd year curriculum, I will be back to blogging as a venue for bouncing ideas around and seeing where they land.

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