 Hi, this is Jessica Hagman here at Alden Library, and today I have with me Hannah Schmillen and Paul Campbell, who are librarians here at Alden, and they are going to tell us about presentations they are doing at the Spotlight on Learning Conference next week that is in Baker Center on Tuesday. So, Hannah, let's start with you. Could you tell us first what you do here at Alden? Sure. So, I'm the Health Sciences and Professions Librarian. So, I am the liaison from the library to that entire college, and I answer questions, and I teach one-shot classes, kind of like a guest speaker. I buy things. So, basically a little bit of everything. And you work here on the second floor? Yeah, I live here on the second floor of Alden, but I also have office hours in Grover to be a little bit more accessible to the people that I work with. Paul, what about you? What do you do here? I am, my official title is the Social Science Librarian, but I specifically liaise with the Political Science, Psychology, and the Masters of Public Administration Departments or Programs. And you work here on the second floor as well, right? Yes. Hannah and I share a wall. We work walls together. Yes. Yes. So, Hannah, could you tell us what you're presenting about at the conference? Sure. So, I'm going to be talking about active learning strategies and information literacy. So, specifically, I use a strategy called Search Smackdown. All right. So, we had a little bit of a hiccup. Could you tell us again what you're doing, you're talking about at the conference? Yeah. So, I'll be talking about information literacy and active learning strategies in the classroom. Specifically, I'm going to be focusing around one of the strategies I use, which is called the Search Smackdown. And it is. So, it's like this competition, but it also allows students to work together in groups. We have discussion time and reflection. But also, it's like this quick, fast pace I had to hurry up and answer questions in a variety of sources. So, it kind of hits on several active learning components, which I'll talk about and discuss the importance of that. But also, I'm going to be making my people, so no pressure, who are coming to my session actually participate in that activity so they can see what it's like and we'll talk about the benefits or disadvantages of it. So, what kind of classes have you used this strategy with? Mostly higher level courses. So, the physician assistant orientation, I worked with them first and it was a two hour time slot that I had. So, I had a lot of time. But I've also worked with, I did it in a senior level nursing course, as well as I think an athletic training course as well. So, higher level, mostly those students are doing research projects for the most part, but at least to kind of get them an idea of like, you can't just search one place and get all of the answers. Like, that doesn't exist. So, talking about how different resources have different authority and different kind of subjects is really advantageous to these future research professionals. It sounds like a good, like I've been in classes too, where there's just lots of different resources that students need to use. If you just go through all of them, it's really hard to talk about all of those things in a short amount of time and not bore people to do it. Right. So, it's a good way to kind of combat that scenario. Yeah. So, this is a lot less of list listing and lecturing and more hands-on like, you dabble in this and then we'll share and see was it successful or was it not. So, it's a good way for them to be aware of all these resources without being like, you know, and for PubMed, this is what you search and there's X amount of citate. They don't care about that. It's like, what can I use it for? Can I actually search it? Is it easy to use and what do I find? So, I've gotten feedback from students about this activity. They love it, especially because I usually have chocolate prizes. So, they're, you know, kind of, no, yes, I will have prizes on Tuesday. But it kind of gets their adrenaline going a little bit. But then they, you can see just the light bulbs go, oh my gosh, you can't just find everything in one spot. Because that's what you want. I like, that's my intention with this. So, the responses from students have been overwhelmingly positive. And I've been trying to find ways to tweak it, to reuse it, and then share it so other people could use it if they have an appropriate context. I think I might have to steal that technique for me the next time I teach a class where we have lots of tools. Is there anything else you want to tell us about that? No, I think that about covers that come to the session and you can learn more. What time is your? It's from one to two, I believe. Oh, now I'm not sure. It's either one to two or two to three. It's one to two. We'll schedule in the comment box so that you can see the full schedule if you would like to see Hannah's presentation. All right, Paul, what about you? I'm going to be talking about also at the one to two o'clock hour. So, Hannah and I are going to be competing against each other. That's sad. But I will not be giving out chocolate, so I just want to throw that out there. I'm going to be talking about a collaboration I did at a previous position at Ohio University Lancaster, where I was the Instruction Librarian there. I worked with a history professor, Prima Nguong, teaching her History 3111J, which is like the senior writing or senior capstone type course. And the culminating project for that is a original research on some historical topic. And she and I originally collaborated over the summer previous to the course being taking place. Excuse me. To try to develop a curriculum or how can the library benefit her course? Because she was getting tired of having just the one shot, 50 minutes. This is the library resources. Good luck, right? And then the students completely forget about it. And as a librarian, I also get frustrated with those because I feel like it really doesn't do anybody any good. The faculty member, the students or the librarian. And so by developing, we initially had three different library sessions and each one of them we talked about a different aspect of the research process. And we also talked about incorporating the framework of information literacy, so if you're dying to know what that is, please come on Tuesday. But we realized that the students still had questions about the research process after those three initial sessions. And so what we did is she actually came to me and she was like, can you come back three more times? And I was like, absolutely. Oh my gosh, that's amazing. So it was a librarian's fantasy that we had a total of six sessions. So the first three were more lecture and active learning about the research process, but then the final three or the last three were more like review and more of a workshop. So she would start at one into the room to give because she's the subject matter expert in history. So she would give that perspective of advice to the students and I would start the other room to give because I'm the subject matter expert for research, right? So I would start at the other end and we would just kind of give the unsolicited advice to the students in order to better research on their topic. And so we got to talk about neat things about how to use Wikipedia in a research process. And so students were like, oh my god, you can't use Wikipedia. Well, to blow their minds blow their minds. I mean, yes and no. So I hope to talk about that on Tuesday and how Wikipedia or Google in general can be a very useful topic when you use it effectively. So it was a wonderful collaboration and then actually it has really informed my practice as a librarian in my current position here at Alden Library. And so I really stress to the faculty that I work with about having more than just one session regarding their research topic or their research in their studies. It must be useful to have that experience to hand and be like, hey, this time this happened and look how well it turned out for the students. Yes. And that's why I'm really excited about this particular presentation on Tuesday is that I hope that if faculty have questions about, hmm, I wonder how the library can really help their students reach at a higher level of their bibliography or whatever, this hopefully will inform them. When you were working in that class, was it all students working on one type of topic or were they all doing different topics? Oh, it was all throughout history. The majority of them were American history of some sort. But there was, I mean, Queen Elizabeth I, one student did a history of graduate university. That's the deaf university in Washington, DC. So it was a wide gamut of information. So being able to give students effective research tools in 50 minutes on all of history is unrealistic. I mean, you can't teach history in 50 minutes. So how can you teach research in 50 minutes? So that was kind of the process that Dr. Wang and I had or the philosophy that we had. And I think that working with faculty and developing a library integration has been kind of like the highlight of my career. I know that sounds really cheesy, but it's so much fun when not only am I achieving the goals that I think the students should have, but then also working with the faculty to realize that my goals are their goals. It's just a different. Should we get those online? Yeah. Yeah. They're just different language, but it's the same thing. So it's a lot of fun. I really like it that when faculty and I are able to present or write articles about these collaborations for the study of teaching and learning journals, for example. So that's what I'm really looking forward to. Awesome. What made, I guess for both of you, what made you decide that you wanted to present at this conference? To spread the good word. Yeah. To be evangelical of the library. That we're doing really amazing things. And the things that we do impact students and the instructors directly. So like when I did my search smackdown, pretty much every instructor was like, I had no idea that existed. Or I didn't know you could search in that way. But also they could see the impact of their students. Like the conversations and the discussion that they were having was so much more in depth than I could have done with just like, and here's the library. Because it doesn't really mean anything. So this really made it relevant to them into the class and what they were doing like you were talking about. So the reason why I wanted to present is because it shows the opportunities that we have to collaborate with faculty and to make a huge impact on student learning, which like you said, it's not necessarily the same language. And we do talk a lot about information literacy frameworks and that, which are really important. And how we can make them specific to for that specific subject. Because I mean, health sciences, information literacy, I can help make that happen. So yeah, mostly it was to spread the good word and also show people strategies that they could use in their classroom. Like you don't have to have a librarian to make information literacy happen, or to make active learning happen. I mean, it's great if that collaboration is possible. But at least in this way, we're kind of planting the seeds a little bit to other possibilities that are out there. Because it's silly to limit yourself. I really wanted to piggyback on what Hannah was saying about being evangelical about showing how wonderful the library is in the librarians, because I'm totally biased on that. Yeah, naturally. We all agree. But my experience with one shot instruction, just that 150 minute, here's the library, black here it is, go away. I as a librarian don't get that relationship with the students or the faculty member. But when I have multiple sessions with students, they'll stop me in the hallway, or stop me on the street saying, hey, Paul, I finally found this article, or I finally found this source that was just perfect. And so it makes me get up the next day. But also the students, I every session, whether it's one shot or six sessions, I always tell them, please contact me. I mean, that's what I'm paid the big bucks to do is to help you with your I can't do it for you, but I can I can certainly help you along the way. And they never do. But when I have multiple relations, relationships, excuse me, multiple sessions with those students that relationship develops. And so they are much more comfortable coming to me, either emailing me or showing up for a consultation in my office. And we can talk about different strategies or thinking about their topic on a broader or even a more specific terms. There was one other thing that I really wanted to make a point of, but I can't remember what it was. I did wonder whether you were working with history students, if you're mostly looking at articles or primary sources or what kind of information they were actually looking for. Thank you, that reminded me. We looked at both in this particular example. First off, we looked at tertiary sources, but then we also looked at secondary sources books and articles about whatever their history topic was. But then we looked at primary sources. And I have learned that students, when you ask them, do you know what a primary source is, they will say, Oh, yeah, of course, of course, I know what is, then you challenge them and they're like, well, kind of hard to determine what that's primary. And it may change. Right. And depending on the question, it might be different thing. And so one of the learning activities, active learning activities that I did with the students was one day we I told them that I was personally unfastened with the late 60s of American history. I think it's a pivotal moment in American history. But so I had a PowerPoint of images or items that were primary sources. And I asked students how I could use them as a primary source. So I used Johnson's Daisy ad. I used a painting that Andy Warhol had at the time. I used an electrolyte vacuum ad. And I asked the students how first I asked the students, is this item a secondary or primary source or tertiary? And then how could I use this item as a primary source? Like what question would have to be used? And of course, my last one was Wikipedia. And how could I use this as a primary source? And they their minds blew. But there are very narrow questions that you can use about how Wikipedia might portray women in history, or for example. So that could be used as a primary source in that specific case. Not always. So it was a very fun activity. The whole class was really engaged in trying to understand. And one thing that was really nice is that Dr. Wong had a journal, research journal that the students had to fill out throughout the course in Blackboard. Could you see those as they were doing them? No, I could not see them. But she did share with me. Obviously, because of student privacy, she couldn't tell me who. But one student really mentioned about that particular learning activity really helped the student understand truly what a primary source is and how it's a lot of gray. And it really helped the student understand the topic that they were researching. So it seems like here you both talk about your presentations and how you're doing teaching. It sounds like, and correct me if I'm interpreting incorrectly, but it sounds like you're trying to take and recognize how complex the research process is. Like there's nothing you could ever teach in a day or even a semester. But so you've got different ways of trying to take that complex experience and make it, use these activities to do as much as you can. That limited amount of time would just say that's a good kind of time. That's how I see the time between you both is you're both taking this like how many primary sources that got lots of different topics. And you're kind of lengthening the instruction and whereas you're using kind of gamification techniques to only have one session to kind of still show all the different strategies. It's just kind of a different approach. Yeah, I would agree with that. I mean, it's not only for my benefit, but at least with my students. If they are in the emergency room or if they have a patient coming in, a lot of times they have one minute to find an evidence-based answer, right? Which is why I try to use that time limit because I have them search. Okay, so they're each searching for different resources in groups and then I'm prompting them like find a systematic review, find a case study, find an answer to this thing. So the time limit, I mean, I have a time limit myself to show them a lot of things, but also they have time limits. They have restrictions themselves. So showing them how to be efficient and effective researchers help them in their practice, but also having that like concept of sometimes it has to be quick, but there's ways to do it well. Because I have limited time too, it really works well together. So yeah, we're trying to show them a lot of things to help them be successful in a short amount of time, which is not ideal. I would love multiple sessions so we can dive deeper into that. So yeah, it's a way to kind of get at multiple aspects at once to make sure that the most learning happens. It seems like you're both really adapting it well for the discipline. Really different disciplines. Like you recognize the time thing is something, in addition to learning how to research, they also need to learn how to find information and reliable information quickly. Whereas with history, it's so complex and I want to better recognize how complex all that information is. I think that one unifying element between Hannah and May's my presentations or teaching strategies specifically with our two presentations is that our intention is that when students leave the university, they will no longer have access to Ohio University resources. So we want them to be informed citizens and knowing how to evaluate and use and engage with the information that they're bombarded with on a daily basis, either through social media or at work. They have that one minute to make a decision on finances or care of the patient, for example. So that's our end goal in our two different strategies and they're kind of the same strategy I see. Yeah, I agree. Awesome. Thank you so much for telling me about what you're presenting. Thanks for having us. So on Tuesday, unfortunately without a time journey, you're not going to be able to see both of their presentations, but you can see one or the other from one to two on Tuesday at Baker Center at the Spotlight on Learning Conference here at Ohio University. But I'm sure Hannah or Paul would be happy to talk to you about what they're doing in the classroom or they could put you in touch with your own subject librarian who could probably do similar type of work with you. So if you have any questions, feel free to put those in the comment box to contact us in the library, the library, or whatever work means works best for you. Thanks for watching. Thanks. Thank you.