Category Archives: Instruction

A Different Kind of Training for Athletes

Annah Hackett is the Information Literacy Librarian for the University of Texas Libraries.


In Undergraduate Studies (UGS) library instruction sessions, the librarians of Teaching and Learning Services (TLS) work with undergraduate students on the research skills they will need to succeed at the University of Texas. Of particular note are discussions about source analysis: Is this the type of source I need? Is it credible? How can I place it in context within my thesis? Most of this instruction is classroom-specific, but TLS always seeks to tie these skills to the broader context of the information students will encounter in the “real world.”

So when Alanna Bitzel – Texas Athletics Student Services Assistant Director for Supplemental Instruction, Writing and Academic Enrichment – asked if I would be interested in leading an information literacy session as part of the new Summer Writing Bridge Program, I saw a unique opportunity to demonstrate how information literacy skills can benefit student-athletes both in- and outside the classroom.

Under Bitzel’s leadership, the Summer Writing Bridge Program provides an opportunity for student-athletes to connect with academic resources on campus, including the Libraries, tutoring services, and the Writing Center. The purpose of this program – now in its first summer – is to empower student-athletes to utilize these resources as they balance their challenging course schedule and athletic responsibilities.

Bitzel sees one of the major concerns student-athletes will encounter is how to navigate endorsement deals. Since 2021, NCAA student-athletes have been permitted to enter contracts with companies who seek to use their name, image, and likeness (NIL) to endorse their products. This is an exciting opportunity for students to make money and connections while they are still in college. However, this opportunity also comes with potential pitfalls. Specifically, students might be so excited to be offered a paycheck that they contract with companies whose values don’t align with their own. To avoid this, student-athletes need to research and analyze the companies who are offering them an endorsement deal. In other words, they need information literacy skills.

Nine of the students enrolled in the Summer Bridge Writing Program came to the Perry-Castañeda Library (PCL) recently to work with a representative of the Writing Center and myself. For some of the attendees, this was their first visit to PCL. I started off by inviting the students to partake in something that I consider an essential tool in critical thinking: homemade cookies. Once they had filled their plates, I then asked them to consider a fictional situation. What would they do if a company selling vitamins and supplements to athletes sought to contract with them for their NIL in their next media campaign? Specifically, what information would they want to know about the company, and where they would find that information?

In a lively group discussion, we worked our way through researching other “brand ambassadors” for the company, checking for FDA approval, seeing if there have been any major scandals concerning the company in the media, and reading the “About Us” page on the company website. I then told the students that their research had revealed that the head athletic trainer at another university had endorsed this company in the past. In my fictional scenario, this person was professionally successful but did not have an educational background that enabled them to say whether a vitamin or supplement would help or harm a person. This led to a conversation about professional and educational expertise.

Eventually, the students agreed that they would not accept this endorsement. For one thing, I had forgotten that athletes using supplements is problematic, if not strictly against the rules. That librarian error aside, the students agreed that the lack of FDA approval (professional standards) and the fact that the other brand ambassador did not have a medical background (educational expertise) made this endorsement too risky to accept. One student-athlete said that she would also ask the head athletic trainer at UT what they thought about the company, which is another way of seeking information from experts in the field.

Having agreed that we would look elsewhere for our endorsement deals, we rounded off the session by looking an actual research assignment from a UGS class. We discussed how they would use the same skills and analysis from the NIL prompt to research the topic given to them by this UGS professor: determine what expertise in this particular situation looks like, use critical thinking skills to figure out what types of sources they needed, and analyze the sources for credibility. Information literacy skills are essential for success both inside and outside the classroom!

The session with the Summer Writing Bridge Program was a fun way to connect with a group of students outside of how I usually interact with them in a UGS classroom. It also gave me an opportunity to show students how information literacy works “in the wild”.

While we spend most of our time supporting undergraduates through their classroom assignments and projects, it is always important to remind them that the skills they learn here at UT can guide them throughout their lives and that librarians are here to help them learn what questions to ask, with or without cookies to make the process more fun.

LLILAS Benson Launches Curriculum Site

By ALBERT A. PALACIOS

In the spring of 2019, LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections partnered with the Urban Teachers Program at the Department of Curriculum and Instruction in the College of Education to develop and provide free, online access to high school lesson plans. The goal was to bring together the historical perspectives of underrepresented groups, current scholarship, and digitized holdings of the Benson Latin American Collection and Latin American partners. Thanks to a Department of Education Title VI grant, LLILAS Benson was able to create a portal via UT Libraries’ open-access repositories to make these resources widely available to teachers.

Department of Curriculum and Instruction chair Dr. Cinthia Salinas walks “Social Studies Methods” master’s students through a teaching exercise using a pictorial account of Moctezuma and Cortés’s meeting from the Benson’s Genaro García Collection, March 19, 2019. Courtesy of Albert A. Palacios.

For the past two years, College of Education graduate students have been creating World History and World Geography units for use in high school classrooms. The underlying principle for these teaching materials is that students are able to understand, and then subvert, dominant historical narratives in Latin American, U.S. Latinx, and African Diaspora history given the marginalized perspectives the lesson plans highlight. Using the Benson’s digital collections, they have focused on a variety of topics, including women in colonial Latin America, the Mexican Revolution, and the Cold War in Central and South America (publication in process).

Collection materials from the Benson’s Rare Books and Genaro García collections, and El Salvador’s Museum of the Word and Image’s Armed Conflict Collection.

The collaboration and site has since broadened to include other disciplines, audiences, and learning objectives. LLILAS Benson Digital Scholarship staff has been partnering with faculty and graduate students in Latin American Studies, Art and Art History, Spanish and Portuguese, Mexican American Studies, and History to design Digital Humanities–focused lesson plans and assignments for undergraduate teaching. Work is also ongoing to publish technical capacity-building teaching and learning resources for graduate students, digital humanists, and archival professionals at UT Austin and beyond.

Banner image for platform tutorial, “Presenting Geospatial Research with ArcGIS,” based on colonial holdings from the Genaro García Collection.

The site also helps instructors and students find and browse through LLILAS Benson’s digital resources. It consolidates under its Primary Sources section all existing LLILAS Benson digital scholarship projects, digitized collections, and exhibitions. Visitors can filter these resources by grade level, date range, course subject, and country to find relevant primary and secondary sources on their research and teaching focus.

Banner image for Fidel Castro’s Building Inauguration Speeches geospatial exhibition. Curated by Karla Roig, Association of Research Libraries’ Digital and Inclusive Excellence Undergraduate Fellow (2018–2019).

Explore the site through http://curriculum.llilasbenson.utexas.edu/. The interdisciplinary collaborations and site’s development were generously funded by the U.S. Department of Education’s Title VI Program and LLILAS Benson’s Excellence Fund for Technology and Development in Latin America. This resource was conceived, designed, and launched by: 

  • Lindsey Engleman, Public Engagement Coordinator (2014–2019), LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections
  • Tiffany Guridy, Public Engagement Coordinator, LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections
  • Delandrea S. Hall, Doctoral Candidate, Curriculum and Instruction, College of Education
  • Rodrigo Leal, Website Designer and Student Technician(Spring 2019), LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections
  • Casz McCarthy, Public Engagement Graduate Research Assistant, LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections
  • Albert A. Palacios, Digital Scholarship Coordinator, LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections
  • Cinthia S. Salinas, Professor and Chair, Department of Curriculum and Instruction, College of Education
  • UT Libraries Digital Stewardship (Anna Lamphear and Brittany Centeno)

Rallying the Next Generation of African Leaders

YALI participants on-site at PCL.

As the Business Librarian at UT Libraries I frequently work with entrepreneurs from the McCombs School of Business and sometimes from the Cockrell School of Engineering. For the first time this summer I had the honor of working with a group of young entrepreneurs from Africa.

The 25 attendees here at UT Austin were part of the 500 Mandela Washington Fellows for Young African Leaders Institute (YALI) selected from over 40,000 applications for this prestigious program. President Obama invited the group to the U.S. from Sub-Saharan Africa as part of his signature effort to invest in the next generation of global leaders. Twenty universities were selected to host the fellows. UT Austin chose the theme of Business & Entrepreneurship for its institute.

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The UT Austin YALI Fellows are creating and/or growing businesses back home. Their interests are broad; women’s and children’s health initiatives, farming, training computer scientists, and translation services. One of the most inspirational companies is one that trains women incarcerated for prostitution to become fashion designers and tailors. The fashion company hires these women upon their release thereby improving the women’s situations and helping them stay out of prison.

Just like I would for students on our campus, I provided a business research workshop to the YALI group and coordinated with the UT Austin International Office to develop a course guide and a hands-on research workshop for these entrepreneurs. In the workshop we practiced search strategies and I introduced them to resources containing market research, economic, and demographic data.

At the end of their UT visit, the Fellows participated in a pitch competition in front of a three-judge panel of successful Austin entrepreneurs. I saw first-hand how they incorporated their research into their pitch for future funding. The judges asked tough questions about growth and sustainability. The Fellows handled the inquiry with aplomb and you could see the passion they all had for their projects.

To cap off the 6-week event all 500 Fellows attended a summit in Washington, D.C. where they met with Secretary of State John Kerry and President Obama. At the summit President Obama announced the program was to be renamed the Mandela Washington Fellowship for Young African Leaders to honor Nelson Mandela. Not only is the program going to continue next year, but the President has also committed to double the number of participants to 1000 for the summer of 2016.

I hope that the University of Texas will be hosting again next year and that I have the opportunity and privilege to work with these global entrepreneurs as they go out and change the world!

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Up Close and Persona

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Instruction Services GRA Anna Fidgeon is featured in a video interview by the Daily Texan examining online personas and privacy on the Internet.

The takeaway? The web isn’t private, so be smart when you’re online.

The Texan interview, however, is just another feather in her onscreen cap. Anna will also be seen starring as a research scientist in an upcoming video ad campaign in support of academics at the university to air on the Longhorn Network.

Breaking Down Tools

Our First-year Experience Librarian, Cindy Fisher, is a guest blogger over at the Chronicle of Higher Education‘s ProfHacker site. In her post, she lauds LibX, a pretty complex, library-specific browser extension from a couple of innovators at VaTech that makes finding and accessing available resources in your library exponentially simpler.

Like I said, it’s pretty complex, so I’ll let Cindy explain it to you.

 

PRIMO Recognition for LIS

Last week staff in Library Instruction Services heard the good news that two more of their instructional efforts were accepted into the PRIMO Database, the Association of College & Research Libraries’ Instruction Section’s peer-reviewed collection of instructional materials.   The purpose of PRIMO is to foster  sharing of high quality digital resources to support academic librarians’ as they teach users how to find and evaluate information.

PRIMO now includes a total of four projects designed by Library Instruction Services:

How to Generate Keywords

This tool helps students turn their research question into a successful database search.  Students often struggle with this first piece of the research process but good keyword selection is vital to bringing back relevant and useful resources.

Tip Jar

Tip Jar posts, which have been featured on this blog before, use comics and video to introduce undergraduates to research strategies, resources and library services.  They are shared through the News For Undergraduates blog,  incorporated into course-specific research guides, and used during chat reference transactions.

All About Plagiarism

This interactive tutorial helps students avoid unintentional plagiarism.  Students learn what constitutes plagiarism, why it matters, and strategies for avoiding plagiarism such as quoting, paraphrasing and note-taking.  The tutorial is assigned by faculty across campus who can upload a related quiz to their Blackboard course site. Libraries staff were also featured in a PRIMO Site of the Month interview discussing the tutorial’s design.

Understanding Citations Tutorial

This interactive tutorial helps students do research and avoid plagiarism by explaining the elements of a citation.  At the end of the tutorial, students are able to discern between different types of citations (a journal article versus a book, for example) and recognize the elements of a citation so that they can build a proper citation for their own bibliography.

These resources are available through the Libraries website 24/7 for students who need help even when the Libraries aren’t open.  They allow us to provide point of need instruction whatever the time of day and support us as we work with students on their research projects.

Catherine Hamer is the Associate Director for User Services at the University of Texas Libraries.

Tip Jars in the Library?

We all know the cliche, “a picture is worth a thousand words”, so in age of YouTube and TwitterLibrary Instruction Services decided that collapsing our text-heavy web pages into succinct and visually stimulating comics and videos would help bridge new media, instruction-on-demand, and quick reference for our time-strapped undergraduates.

The idea for these short light-hearted videos evolved over time to incorporate comics instead of actor librarians; we’re slightly camera shy here and creating comic alto-egos mean we’ll never have a bad hair day. Staff in Library Instruction Services scripted the vignettes, and our Library Assistant and resident-artist Elise Nacca and Graduate Research Assistant Krystal Wyatt-Baxter used a free version of Bitstrips to create characters and dialogue incorporating the scripted scenarios.

Since their release in September 2010, the Tip Jar posts have covered topics such as how to use Google Scholar, narrowing a topic and placing it in context , finding E-Books and more.

Creating this digital content means that it’s easily distributed and re-purposed depending on student and staff needs. For instance, Tip Jar instructional videos are integrated with a collection of videos created by students from our 2009 Library Video Contest to be used in the Undergraduate Studies First-year Interest Group program as a way to introduce the students to library services in a fun and flexible way. We’ve also included these videos within our online research guides for course-integrated instruction or during a reference exchange over our Ask A Librarian chat service.

The posts run every other Monday on our News For Undergraduates Blog, which also incorporates events, resources, and items of interest for the University of Texas undergrad community. Stop by and get a tip from us!

Cindy Fisher is the First-year Experience Librarian, Library Instruction Services.


And the Winner is…

On Saturday, July 24, Library Instruction Services hosted the Amazing Library Race as part of the Honors Colloquium sponsored by the School of Undergraduate Studies.

The Colloquium, in its 29th year, invites exceptional high-school students from throughout the state to a unique summer program designed to showcase the very best the university has to offer.  Students attend class sessions and special lectures by distinguished faculty in addition to going on tours and choosing among interest sessions hosted by departments across campus.

During the Amazing Library Race, ten groups raced through PCL, following clues for their assigned country that led them through the stacks, to photocopiers and group study rooms, and to our electronic resources before they had to make a mad dash to the finish line in the Map Room.

This year, Team Netherlands won, finishing in less than 15 minutes. Donuts were enjoyed by all at the end of the race.

The Race is designed to provide students with an introduction to the space and resources of an academic library, allowing them to compare their previous public and school library experiences to the vast collections that they will find in a research library like PCL.  At the end of the event, students had questions about the collections of government documents they saw in the stacks, how they could get a job in the Libraries, and how academic librarians will support them in their research as college students.

This event remains the highlight of the summer for all of the staff in Library Instruction Services and consistently receives rave reviews from the Colloquialists.

See photos from the event here.

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Meghan Sitar is Instruction & Outreach Librarian for the University of Texas Libraries.

Breaking Through Austerity

“An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.”

-Benjamin Franklin

You’ve probably heard the news that UT-Austin has initiated a plan to cut $14.6 million in expenditures for 2010 – 2011. Everyone on campus has been looking for places to trim back, trying to decide what is core and essential and what is just “nice to have.”

The UT Libraries has a long-standing commitment to staff training and professional development and that commitment has not wavered during these tough economic times.   However, we have had to find creative ways to provide this training with fewer financial resources.

One approach we have taken is a program called Learning Breaks.  Every other week, someone from the Libraries staff will do two 30 minute presentations, one in-person and one online through our online meetings software, about a topic in which they have expertise.  This approach has allowed us to offer trainings on a wide variety of topics ranging from Web 2.0 applications such as Twitter, Flickr, wikis and blogs to time management practices such as managing your to-do list.

Since these topics are suggested by staff we know they fulfill a need.  What’s more, the benefits of Learning Breaks go beyond what is learned in the training; this peer-to-peer model also allows the Libraries to recognize and value the expertise and diverse talents of the staff.    And by incorporating ongoing training into the work day on a regular basis, Learning Breaks send a message that library staff are worth the investment.

Catherine Hamer is Interim Associate Director for User Services.