Course Integrated Instruction : October 2010 Archives

I would love to hear about if/how folks talk about Open Access in teaching to faculty? grad students? undergraduates?

International Open Access Week is October 18-24
Why is unrestricted public access to scholarly articles important?

Moral arguments

Pragmatic arguments

OA frees authors and readers from needless access barriers. OA returns the control of scholarship to scholars. By increasing the author's impact, it advances the author's purpose in writing journal articles for impact rather than money. OA serves the under-served. For the special subset of publicly-funded research, open access is part of fundamental fairness to taxpayers.

OA reaches a wider audience at lower cost than toll-access forms of distribution. OA makes research literature and data available for crunching by new generations of sophisticated software (indexing, mining, summarizing, translating, linking, recommending, alerting, mash-ups, and other forms of processing). OA widens dialogue, builds community, and supports cooperation. OA accelerates research and increases the productivity of researchers. OA makes research more useful and increases the research funder's return on investment.

Please check out http://z.umn.edu/OAWeek or http://www.openaccessweek.org for more information, videos, and talking points!

Recently the Instruction Coordinators Group, created a short evaluation form for workshops. This quick and easy assessment was made using Google docs and is intended to help staff improve their instruction by getting patron feedback. While intended for workshops the evaluation  can be used to assess any instruction offering. For instance, I recently hosted a two day course integrated session for an honors history class. I sent the assessment to them and received great feedback. One student said that they found most helpful, "The information regarding how to find, identify, and utilize archival materials. The workshop improved my ability to identify the purpose of a given material and cite it."