Recently in Workshops Category

 Thursday, April 19, and Friday, April 20:

• "The Future of History." 4:00 p.m., 125 Nolte Center. (Co-sponsored by Institute for Advanced Study, Immigration History Research Center, Department of English, Department of Writing Studies, Department of History, and University Libraries.)
• "Supporting Digital Humanities." 10:00 a.m., Arthur Upson Room, 102 Walter Library. (Co-sponsored by University Libraries.)

Dan Cohen is associate professor of history and director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

Cohen played a leading role in developing Zotero, the powerful bibliographic software program. His research into uses of the Victorian digital archive was reported by Patricia Cohen in "Analyzing Literature by Words and Numbers," New York Times, Dec. 3, 2010. Recently the Chronicle of Higher Education named him one of "12 Tech Innovators Who are Transforming Campuses." Professor Cohen co-edits Journal of the Digital Humanities, which last month published its first issue.

Just thought I'd share this recent example of Instructional Design serendipity:

Back in May a group of science and engineering librarians got in touch with Paul Zenke because we wanted to update our online tutorial, "Creating Posters In PowerPoint"

When we met with Paul he asked us what we hoped to achieve with this tutorial and after having a discussion about the outcomes he thought we might be better able to achieve our goals through a static infographic and an interactive online activity (a poster rating simulation--still in progress).

Later Jody Kempf and I met to discuss ways that we could punch up the in-person workshop that we teach on using PowerPoint to Create A Poster and we decided to take what we'd discussed with Paul and try to apply it to our in-person workshops.

We decided to use the infographic that Paul created as our workshop handout and also to take the poster rating simulation idea that Paul and Andrew were developing for our online users and see if we could use it to generate conversations in class using Clicker software to conduct a live version of the poster rating simulation.

So now instead of lecturing about design criteria we're going to give students a chance to look over the infographic and then we'll present them with slides of a poster (the poster images were created by Andrew Palahniuk)

And using the criteria on the infographic we have them rank the poster from 1 to 5 stars.

We then can use the rankings as the beginnings of a conversation about poster design principles.

I think this is a great example of the unexpected outcomes of going into a meeting with Paul...even when you think that you just want an updated tutorial.

If you're interested please feel free to use the slides...you can alter them however best fits your instructional needs.

P.S.  I'll also be posting these in the *new and improved* Information Literacy Toolkit!

From Patrick Beja: http://patrickbeja.com/2011/07/a-metaphor-to-understand-google/.

Also Sarah Houghton-Jan shared her experience teaching a Google + class: http://librarianinblack.net/librarianinblack/
2011/07/googleplus.html

Do we try it this fall...? Who is game? Wait...should have posted this in Google+....sigh...