Information Literacy Instruction

These activities are good for breaking up lecture with hands-on work. 

Activites

This is an excellent warm-up activity that also helps students think about the process of asking research questions.  

From Lori Townsend, Amy R. Hofer, and Silvia Lin Hanick's book Transforming Information Literacy Instruction: Threshold Concepts in Theory and Practice (2019). 

This is a fun way to have students participate and cover all the basics.  Distribute questions to students as they enter room.  After you introduce yourselves, tell them that you will call out a color and students with cards of that color can stand up and ask the question (make sure to repeat in case everyone doesn't hear).  If someone doesn't want to, they can give the card to another student.  Give students an opportunity to answer questions as well.  Two easy questions can be followed by a more complex question that gives students an opportunity to do some active work.  Optional: students who ask and attempt to answer questions get a piece of candy thrown in their general direction.  

Format comparison asks students to compare different formats and think about when they would use them. I've attached a copy of my activity "See 3 P Ooohh: The Format Wars." 

Materials: 

  • At least two formats that cover the same subject -- projected or printed out 

Directions:

  1. Divide into small groups. 
  2. Give several formats that cover the same topic. For example, a journal article and a magazine article about using blood drones. If you're only using two formats, you can project them on the screen side by side.  Otherwise, you can print out copies. 
  3. Have students identify differences in appearance & content, identify audience etc. 
  4. Come back together as a group and discuss findings. 

Kevin Seeber developed this activity to complement the ACRL Frame "Information creation as a process".  It discusses 6 formats: Tweet, Blog Entry, Wikipedia Article, News Article, Scholarly Article, & Scholarly Book. For more advanced classes, I've swapped out "Tweet" for "Documentary". 

Materials: 

  • Process Cards 

Instructions:

  • Divide group into 5 small groups
  • To each group, hand one topic card (Ease, Time, Research, Editing, & Length) and one deck of format cards (Tweet, Blog Entry, Wikipedia Article, News Article, Scholarly Article, & Scholarly Book). 
  • The groups will arrange the cards in order for their topic card; i.e., arrange format cards in order of easiest to hardest, least amount of research to most amount of research etc.). Make sure to explain that groups will probably have different answers. If some groups finish early, you could have them talk about how/when/why they would use each format in a research paper. 
  • Come back together as a group to share results. 

Please use and modify . . .

These activities and handouts are meant to be used, shared, and edited!  If you modify or have a new activity, please share it with Glenn, so she can add it to the options!