Do Less, Accomplish More!

Today I had the opportunity to provide an information literacy session for participants in a summer school of sorts hosted by the College of Engineering.  As I was typing up my lecture notes, it occurred to me that I had a total of five activities and essentially my whole 60 minute segment one active learning method after another, yet, I probably accomplished more in that hour than I normally do in an one-shot instructional session. 

Here is a list of my activities:

• Be My Google – class brainstorming activity [activity courtesy of Amy Fyn of Bowling Green University]
• Question: What is human powered transportation? If I ask that question and you are Google, what types of results will I retrieve
• Begin to evaluate results, then compare results with Google and Google Scholar
• Look Up - class brainstorming activity [again courtesy of Amy Fyn who refers to this activity as Thumball]
• I randomly selected participants instead of throwing a ball around the room
• Question: Why don't people commute by human powered transportation methods?
• Discover - small group brainstorming activity
• Based on your project and group solution; come up with a list of keywords, sources of information, dates, topics and potential authors
• Pick a spokesperson from their group and share with the class the results from this activity.
• Further the activity by using a discovery system or database
• Keyword Challenge
• http://21cif.com/rkitp/challenge/Keyword_Challenge/KeywordChallenge.swf  
• In class, we did the Earthquake challenge together