Biology 301

Well this was an interesting project.  As I posted earlier, I wanted students to compare and contrast two articles in my instructional session, but I am not able to distribute copies of these articles to the class due to copyright restrictions.  Because of this I started a LibGuide for the class in which I could embed links to the articles that would only be available to authenticated users. 

Today, I wanted to finalize my LibGuide and prepare for tomorrow's instruction session, but as luck would have it, the LibGuide's site was down for most of the day.  Consequently I spent the day creating back up materials preparing for the worst (which is a good idea anyways, just not how I thought I would spend my day).

Thankfully tonight, it is back up and running so I was able to complete the LibGuide.  Here is it: http://libguides.usask.ca/biology301.  The LibGuide includes a link to my presentation that I shared through Prezi, as well as a link to an evaluation tool that I created through a tool provided in-house.

Now, let's just cross our fingers that it all works tomorrow!

Copyright restrictions require creativitiy

On August 27th, I attended a new faculty orientation at the University of Saskatchewan.  One of the speakers in the afternoon shared an active learning technique that I knew would be perfect for integration into a library instruction session.  The speaker gave one side of the classroom a syllabus created for an undergraduate class while the other side of the classroom was given a syllabus for a graduate class.  Once you had the syllabus in hand, students were instructed to pair up with someone on the opposite side of the classroom and discuss the layout, the content, etc. 

ah ha!  THE perfect activity for comparing and contrasting scholarly journals with popular magazine... Except....

With copyright restrictions, instructors are not allowed to distributed multiple copies of a journal article within a classroom without prior approval from the copyright holder; even if you have the students return the copies at the end of the class.  I know this because I was on the copyright/usage rights communication team.  So what can I do?

Well, I ended up embedding the links to two articles into a LibGuide for the course.  I will instruct students to click on the links and retrieve the article that way - thus compiling with copyright.

If there were no computers in the classroom... now that would be an exercise in creativity!