Put the Big Rocks in First

My law school is arguing right now about changing from a 14 week semester to a 13 week one. That sounds like a tempest in a teapot. But it will bring a lot of collateral changes with it. Some will be very good, and some will be very challenging. One of the challenging items will be the need for all of us who teach to think hard about what we cover in our syllabus.

When you have been teaching a course that has 14 leisurely weeks to cover a subject, and then are asked to shave one week off that syllabus, you really should consider whether you are going to cover all the same subjects in all the same detail. It’s going to be a hard question, and I know some people are just going to ignore it and cram the same package into the smaller box.

I had a course design workshop last summer that was very enlightening. It was fun, as well. The first thing that really caught my attention was the image of a video that our moderator used (this is a different version, but equally illustrative)

I have read the parable before. You choose the “big rocks” and put them in the bucket first, and then fit the little pebbles or sand around them and it all fits. In most of our lives, we have all the little pebbles (which stand for the little niggling tasks and distractions in our lives) that fill up our days. We need to choose the big rocks – the important priorities that we really want to devote ourselves to, and prioritize those, and then fit the pebbles around those.

In this course design workshop, the same analogy means a slightly different thing. Our courses have big rocks and little pebbles, too. We have a few big ideas that are really important for our students to remember, we hope, in 5 years. Think about a few of your law or library classes, and try to remember one or two of the big ideas from them.... Can you come up with one? If so, that was a successful professor, who managed to communicate one of the core concepts to you – a “big rock” thought! This course design workshop urged us to really focus and pare down our syllabus until we had a handful of these, and then build the course around those.

It took a good deal of courage and a bit of interior weeping to let go of so much of my long-term syllabus. And it takes a GREAT deal of courage to create a syllabus that is really for my students and not at all for my colleagues. The first (MANY) times I created a syllabus for my courses, I really wrote them with the idea in the back of my mind: “What if one of my colleagues sees this? What will he or she think? What if I don't cover Justinian's Code? Will they think I'm ignorant?”

Instead, we should be creating syllabi focused entirely on student needs, and the shape of our semester. That really does call for courage and a lot of rethinking. What is it I really need a student to remember 5 or 10 years from now about this class? What will still be useful for them to know? In legal research, that’s a particularly tricky question, as so many of the publications and databases change more and more quickly. I have come to the conclusion that the most useful thing I can teach is how to evaluate materials and teach themselves. I still teach resources, but mostly in the context of how to evaluate them and how to learn about an unfamiliar resource.

Will you all think I'm ignorant? Gee... I'm trying not to care.

Image decorating this post is courtesy of http://radiantdust.blogspot.com/2011/01/first-things-first.html

A fun way to encourage students to improve Google search skills

I stumbled upon a cool way to encourage students (or anybody!) to buff up their Google search skills: A Google A Day! This summer, the Google Labs guys came up with this puzzle that pops up a new poser every day. There are multiple ways to solve each one, but only one right answer (does that sound familiar, research instructors???) But those who get stumped can click and get one suggested solution from Google, so there is a good clue there, too, a chance to learn if you can't get it on your own.

Because it's a puzzle, and light-handed, it might be a good way to get students to look at the excellent aids that Google puts out for users, and maybe get them to learn more about what's "under the hood" at their favorite web browser.

Google Basic Search Help

More Search Tips

Special Search Features (a lot of these are specialty things like weather, stock prices, earthquakes, but scroll down for more generally applicable things like using the + sign in your search to REQUIRE a particular word to appear in the results! That's especially helpful when you are wanting to search a phrase that includes a word like "and" that usually gets filtered out by search engines as being too common. A good example in law is "assault and battery." But you can also use it if your searches are popping up web pages that do not seem to include one of your terms. There are lots of other useful features, so keep checking this list.

And do not overlook the Search Tips Gallery, which used to be called Advanced Search. This gives you fill-in boxes to help you conduct more complicated searches. You can choose between searching Google Docs, a web search, Google Maps, or searching your Gmail, if you have an account for that.

Besides allowing their staff engineers and programmers to work on projects of their choosing, Google has another interesting way to develop new projects. Every summer, they select student programmers and engineers in a highly competitive system. This is called the Google Summer of Code. The students have made proposals of projects to work on, and release the code as open source for all to use. My daughter's programmer boyfriend was one such student programmer one summer. And I know of a library-intersection project that Google sponsored a few years ago, in 2007, that has resulted in one or more web-based cataloging applications (see Code{4}Lib post), and this post from the Disruptive Library Technology Jester.

Digital Natives and getting under the hood: the ERIAL Project

Tip of the OOTJ hat to Billie Jo Kauffman who sent along a link to an article from USA Today reporting on a study for American Library Association (ALA). The ERIAL (Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries) project was a series of studies conducted at Illinois Wesleyan, DePaul University, and Northeastern Illinois University, and the University of Illinois's Chicago and Springfield campuses. Anthropologists looked at both the students and the librarians at these campuses, focusing, as far as I can tell, on undergraduates. The studies will be published this fall by the ALA under the title, "Libraries and Student Culture: What We Now Know," and apparently, what we now know is pretty darned sobering. (see presentations, powerpoints, papers, and posters from many conferences including ALA 2010 link here) The research shows that although "digital natives" may have grown up online, they are not widely digitally literate.

I don't think librarians will be surprised to know that students rely on Google far more than any other database or other resource, or that they are far worse at using Google than they think they are. The study found that a large percentage of the students studied did not understand either the search logic of Google or the display of results. And students tended to treat all search boxes the same, expecting every database visited to have a Google-type search protocol. We in law libraries see a similar expectation that everything will work like Westlaw and Lexis, OR Google! It's something I have to teach specifically in my Advanced Legal Research class.

Students were often very poor at choosing databases for research, as well. Selecting JSTOR for current type searching, as an example from the article, without understanding that JSTOR does not get journal articles until 3-5 years after publication. Again, I have to teach my students to read the descriptions of databases, either the scope notes in Lexis and Westlaw or other descriptions for other databases or websites. It's like learning to read the ingredients on the boxes at the supermarket, I suppose. Students also do not understand cataloging or how libraries are arranged, so again, this is something I am explaining even in law school. The undergraduate students often could not decipher citations. By law school, however, the students do know this, thanks to their first year LRW courses.

The ERIAL studies found what Joan Shear had found earlier for law students, that many students have a very inaccurate sense of their research ability. They tend to over-estimate their skill level, and are also very loathe to ask for assistance from librarians. Though we sometimes find e-mail and text reference bring more questions, even when the questioner is right across the room. Somehow that is more comfortable for students than asking face to face. Another problem seems to be that students apparently have no idea that librarians are there to be asked questions! They are more likely to ask their professor than to ask a librarian, according to this study.

I hope is not true of our libraries. I suppose we need to get anthropologists in! One thing that we do that may help is that many of the law librarians are involved in teaching 1-Ls research skills. So they are known to the students from that, and probably stress during their teaching that students should ask at the reference desk or other reference access points for help. Law librarians may also come into upper level seminar courses to teach a "cameo" class on how to do the research for the paper. These interactions all help the students feel that they know the reference librarian, and can approach them for help.

The article at the USA Today also talks about the tension between the desire of the college student to just get the information, and the desire of the librarian to get the student to love the research process. The student, may even want the information just handed to him or her, rather than to learn how to find it. Of course, you can't do that -- you have to teach them how to find it themselves. But is there anything wrong with teaching shortcuts, teaching them to avoid the "blood, sweat and tears" methods? Particularly if you are teaching students for whom research itself is not going to be the life-time vocation that it is for a librarian, I think there is not a problem, even if we are talking about training lawyers. They need to understand research, but I do not any longer teach every step of legislative history research, for instance. I teach them how to find compiled ones, and tell them to call me if they ever have to compile one from scratch.