Anticipation

I LOVE this time of year. As much as I may be prone just like everyone else to groaning about how quickly August rolled around, I must admit that I have this closet love of all things "Back to School." There's a bustle about town - and Walmart; the hallways of the libraries smell like fresh wax; students everywhere are worrying about what color backpack to buy and whether to bring a pencil or pen (or maybe now a laptop) to the first day of classes. When I was growing up, from age 5 - 22, I could never sleep the night before school started.  It wasn't because I was scared. It was because I was excited, and I wanted, above all, to be prepared.

Fast forward not so many years, and here I am - FACULTY!!! (I still haven't shrugged the little voice in my head asking, 'How did that happen?!') Next Wednesday, August 27th, is my first day of school. For the second Fall in a row, I will be team teaching the Libraries' first year seminar with my colleagues Dan and Emily. The seminar (woops! I just almost typed seminary - I hope not!) is titled Research Skills for the 21st Century. We hope to deliver on that title for the 19 DUS students from Discover House who have enrolled.

Last year when the three of us taught the course together, we pretty much did it up "old school." Lecture - activity - homework assignment in class and readings/assignments in between, all culminating in a final project powerpoint presentation at the end. Our students liked the class, and learned a lot, but these methods of learning, communicating, and presenting didn't seem to jive with the 21st century portion of our course title.

Fast-forward to today. We're doing some really exciting things this Fall. First of all, we're thrilled to be part of a Libraries' pilot project, testing the Sony Reader and its application in an academic environment. (Disclaimer - I am also a Project Leader for this endeavor so I have both the administrative and participant viewpoint.) Today our students received an email message instructing them to come to the library to pick up a Sony Reader which will contain their course readings.  The readers also have some interesting titles just thrown on.  We want to see how they use the devices.  Will they add content of their own? Will they bring them to class every week? What features are helpful? What functionality would make a device like this better-suited to academia? I can't wait to see and hear their reactions!

The other new thing we're doing is (hopefully) encouraging a community of learning in and out of the classroom by requiring the students to create a blog on the Blogs @ Penn State platform.  They will have to do a weekly entry on an assigned topic, and each week a different pair of students will be charged with monitoring the feed and summarizing the high points for the rest of the class at the start of the next session. Signing up for a blog was also a pre-assignment, and so far no questions about how to do it.  This is either scary or encouraging - probably both!

Throughout the course, students will learn about where libraries and research have been, and where we are going.  They'll learn how to look for a book (and use it!), as well as how to create an online research desktop. Lots of readings will come from Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger, and there will be others as well. We are hopeful that we'll be able to distribute things "on the fly" for students to just load onto their Sony Reading devices.

I am hopeful that our students will embrace these new opportunities and experiences - if not today, down the road when they have the chance to reflect and think "I'm really glad I took that class. It made me a better researcher/thinker/person/student/etc."

Stay tuned for more. I am committed to at least one weekly reflection on how the class is going :)