Needs Assessment Responses


All of the needs assessment responses I have received so far are now posted. If you submitted your answers to me and do not see them here, please let me know (mhristov@brynmawr.edu). If you have any comments or suggestions, please email me and I will make the changes. Thank you and enjoy the conference!

* Please click on the school link and it will take you directly to the responses from that particular school.
 
School
Information Technologist
Librarian
Professor
Student
Mount Holyoke College:        
Vassar College:      
Hampshire College:        
Amherst College:    
Haverford College:        
Swarthmore College:    
Smith College:  
University of Massachusetts      
Bryn Mawr College:    


Sean Decatur, Professor, Mount Holyoke College

Describe the course your team will be working with on. What are the pedagogical approaches for which you want to draw on technological resources? Map out the range and variation, including both the content and the kinds of resources you encounter and need.

 

Chemistry 101 is the first chemistry course in the "Core" sequence at Mount Holyoke. Most of the students are "first years"; many are taking the course as a prerequisite to courses in other disciplines (biology, environmental science, neuroscience) or as a part of pre-health requirements. Students spend ~3.5 hours/week in lecture or recitation, and 3 hours/week in lab.

In the past, "technology" has been used in the course in several different ways:

(1) A course web page was used primarily to disseminate information and materials to students (problem sets, answer keys, lab handouts, etc.).

(2) Lectures were supplemented by powerpoint slides, made available to students after class on the web.

(3) Molecular modeling and visualization software was used in a laboratory exercise to give students an opportunity to manipulate and extract information from model
structures.

These are all examples of using classroom technology for providing information to the students; the interactions were always "one way," with the instructor using the technology as a means to deliver particular pieces of information. In our preliminary conversations about the course, all of the ideas we've discussed involve using technology to allow the students to retrieve information on their own, to organize their own data and ideas, and to share data with their peers (and the instructor). How do we develop exercises and materials to teach new students how to access and critically analyze ifnromation from the chemical literature or from databases or other resources? How can we use contemporary tools (such as electronic, online lab notebooks) to help students organize, process, and share data? Can we make students active and creative users of technology instead of just passive consumers?


What roles and responsibilities do you currently assume regarding the use and instruction of technology?

In general, I believe that use of technology (especially technology relevant and necessary to professional activity within a discipline) should be thoroughly integrated throughout the basic curriculum of a field. In advanced courses, chemistry faculty at MHC have worked with others on campus (Sandy Ward, the science librarian, and Mary Glackin, the technology specialist for the sciences, among others) to train students to use technology resources (ranging from online literature searching to use of molecular modeling in class presentations). We hope to strengthen these features in the introductory courses as well.

What goals do you have for collaboration in this area?

While our members of our "team" have worked with each other before on smaller scale or ad hoc projects, this is the first time we have joined in
a coordinated effort to work on a course. I hope that our efforts in this project may work as a model for future synergies.

 


Sandy Ward, Science Librarian, Mount Holyoke College

What roles and responsibilities do librarians on your campus currently assume regarding the use and instruction of technology and electronic resources?

We select and evaluate databases for information retrieval, deciding which ones to acquire (or license) for our campus. We lead workshops for students, faculty. We tailor our instructional workshops to the needs of specific courses, at the request of faculty. We also teach students one-on-one as they come to us at the Reference desk or request help in other ways (email, phone). We design and maintain webpages that lead people to electronic (and other) resources. Increasingly, we are selecting e-journals and online reference tools.


Are there specific resources in the sciences that you think contribute to or support student learning in the classroom? For each, explain briefly how it could help expand the students' critical information gathering skills.

Science Citation Index (Web of Science) is particularly useful in helping students discover journal articles from a wide variety of science disciplines and follow the trail of cited referencees, realizing the interconnections over time. Chemical Abstracts (CA Online via STN) could be a more useful tool, but our limited only-after-5pm access is a barrier. General Science Index (or GenSciAbstracts via FirstSearch) is a simpler, smaller index that overlaps well with our journal holdings, so it is a good starting point. JSTOR's General Science collection (and Ecology and Botany collections) are even smaller in terms of number of journals covered, but exceptionally powerful with full-text searching going back so many years; the immediate availability of the fulltext is also very helpful and popular with students. Other e-journal collections such as the new ACS Journal Archive will help reduce barriers to scientific literature.

 

What goals do you have for collaboration with faculty, students, and information technologists in the field of electronic information? What goals do you have for collaboration with faculty, students, and information technologists in the field of electronic information?

I look forward to working with this team in reforming the introductory chemistry course. I also hope we'll identify ways to incorporate library/information instruction into the chemistry curriculum. No course-integrated workshops for chemistry have been taught since the old Chem 306 course was dropped a few years ago. I'm delighted that we are considering an information-seeking assignment within Chem 101.

 



, Information Technologist, Mount Holyoke College

What roles and responsibilities do you currently assume regarding the use and instruction of technology?

 

What technologies could enhance student and faculty research/ teaching/ learning? Include a brief description of the technology and a brief explanation of its potential usefulness.

 

What resources are you considering devoting to its future development?




, Student, Mount Holyoke College




Mary Griffin , Student, Vassar College

What are your learning and research needs as defined by course assignments in both this course (if you have taken it) and in others? Map out the range and variation, including both the content and the kinds of resources you encounter and need.

This course is the laboratory companion to a lecture class. If taught well, the lab will enforce the concepts taught in the lecture, as well as offer hands-on practice, which will make these concepts more interesting and real. When I took the course myself, Microsoft Excel was the main form of technology integrated into the learning process As use of a spreadsheet in order to perform calculations is laborious and un-exciting, I believe the use of a Mathematica template would greatly increase the enjoyment and ability of students to learn from the lab. Also, Vassar has a number of molecular modeling programs which are currently not being used in this course. The inclusion of modeling will make the laboratory more applicable to chemistry. In addition, a literature search aspect will familiarize students with both the library and the research process.

What goals do you have for collaboration in this area, both as a student-learner and student-assistant.

As a student-learner, I hope that this collaboration will allow me to better understand the roles of the professor, librarian, and information technologist in the classroom use of technology. I will be able to use this understanding to facilitate my own future learning. As a student-assistant, I will learn how to help students use technology such that their learning is maximized.




Maria Gomez , Professor, Vassar College

Describe the course your team will be working on. What are the pedagogical approaches for which you want to draw on technological resources? Map out the range and variation, including both the content and the kinds of resources you encounter and need?

Our team will be working on the thermo-statistical mechanics physical chemistry laboratory. This laboratory is intended to give students some
hands on laboratory experience with the ideas of thermo-statistical mechanics. This will be done through five multi-week laboratory units that
are being developed specifically for the course. The central pedagogical idea in the development of these units is that a combination of experiments, simulations, and theory can complement our learning of physical phenomena. Through the experiments, students learn how to manipulate nature to measure quantities of interest; through simulations, students can tie the resuls of these experimental results with what is occuring at the atomic scale; combining both experiments and simulations can help students understand the theories presented in class better. Additionally, in the fourth unit, students are asked to go to the literature to help them design an experiment. Here are the tentative ideas for the laboratory units.

The fist unit will introduce students to using models to aid their understanding of physical phenomena in gases. They will obtain experimental
data about the pressure of fixed amounts of several gases at different volumes. To complement their experiment, molecular dynamics simulations
using Cerius2 for non-ideal models of the gases in their experiment will be performed. From these simulations, they will see how the pressure of these gases varies with the volume using these non-ideal models. The experimental data will then be compared with the ideal gas model, the non-ideal models used in their simulations, and well known non-ideal equations of state.

The second unit will introduce students to how the degrees of freedom in molecules influence heat capacities. A standard experiment to measure the ratio of heat capacities for different gases will be performed. This experiment will be complemented by a calculation of the vibrational frequencies and rotational constants for these molecules using Gausian98. The students will combine these vibrational frequencies and rotational constants into the partition function for the molecule. With the aid of Mathematica, the students will go from this partition function to the average energy and then to the heat capacities. The ratio of heat capacities will be compared to the experiment.

The third unit will introduce students to using calorimetry to find changes in enthalpy of reactions in solution. Some classic experiments will be
complemented with calculations that include the effect of solvation. The Gaussian98 program will be used.

The fourth unit will introduce students to finding binary liquid/solid phase diagrams in a classic experiment. The students will then be asked to apply
this knowledge to finding the phase diagram of chocolate caramel mixtures and use this diagram to come up with ways of making candies with solid chocolate outsides and liquid caramel insides. This project will introduce students to searching through library resources to find data useful in
designing of their experiment.

The fifth unit will introduce students to the study of kinetics in ground and excited states through the use of spectroscopy. This series of experiments are taken directly from J. Chem. Ed. Complementing this sequence will be a calculation using Gaussian98 which will show the students where the electron density in the molecule is in the ground and excited states. They will use this infomation to help explain their experimentalresults.

What roles and responsibilities do you currently assume regarding the use and instruction of technology?

I have developed laboratories for the quantum mechanics physical chemistry laboratory that make use of Mathematica and Gaussian98. Physical chemistry students have used these resources in my research computers where I installed the software. This past year, these resources have been
implemented in Vassar's Scientific Visualization laboratory which our information technologist takes care of. This has been a wondeful time saver
for me. I continue to develop experiences for students that make use of computer simulations in learning about chemistry.

What goals do you have for collaboration in this area?

I would like to develop a dialogue with our team to understand better how the expertise they provide can be used in our teaching program. I hope that this course will serve as a concrete case study through which to explore how we can all contribute to student learning through our collaborative efforts. In particular, I would like to explore the applications of the software in our Scientific Visualization laboratory to chemistry courses; additionally, I want to explore the introduction of library searches into laboratory courses to help students think about the design of their experiments. Later, I hope to extend these ideas into other courses.

What resources are you considering devoting to its future development?

I plan to give of my time to our collaboration in this course and continued discussions on other courses.



, Librarian, Vassar College

What roles and responsibilities do librarians on your campus currently assume regarding the use and instruction of technology and electronic resources?

 

Are there specific resources in the humanities that you think contribute to or support student learning in the classroom? For each, explain briefly how it could help expand the students' critical information gathering skills.

 

What goals do you have for collaboration with faculty, students, and information technologists in the field of electronic information?




Cristian Opazo Castillo, Information Technologist, Vassar College

What roles and responsibilities do you currently assume regarding the use and instruction of technology?

I am one of the three instructional computing consultants here at Vassar (my field of expertise relates to the natural sciences, whereas my other colleagues work in humanities/social sciences, and geography/geology respectively). I am in charge of running and maintaining software and hardware at the Scientific Visualization Laboratory, a multi-platform (Windows, Mac, Unix) computing facility where teaching and research in the sciences takes place. I work closely with faculty and students helping them using the various software packages and developing solutions to particular problems related to analysis and visualization of scientific data. In addition to these user-related tasks, I am responsible for finding and testing new technologies that can be helpful to the teaching/learning process at the Sci Vis Lab and other labs on campus.

I also work at the teaching side of the IT spectrum. I am a lecturer for the Physics Department and teach a class on computational methods. In this class I want to make the students comfortable with using two of the most popular programs for scientific computation: Mathematica and Matlab. During the course of a semester, our work ranges from the basic arithmetic calculations up to the development of computer code as a way of modeling natural phenomena.

What technologies could enhance student and faculty research/teaching/learning? Include a brief description of the technology and a brief explanation of its potential usefulness.

I think one of the most important and challenging of issues to solve is the one related to standardization of the various computing services across different operating systems and hardware across campus (email client/server, networked file sharing, printing, directory services, etc.). Users tend to get frustrated (with reason) from having to learn 10 different methods to accomplish different 10 computing tasks (sometimes in 10 different places), so we have to be able to provide a simpler, more efficient solution. In this respect, we have already gave the first step into standardization by introducing the Blackboard course management system across the entire college about a year ago. The standard web interface provided by Blackboard allows faculty and students to seamlessly do the same tasks across the curriculum. The response has been a very positive one from most users. We are currently working on the other systems mentioned above.

What resources are you considering devoting to its future development?

More than particular hardware or software tools, as an instructional technologist I have to figure out and develop more efficient ways to let people know about my role within the academic community. Sometimes problems that users face simply drag for too long because people do not seem to know where to look for help. Being in real contact with the academic community on a one-on-one basis is the key to offer effective solutions. The technology is the easy part.


, Professor, Hampshire College

Describe the course your team will be working on. What are the pedagogical approaches for which you want to draw on technological resources? Map out the range and variation, including both the content and the kinds of resources you encounter and need.

 

What roles and responsibilities do you currently assume regarding the use and instruction of technology?

 

What goals do you have for collaboration in this area?

 

What resources are you considering devoting to its future development?

 


, Student, Hampshire College

What do you hope to gain from this collaboration?

I

What are your learning and research needs as defined by course assignments in both this course (if you have taken it) and in others? Map out the range and variation, including both the content and the kinds of resources you encounter and need.

 

What goals do you have for collaboration in this area, both as a student-learner and student-assistant?




, Librarian, Hampshire College

What roles and responsibilities to librarians on your campus currently assume regarding the use and instruction of technology and electronic resources?

 

Are there specific resources in the humanities that you think contribute to or support student learning in the classroom? For each, explain briefly how it could help expand the students' critical information gathering skills.

 

What goals do you have for collaboration with faculty, students, and information technologists in the field of electronic information?

 

Here's our response to the team question: What do you hope to gain from this collaboration?




, Information Technologist, Hampshire College

What do you hope to gain from this collaboration?

 

What roles and responsibilities do you currently assume regarding the use and instruction of technology?

 

What technologies could enhance student and faculty research/teaching/learning? Include a brief description of the technology and a brief explanation of its potential usefulness.

 

 

What resources are you considering devoting to its future development?




Susan Kimball, Librarian, Amherst College

What roles and responsibilities do librarians on your campus currently assume regarding the use and instruction of technology and electronic resources?

Amherst College Librarians are responsible for course-based instruction upon faculty request, one-on-one research appointments, and reference desk interactions. Through each of these avenues we provide training in the use of a full range of electronic resources, from online databases and fulltext aggregators, to electronic journals and books. We also identify, evaluate, and negotiate licenses for new products that support the curriculum.

Are there specific resources in the sciences that you think contribute to or support student learning in the classroom? For each, explain briefly how it could help expand the students' critical information gathering skills.

There are a variety of discipline-specific bibliographic databases that students should be able to use to adequately research subjects in their field of study. Identification of primary research is a critical skill that should be included in the science curriculum.

Geographic Information Systems are becoming increasingly important in many fields but geology and environmental science, in particular. Understanding data gathering and manipulation for GIS will be critical for students entering these fields.

What goals do you have for collaboration with faculty, students, and information technologists in the field of electronic information?

I'd like to contribute my skills in the areas of information seeking and evaluation to better integrate library research into the curriculum at Amherst. Working with faculty and information technology staff will help to identify the needs of students and develop assignments that incorporate information gathering and use of technology in a meaningful way.


Andy Anderson, Information Technologist, Amherst College

What roles and responsibilities do you currently assume regarding the use and instruction of technology?

Generally, I facilitate the use of information technology in the curriculum, primarily in the natural sciences and mathematics, and generally of an advanced nature. I provide training, support, and encouragement for the use of that technology, investigate new technologies and bring ideas for their use to the attention of the faculty, and establish networks of faculty using particular technologies.

What technologies could enhance student and faculty research/teaching/learning? Include a brief description of the technology and a brief explanation of its potential usefulness.

Our current interest in the "new technology" area is Geographic Information Systems (GIS). It has the ability to graphically display information linked in geographic relationship, allowing the easy visualization of many important concepts. It has uses not only in the natural sciences (geology, biology, and astronomy) but also throughout the social sciences (history, economics, anthropology, sociology, political science), and even in the humanities when viewed from an historical or anthropological perspective.

What resources are you considering devoting to its future development?


A considerable amount. We will shortly be making the ESRI ArcGIS software available for use across the Amherst campus. I am currently learning as much about the technology as I can, to provide support for the many users we expect. We are planning to have training sessions in early August.


, Student, Haverford College

What are your learning and research needs as defined by course assignments in both this course (if you have taken it) and in others? Map out the range and variation, including both the content and the kinds of resources you encounter and need.

 

What goals do you have for collaboration in this area, both as a student-learner and student-assistant?

 


, Information Technologist, Haverford College

What do you hope to gain from this collaboration?

 

What roles and responsibilities do you currently assume regarding the use and instruction of technology?

 

What technologies could enhance student and faculty research/teaching/learning? Include a brief description of the technology and a brief explanation of its potential usefulness.

 

What resources are you considering devoting to its future development?

 


, Professor, Haverford College

Describe the course your team will be working with on. What are the pedagogical approaches for which you want to draw on technological resources? Map out the range and variation, including both the content and the kinds of resources you encounter and need.

 

What roles and responsibilities do you currently assume regarding the use and instruction of technology?

 

What goals do you have for collaboration in this area?

 

What resources are you considering devoting to its future development?

I'



, Librarian, Haverford College

What roles and responsibilities do librarians on your campus currently assume regarding the use and instruction of technology and electronic resources?

 

Are there specific resources in the humanities that you think contribute to or support student learning in the classroom? For each, explain briefly how it could help expand the students' critical information gathering skills.

 

What goals do you have for collaboration with faculty, students, and information technologists in the field of electronic information?




Liz Evans, Information Technologist, Swarthmore College

What roles and responsibilities do you currently assume regarding the use and instruction of technology?

software testing, support and training; support for faculty web development (in general and with Blackboard); infrastructure (server) and lab computer support

What technologies could enhance student and faculty research/teaching/learning? Include a brief description of the technology and a brief explanation of its potential usefulness. What resources are you considering devoting to its future development?

Recently, we have been focusing on Blackboard course management software as a means of enabling a broad group of faculty to incorporate web-based content, tools, and communications features to their courses. Although many professors in the natural science are already comfortable (and in many cases, extremely savvy) with technology and computers, Blackboard has increased the power and flexibility of delivery within an integrated web environment. In most cases, Blackboard interfaces well with library resources and other tools. At the same time, the system does have limitations and certain 'ways of doing things' which can be frustrating. So, while Blackboard becomes more popular, we are also striving for a balance with other ways of using technology for teaching, and are interested to learn about the other schools' experiences.

What resources are you considering devoting to its future development?

Blackboard was introduced campus wide at Swarthmore just last semester, and it's popularity is already in evidence. Staff from academic computing and the library have joined together to offer a comprehensive program of training and support for faculty, staff and students. From the IT perspective, we (as a tri-college project with Bryn Mawr and Haverford) are expanding the infrastructure and back-end support for Blackboard to be sure we have the capability to meet the increasing demands as the number of users and courses grows.



, Professor, Swarthmore College

Describe the course your team will be working with on. What are the pedagogical approaches for which you want to draw on technological resources? Map out the range and variation, including both the content and the kinds of resources you encounter and need.


 

What roles and responsibilities do you currently assume regarding the use and instruction of technology?

 

What goals do you have for collaboration in this area?

 

What resources are you considering devoting to its future development?



Rabi Whitaker, Student, Swarthmore College

What are your learning and research needs as defined by course assignments in both this course (if you have taken it) and in others? Map out the range and variation, including both the content and the kinds of resources you encounter and need.

I've used the web for research in all the astronomy classes I've taken, both as a general resource (just googling) and to find more specific publications (searching databases like astro-ph, or using tripod to get hard copies of things from the libraries). this is what it's been most useful for: looking up stuff that I wanted or needed to know. (and finding pretty pictures; the web is full of those.)

I believe I was required to use web sources for at least one of the papers I wrote in an astro class, and it's always expected that we'll keep up with postings on our course websites (which have been a consistently valuable resource, mostly because they organize and collect a lot of useful information).

We've also been asked to do analysis on data (both real and simulated) using some basic programming, or occasionally with programs written by someone else. The usefulness of these has varied wildly, especially in the cases where we were using similated data as a facsimile for actual astronomical phenomena.


What goals do you have for collaboration in this area, both as a student-learner and student-assistant?

the introductory level astronomy courses already draw a lot on web and technology resources for class material, but it would be nice if there were
more focus on interactivity (by which I mean getting the students to go out and find and use resources on their own, not necessarily the point-click-computer-does-a-trick thing). I think a lot of the archival astronomy data and publicly available information could be used in labs or problem sets to give astronomy a more real, off-the-page feeling, the way experiments with rolling cars and flying balls do for physics. it would be nice if librarians as well as professors were well-versed in the workings of these kinds of resources (just for retrieval purposes if nothing else).

 



, Librarian, Smith College


Katherine Pratt, Student, Smith College


Learning and research needs as defined by course assignments:
- primary sources for research (i.e. books, video interviews, or art work, depending on the course subject)
- electronic database searchs
- articles in professional journals
- computer application tools (such as Mathematica, MATLAB, Excel)


Goals for collaboration in this area:
-to intertwine the use of information resources across departmental boundaries
-to discover how certain learning mediums can best be utilized by each student
-find ways in which to match the learning style of students with the learning mediums and research tools used in their course work



, Librarian, University of Massachusetts




Stephen Schneider, Professor, University of Massachusetts

Describe the course your team will be working with on. What are the pedagogical approaches for which you want to draw on technological resources? Map out the range and variation, including both the content and the kinds of resources you encounter and need.

Astro 100 is a broad introduction to the whole universe squeezed into a single semester. My class has 300 students in it, and for most of them
it will be the only physical science course they take as an undergraduate.

In such a large course, students can get "lost," so I like to employ a lot of different strategies, including collaborative work, hands-on projects, active-learning exercises, etc. Many of these are unwieldy in a large classroom, and my teaching assistant's time is largely wasted on mundane tasks like alphabetizing in-class worksheets. I imagine that technological improvements like an in-class interactive response system (e.g., PRS) can help make these activities stronger and make record keeping simpler.

Since astronomy is such a visual subject, I'd also like to figure out how to make better use of existing computer demos, animations, applets, etc. both within the classroom and for students to use on their own.

What roles and responsibilities do you currently assume regarding the useand instruction of technology?

I added on-line quizzing (WebCT) last year, but I think there is a lot of room for improving the questions and feedback through this system. The distribution of grades through this system has been a terrific simplification in handling a large class, although there was a lot of
time at the beginning of the course required to guide students in using the system.


What goals do you have for collaboration in this area?

During the workshop I'm hoping to get a clearer idea of technological resources that are already available and ones that are being tried at other institutions. I also hope to make the kinds of contacts that will help me move this forward so it doesn't end up as a lot of vaporware.


What resources are you considering devoting to its future development?

During the next year, I will be working with funding from the Davis Foundation for making technological changes to Astro 100. This will provide support for software designers as well as some equipment installation.




, Student, University of Massachusetts

What are your learning and research needs as defined by course assignments in both this course (if you have taken it) and in others? Map out the range and variation, including both the content and the kinds of resources you encounter and need.

 

What goals do you have for collaboration in this area, both as a student-learner and student-assistant?



, Professor, Bryn Mawr College

Describe the course your team will be working with on. What are the pedagogical approaches for which you want to draw on technological resources? Map out the range and variation, including both the content and the kinds of resources you encounter and need.

 

What roles and responsibilities do you currently assume regarding the use and instruction of technology?

 

What goals do you have for collaboration in this area?

 

What resources are you considering devoting to its future development?

 



Anneliese Taylor, Librarian, Bryn Mawr College

What roles and responsibilities do librarians on your campus currently assume regarding the use and instruction of technology and electronic resources?
 

I assume that my role is to help patrons - students, faculty, and visitors alike - when they have questions about doing library research or about computer equipment in the library. At the Science Library we have a computer lab at the front of the library with a variety of software programs including Word, Exel, Powerpoint, Netscaper, Internet Explorer, SPSS, Mathematica, and SciFinder Scholar. We have additional computers (5) throughout the library. I assume that the students know how to use a computer and the various programs, but if someone has a software-specific question I always try to answer it. These questions are usually brought to me at my desk or to the student employee and then referred to me. Sometimes when I'm in the lab students will stop me and ask a question, making me wonder if they would have asked had I not walked into the room.

Often the students know more about a program than I do, especially when it comes to programs like SPSS, so I have to refer the question to a computing staff, usually Quintin since he is located in the science library. I always try to explain how to do something if I know how, so that the students can do it on their own the next time. I find that Bryn Mawr students can be reluctant to ask questions when they need help so I try to get that little bit of instruction in.

As far as using library resources, there is a mixture of librarians visiting classes and demonstrating electronic resources such as the online library catalog and online research databases and patrons receiving this instruction one-on-one with the librarian in the library. At our library there is no reference desk, so patrons either come up to the circulation desk and get referred to a librarian, or they come directly in to my office with questions. I think if a librarian has visited their class they feel more at ease walking into our offices asking for help. I am always willing to help patrons with research, even if I've been to their class already and we're covering the same material. I feel this is a significant part of my job. Often, though, the
students seem apologetic for 'bothering' me when they need assistance. I tell them they're not bothering me; that's what I'm here for. But I think that's the general perception of the students nonetheless.

Are there specific resources in the sciences that you think contribute to or support student learning in the classroom? For each, explain briefly how it could help expand the students' critical information gathering skills.
 

I think that the article databases are one of the most valuable tools for students since they learn about the different types of research and are using technology at the same time. For lower level classes, some of the scientific databases may be too technical, but they can learn from them nonetheless. Science students are lucky in that their fields are some of the most innovative when it comes to making information available online. In chemistry there's SciFinder Scholar; in Math it's MathSciNet; in Physics it's Inspec, etc. There are also many free Web pages created by educational institutions or even corporations with helpful interactive tutorials or informational databases (e.g. ChemFinder.com).

All of these resources are good because they expose students to the wealth of scientific informaton available, the research process, following up on references, and they give students experience with various technologies such as: searching a Web database; selecting specific records and pursuing the full text via the Web or print resources; learning to navigate various Web sites; and experiencing different file/media types.

The only drawback with many of this resources is, without library instruction, it can appear to the students that because it's all on the Web, it's all free. And while using subscription article databases, if a link to full text is not provided, the users may not know how to go about getting the full text of the articles for free from their library. Many students are discovering these databases on their own and may not be getting all of the information they need.

What goals do you have for collaboration with faculty, students, and information technologists in the field of electronic information?
 

I would like to find out more about how faculty teach, what students are looking for, and what technology is available so that I can contribute more as a librarian. Not many science classes request library instruction visits, so this will be an opportunity for me to see if there are other ways that library resources can contribute to the classroom, even if there is no librarian visit to the class.

 
 
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