em Blog 643

Last class, we spoke about fake news and its relation to information literacy. We saw a push by librarians to increase the ability for students to determine the validity of a source and the recent elections has only made the need for info literacy more prominent. Is the fake news movement the same as the information literacy movement? Fake news acts to highlight the need for information literacy but importantly shows that literacy skills are changing. We now have an incredible amount of sources that we can quickly skim over in minutes. This changes the way students analyze the content of articles because they are reading the materials differently.  One critical skill students must have that can be facilitated in the classroom is the ability to explain the reasons behind their predictions. Teachers should help students by testing student thinking and help students see why ideas change and evolve to adapt to new knowledge. Progressive formalization allows...

Last week in class, we discussed information literacy and whether this concept should extend beyond libraries. As with most of the course, I agree that this is a skill that many students need and requires critical thinking beyond the library setting. With Facebook and other online blogs pushing the definitions of what real news is and how we classify fake news, students need to be able to assess the validity of literature and online sources quickly and efficiently for all classes. In addition to talking about information literacy, we also viewed some of our classmate's screencasts. I was really impressed by how calm and clear my peers were in their videos and the overall level of quality of the videos, considering the constraints placed on us. After careful design and testing of exercises, The Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) (2016) present approaches students can take to evaluate the validity of online information. The activities span middle school, high school, and co...

Screencast url: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pXf4dM5L9v0zXWm5_Dr9YDmT8nOMDrl6/view?usp=sharing Tool url: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/imovie/id408981434?mt=12 Transcript: Hello and welcome Today we are going to use iMovie, a movie editing software available free for Mac, to make a time-lapse video. A timelapse combine many photos taken over a period of time to make time appear faster than actually is. So, what you need is a camera that can take photos of a set time period and software to combine the photos into a video. We are going to walk through the steps of transforming your photos from still images into a video with the help of iMovie. First, open iMovie and select the Projects tab from the top. Select Create New, then Movie. Ok, so now we have created a new Movie project. On the top, we have our media library, which is currently empty. So we will bring in some photos to the library. Select import media to bring photos from your computer to the new Movie....

This week for Instructional Skills we are learning about creating successful video lessons, or screencasts. This should be valuable for my field, as I begin my career at Chegg, I will be working with tutors to re-evaluate how lessons are completed online, whether synchronously, or more relevant to this research, asynchronously. Often students can not learn at a time and place convenient or accessible to the teacher, meaning lessons will have to take place online and this will lead to results different than in-person lessons. Bowles-Terry (2010) present a think-aloud study, completed by college students, to understand how effectively students can use online tutorials on the library’s website to learn about resources and services offered. They found, unsurprisingly, that students prefer short videos (about 3 minutes) and often skip past the introduction to get to the core content. Additionally, students did not want to the look and feel of the videos to be more entertaining, they pr...

Introduction Hi everyone, I'm a second-year master's student specializing in social computing. I grew up in a small suburb of NYC, running cross country, playing tennis, and saxophone. My background is cognitive psychology and HCI from CMU in Pittsburgh. This summer, I will be moving to San Francisco for a full-time user research position with Chegg Tutors. I'm especially interested in what it takes for (online) e-tutors to be successful and how technology facilitates learning experiences. In my free time, I tutor local middle schoolers python and robotics. Outside of academics, I enjoy cycling (when it's a bit warmer 😆) around the Ann Arbor local loop. I also enjoy travel and spent last year exploring the amazing state of Michigan, but sadly I sold my car this past break. See yinz in class! -Evan M