The Alien Worlds project teaches ethnographic skills using the societies of dystopian, postapocalyptic, and science fiction texts as imagined field sites and targets for analysis. These exercises and assignments, which illustrate principles of qualitative fieldwork, were developed when COVID-19 precautions made it impossible to assign tasks that…

The paper shows that Tuning Project has generated indifference more than resistance within the French academic community. It proposes an analysis of the reasons of this situation: difficulties arising from Tuning itself, the resistance of the French academic tradition, the institutional inhibitors and facilitators. The impact of Tuning on French…

Hosting guest speakers is a common practice among instructors because it can yield new insights for students. However, the experience is often disappointing. This article refers to guest experts to signal a break from the conventional approach, in which guest speakers deliver information primarily in a one-directional manner without any engagement…

This paper reports on an investigation into the effectiveness of teaching research methods in library and information science (LIS). A review of the literature revealed that the LIS community is engaged in a continuing debate about the most effective means for teaching research methods courses in master's-level LIS programs. Many LIS master's…

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether students of English as a foreign language (EFL) at the Lebanese University (LU) can effectively improve their language proficiency by creating digital stories. To do so, the researcher introduced digital storytelling (DST) as an optional assignment in an EFL communication course offered at LU in…

This article describes an activity in which students will understand, analyze, and apply the principles learned in the RACE process (research, action, communication, and evaluation). Students should have the ability to identify the four-step public relations planning process and ultimately create a public relations plan. This two-week activity is…

Readers can explore 13 teaching innovations presented at the 2019 Association for Business Communication annual international conference in Detroit, Michigan. These assignments are designed to add fuel to oral and written persuasion, including the practical use of rhetorical tools. Ideas to advance learners' professional development are presented.…

This article describes experiential-learning approaches to conveying the work and rewards involved in qualitative research. Seminar students interviewed one another, transcribed or took notes on those interviews, shared those materials to create a set of empirical materials for coding, developed coding schemes, and coded the materials using those…

A major responsibility of instruction librarians is to help students develop a more extensive and flexible information literacy repertoire. The teaching and learning of information literacy most often takes place in one of two ways: within the context of single 50-minute library sessions, or at the reference desk. In both cases, it usually takes…

In this instructional article, we describe a non-traditional course assignment in which we ask students in our social problems courses to write, illustrate, and present a children's book about a social problem as part of the process of learning. Over the course of the semester, students utilize guided handouts to create a children's book exploring…

Recognizing the limitations of traditional research assignments, the two authors of this article--one a librarian and one a historian--set out to redesign a history capstone seminar to focus on the research process as much as on the research product: tipping the iceberg to look at what is underneath. The article begins with a brief overview of the…

Research skills are a valued commodity by industry and university administrators. Despite the importance placed on these skills students typically dislike taking research method courses where these skills are learned. However, training in research skills does not necessarily have to be confined to these courses. In this study participants at a…

Student consulting is a form of problem-based learning through which students work on strategic issues for organizations. To explore how students perceive their research-related tasks, 15 student consultants were asked to evaluate their comfort levels with seven tasks--adapted from the Association of College and Research Libraries' Information…

This study focuses on a quantitative assessment of undergraduate student use of SFX citation linking software. The study seeks to reveal whether or not students are using SFX, and, if so, how they are using it. Study participants were Penn State Altoona students, all of whom had received basic library instruction. Their research sessions were…

More than two decades of debate since the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) adopted the term information literacy have been marked by ongoing criticism of its associated definitions and standards. Some scholars and practitioners have argued for a critical information literacy, which applies the precepts of critical pedagogy to…