Actual Results of My Pitch

As you may have guessed from the earlier blog post, I pitched our idea to a First Year Writing professor because he has a major meeting with librarians from our school and Utah State on Monday. His job is to give them feedback and any suggestions for the library's course in the First Year Writing program. Needless to say, I was really nervous, but I believe it went rather well.

He was really interested in our idea and would love to incorporate Library Research 2.0. He was particularly interested in students connecting with experts after reading their articles. He said he would ask to have all of our "connection" points incorporated into the library days because that is closely tied to the articles they find. However, he said that all of our other points are more for First Year Writing professors because the library only has two days to talk to the class about research. Therefore, all of their research instruction must be library related and all other research instruction is given by the professors in class. He recommended that we contact Brian Jackson. He is either a coordinator or a co-coordinator in the English department. He also instructs the graduate students in the English Department. It also happens that he is incredibly interested in digital literacy and has used a wikipage to compare teaching techniques in the department. I was told that he would definitely be the best one to talk to if I wanted to add to the First Year Writing curriculum.

He also told me tips about connecting to graduate students so they can teach future classes with Library Research 2.0 techniques.

He also suggest that we present our pitch as a simple lesson plan that can be incorporated into about half a class day's instruction. In the lesson, he suggested that we focus on creating/connecting and show 3 links of quick videos where students have displayed their ideas in a short of video "tweethis." We can then suggest that students create their own videos of their work and comment on each other's videos.

After hearing our pitch, this professor said that he would like to incorporate connecting and social proofing in his class by having his students post their research thesis on Facebook and sharing the feedback they received. We also talked about having students publish their work or at least being taught how to publish their work, so they can publish more polished research papers in the future. We talked about ebook pages, youtube videos, and presentations. Students could also shorten their work and publish it in the Daily Universe.