Like a splinter or like a journalist

Last night I had the honor of spending some time (via Skype--thank you all for your patience with my technical difficulties!) with a group of school librarians in Nebraska talking about embedded librarianship. The slides from my talk are below.

Embedded school librarianship - NEMA from formanlibrary

It was a wonderful opportunity to talk about the why and how I've embraced the sometimes messy process of becoming a more embedded librarian. As I talked about in my presentation, I believe that embedding ourselves in different teaching and learning spaces is the natural evolution of the collaborative efforts that have been at the heart of our profession for so long. 

Fight in the Dining Hall: A Research Allegory

I know it's been quiet here on the blog--it's been a busy fall in many ways. But tonight I finished a project I've been thinking about for a while, and I wanted to share.

When I talk to students about research, I always talk about trying to get as close to the original source as possible. This often comes up in discussions about Wikipedia, when I point students to the Reference list at the bottom of articles (which few of them had noticed before). The analogy I usually use is to explain that research works kind of like gossip--the story can get distorted the farther you get from the original source. I often create a version of the story depicted below involving students in the class. Using the gossip analogy has often helped students grasp the "get to a primary source" idea.

I'd been toying for a while with the idea of creating some sort of video to illustrate the story, but I don't have a lot of film making expertise. But as I was playing with apps for some different projects, I had an "aha!" moment about how I could make this project.

I used Skitch (to make the drawings) and Explain Everything (to create the video) on my iPad to make the video. I can't decide if it's nerdtastic, or the most nerdtastic thing I've ever made, but I'm pretty happy with how it came out.