Welcome to the world of blogging

I'm planning on blogging about my experience as a second year student in a MLIS program and about different issues in librarianship. Hopefully this will be a record of what I have learn and serve as a future resource for research topics.

This week I've been reading about the use of problem-based learning in information literacy instruction. Problem based learning (PBL) is designed to encourage student's independent and active learning. The instructor serves as a more of a guide than a lecturer. PBL is group based. Students are divied up into pairs or small groups and given a problem to work on. For example, students may have to find a scholarly article about symbolism in Paradise Lost by John Milton. The instructor can show them where to access the databases, or may not initially even guide them that far. The instructor walks around answering students questions and helping with any problems they might encounter. The students then report back how they found their article.

This approach encourages critical thinking because students have to examine how they find information and why they picked certain articles or information avenues. Though, I think that the time limit is a significant factor in why they would pick a certain article. Given more time some students would probably dig deeper, or look at other databases.

PBL seems like a very good teaching technique. Having sat through a few one shot literacy instruction sessions as an undergraduate student myself, I know that it can be hard to pay attention and see the relevancy in what I was being shown. By keeping the students active it's much easier to concentrate on the material at hand and understand how they can use it for their own research.

I think one of the pontential problems with using PBL is that you have to have a trade off between the students participation in their learning, and the amount of information you are giving students. Librarians know a lot, and they like to share what they know about using the libraries resources. We're a helpful profession in general! Since most one shot classes only last about an hour, there is not a lot of time to give the students the information they need, especailly if you're spending a significant amount of time on group work. However, PBL can at least be used to give students enough information to complete their assignment and give them a base in how to do research and think critically.

Finally, it would be interesting to try and integrate PBL techniques in a distance education environment. where there is no physical space for the students to interact with each other. This makes the group learning aspect much more diffifcult to acheive. One could use chat rooms, instant messaging, or video chat to simulate the classroom enviroment. Or you could give students an assignment and allow them a few days to finish it. I'm not sure how successful these techniques would be, and perhaps we'll have to wait for the right technology in order to do real time group work.