 In Fall 2021, I participated in the UCCS Faculty Resource Center's Online Course Design Badge class. This program is designed to certify faculty to design fully online courses, which doesn't really align with the kind of teaching I actually do (1-2 shots for my liaison areas and ENGL 1410 themes), but I felt like my online teaching strategy had been a little more ad hoc than would be ideal. So I signed up!
Overall, I think this was a really helpful course. It was a lot of fun to design a semester-long info lit class, and I also feel like it taught me to navigate the way a lot of the faculty I work with have set up their Canvas Courses (there were quite a few instances at the start of the pandemic where I had to send very confused emails to people while I tried to find relevant docs to better inform my one-shot instruction). In this post, I'll go through the modules in my mock class and a little about the process of the badge course.
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The director of the UCCS first year rhetoric and writing program is running a sabatical blog and she invited me to write a 'who I'm talking to' post! I wrote about my teaching philosophy, teaching persona, and teaching injuries. Check out that post and the rest of the blog here:
Yes, 3.0! This activity is now on its third iteration, and it just keeps getting better and better. You can read about version 2.0 here.
This year, I had to back away from padlet due to user interface changes they made on their end. I thought I would be able to do the activity in person on our classroom whiteboard. However, as it has in so many things, COVID interfered. I was exposed in a class I'd taught the week prior and hadn't gotten my test results back before I was due to teach a different course. The test did ultimately come back negative, but in the moment I had to quickly pivot my plans from in-person to online. To do that, I ended up pivoting to a tried and true old friend: Google Forms. 2021 marked the sesquicentennial of the founding of Colorado Springs, and instead of marking Colorado Day (Aug. 8) this year I wanted to put together an exhibit that celebrated the direct community context of UCCS. This celebration involved photoshopping a lot of clip art party hats on municipal buildings.
To look at our immediate vicinity, I decided to look at the sister cities program to see who might "come" to a birthday party for Colorado Springs. It was great to have (well, make) the opportunity to weave federal docs, state docs, and international local docs together in one exhibit. This spring semester, I had the opportunity to work more closely than I ever had before with one of my English faculty. She taught an asynchronous online course entitled “Speculative Fiction and the Environment,” and I got to have discussions with her about the class as early as October 2021, which really set us up for success. Together we were able to hash out her dream exercise for the class: an annotation project where students would take a short excerpt from each of their four texts and add annotations linking the fiction to newspaper articles contemporary to the writing of the novel or to some other thematically resonant content.
For the past year, I’ve been participating in the ACRL Instruction Section’s mentoring program. It’s been an excellent opportunity to talk to someone with more experience about her instruction practice, techniques for building relationships with faculty, and also occasionally just hearing that I’m doing a good job from someone with an entirely external perspective. One of the things that she introduced me to was using google slides as an instruction tool beyond just making a slide deck. She’s used google slides as a surrogate for underlining things that would have been projected on a whiteboard. When I was asked to talk about academic honesty in the digital humanities context, I saw the perfect opportunity to try this out.
As part of my government information librarian role, I’m incapable of shutting up about the decennial census. And when I wanted to turn around an exhibit in the height of 1410 season, I turned to the census for inspiration. Drawing from Rob Lopresti’s When Women Didn’t Count and Measuring America, I put together a carousel exhibit on census undercounts focusing on women. This carousel pulled double duty as my presentation for the March 2021 meeting of the Cheyenne Mountain Chapter of the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution where I was doing the monthly programming block. In the future, I want to do an exhibit that really gets into how enumerators are given their instructions, but that may have to wait until 2030… If you want to flip through the exhibit, click here:
One thing I wanted to be able to bring back in Spring Semester for ENGL 1410 (First Year Rhetoric and Writing) was my citation mapping exercise. This had been on hold because it had previously been a very in-person activity. I would group students in pairs in the classroom, give them an article, and task them with developing a handful of keywords that they thought would apply based on reading the abstract. They would then put the articles up on the whiteboard and we would connect them based on shared authors, shared themes, and if any of them linked up via their references. I like this exercise because it speaks to the “scholarship as conversation” frame and allows me to talk about the fact that not only are students putting their sources in conversation in their writing but also entering the scholarly conversation themselves.
As part of my government information librarian role, I’m working on increasing the visibility of the government documents collection here at UCCS. Part of this project is increasing the frequency of exhibits using that collection. For Black History Month, I decided to look at the National Register of Historic Places for locations in Colorado related to Black history. One of my favorite jokes is to point at government buildings, vehicles, etc., and say “that’s a government document” and this was a fun way to explore that idea. I started with the process of getting a location on the national register of historic places and then shared a handful of Colorado locations throughout the state. If you’d like to check out the tour, which I built on StoryMapJS, you can click here:
Earlier this semester, I put together an activity for an English class to guide them through the two databases that they would be using this fall. You can read about that here. It worked pretty well (enough for me to revise it for future use!) but it definitely had some issues to be worked out.
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