Weekly Reader

Active Learning and Teaching the Teacher
"Ever since I attended ACRL’s Immersion Teacher Track about a year ago, I’ve been trying to incorporate more active learning strategies into my classes—and surprisingly, it’s been a lot of fun! One unintended benefit of these activities has been the opportunity for me to see inside the minds of students by seeing and hearing how they reason their way through this crazy journey we call research." -- Veronica Wells, ACRLog, 9/19/12

What Libraries Should Be: A Values Proposition
"I am finally getting around to reading Andrew Delbanco’s College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be, and was struck by a list he provides in his introduction of “qualities of mind and heart” that are necessary for citizenship and which colleges should help their students develop. Quoting them in their entirety, they are: A skeptical discontent with the present, informed by a sense of the past; The ability to make connections among seemingly disparate phenomena; Appreciation of the natural world, enhanced by knowledge of science and the arts; A willingness to imagine experience from perspectives other than one’s own; A sense of ethical responsibility." -- Barbara Fister, Library Babel Fish, 9/19/12

Advice to New Teachers and New Students: Learning is a Quest
"Three new teachers at the front end of academic careers, about to face their first classes as teachers, want to know from somebody at the back end, “What’s most important for new teachers to know?” I don’t hear myself saying anything very coherent. I don’t want to give what new teachers frequently get: pat answers and banal suggestions that seem to be helpful without actually being so." -- Maryellen Weimer, PhD , Teaching Professor Blog, 9/12/12

FOMO (The Fear of Missing Out) and MOOCs
"It’s that feeling of anxiety that you get when you look on Twitter and see all your colleagues are headed out to conferences, concerts, parties, or movies. If you don’t go, you worry, if you don’t do something, if you don’t have your own status updates and Instagram photos to share, opportunities are going to pass you by." -- Audrey Watters, Hack (Higher) Education, 9/19/12