Sunday, March 31, 2013

A librarian lurking in a MOOC

I'm paying attention to the discussion fora on Duke's English Composition I course taught by Denise Comer and offered through Coursera. I'm looking for places that an embedded librarian might intervene. Why? I'm interested in the role that information literacy plays in MOOCs in general. More specifically I'm on board as staff librarian with writingcommons.org (http://writingcommons.org)which is being used as one of the resources for the Duke course. What other information could writingcommons.org include in order to help students taking MOOCs? Here's a few things that I've answered:

How do I copyright my work? This was not the "how do I cite work and avoid plagiarizing" - but "how do I copyright works of fiction that I myself have written?" I explained how it's done in the U.S, but I'm not certain this student was a U.S. citizen.

There was a question about how to search for open access resources. Another student helped out with that and I chimed in as well with some ideas.

How do I find recent research on child development? I explained how to find some research using open access services - and made some suggestions about finding recent articles if you are affiliated or near a library.

How can I find glossaries for various academic disciplines - specifically social work? (In the case the student is a non-native English speaker.) I listed some sites and explained how I identified them.

What about political correctness and academic writing? I turned up an interesting web site from University of Leicester and asked the students to take a look to see what they thought about it.

I'll try to keep track of whatever else gets "librarian" answer from me.

I've let the Duke librarians know that I'm in there being nosy. Any other librarians embedded in their MOOCs and answering questions wearing their librarian hat?

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