Category Archives: What’s Cool

November is Native American Heritage Month

Here are a few ways to celebrate Native American Heritage Month.

View a documentary about the contemporary experiences or history of Native Americans available via Healey Library streaming video databases.

Up Heartbreak Hill

“Up Heartbreak Hill chronicles the lives of three Native American teenagers in Navajo, New Mexico-Thomas, an elite runner; Tamara, an academic superstar; and Gabby, an aspiring photographer-as they navigate their senior year at a reservation high school.”

The Way West: Ghost Dance

“The story begins with the opening decades of expansion, key technological advances, and the uprooting of the native people through the Civil War period. It then examines the four-year period immediately following the Civil War to the completion of the transcontinental railroad. The conclusion traces the sequence of events leading to the battle of the Little Big Horn, the oppression of Native American tribes, the rise of the Ghost Dance religion and the massacre at Wounded Knee.”

In Whose Honor?

“In Whose Honor? takes a critical look at the long-running practice of “honoring” American Indians as mascots and nicknames in sport. It follows Native American mother Charlene Teters, and her transformation into the leader some are calling the “Rosa Parks of American Indians” as she struggles to protect her cultural symbols and identity.”

 

Read a book about Native American history or literature.

Green, Thomas A., ed. Stories from the American Mosaic: Native American Folktales. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2008. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 13 November 2015.

Mann, Charles C. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. New York: Knopf, 2005. Print.

Treuer, David. Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual. Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 2006. Print.

 

Academic Impact: Open Education Resources initiatives at BLC Libraries

OER

On September 28, 2015, Boston Library Consortium (BLC) hosted the first Open Educational Resources Workshop “OER: the path to sustainable change ” at the Boston College Theology and Ministry Library. The keynote speaker was Dr. David Ernst from the University of Minnesota and founder of the Open Textbook Library. The statistical data shows that students who took the OER courses performed well in the advanced level courses.

Four librarians from the BLC libraries, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Boston College, University of New Hampshire and The University of Connecticut shared their experiences in developing  OER initiatives and programs on their campuses.

The video of the workshop is available from the following link:

https://www.blc.org/special-highlights/open-educational-resources-and-blc

After the presentation, there was a brainstorming discussion on how BLC can support these initiatives going forward.

The BLC is considering joining the Open Textbook Library network. More information coming soon, stay tuned.

 

Information Literacy Paradigm Shift: Standards to Framework

What do the words “information literacy” mean to you?

As John Naisbitt portended in 1982, “We are drowning in information, but starved for knowledge” (p. 24). It is both an unimaginable privilege and a near-insurmountable challenge to live in a time of information overload and near-constant connectivity. To contextualize our data-driven lives, consider that every minute in 2014, Facebook users were sharing over 2 million pieces of content, Twitter users were tweeting over 270,000 times, and Google received over 4,000,000 search queries (James, 2014). Also consider that 64% of American adults—and 85% of American young adults—now own a smartphone, and 46% of smartphone owners describe their phones as something they “couldn’t live without” (Smith, 2015). What do we do with all of that information? And more importantly, how do we teach our students to become critical navigators and consumers of that information and, hopefully, producers of that information and content themselves? Continue reading Information Literacy Paradigm Shift: Standards to Framework