The goal of this in-class activity is to help students relate database searching to something they already have familiarity with. This is interdisciplinary and could be adapted for any subject or database. Students will explore a timely topic on Twitter using a hashtag and note bias, tone, authority, and related hashtags before conducting a similar search on a library database or discovery tool. Students and instructors then discuss similarities and differences between both searches and their results. 

Privacy Literacy Toolkit for K-20 librarians and educators to facilitate creation of learning experiences on privacy related topics.  Toolkit includes teaching materials, how-tos, case studies, current awareness resources, along with professional values & policy guidance.

The Penn State Berks Privacy Workshop Series focuses on privacy issues for students in the past, present, and future.  The Privacy Workshop spotlights privacy practices and concerns in the current moment; Digital Leadership explores future implications of past and current digital behaviors; Digital Shred provides tools to evaluate and mitigate the damage of past digital behaviors; and Digital Wellness focuses on privacy across the lifespan - bringing together the past, present, & future by finding a balance of technology & wellness, while aligning habits and goals.  Each workshop is grounded in theory – countering approaches that overpromise user control in the face of information asymmetries and the control paradox – and embrace students’ autonomy and agency by avoiding prescribed solutions, and instead encouraging decision-making frameworks.In the Digital Shred Workshop, students will be able to:Reflect on and describe their digital privacy priorities in order to articulate the benefits and risks of their digital dossierApply a growth mindset to critically examine their current data exhaust // digital footprint and recognize when change is neededDevelop a Personal Data Integrity Plan that makes routine the process of auditing and updating their digital dossier in alignment with their privacy valuesDescribe “digital shred” and its importance. 

This lesson is designed to orient teacher education students to the library spaces and resources that support the development of multiple literacies by using a gamified tour through a series of stations throughout the library. Exploration stations are focused on themes of Indigenous perspectives and critical literacy, differentiated reading materials, leisure reading, coding and computational thinking resources, and “making” stories through unplugged STEAM activities. At each station, students engage with the resources through conversation, play, and decision-making. Students will gain an appreciation for the breadth of library resources to support the development of multiple literacies, and begin to critically appraise teaching and learning resources for the classroom. The Unlock Library Literacy workshop models a gamified approach to learning design. Students gather in small groups and engage in a self-guided exploration of stations throughout the library, with librarians available to facilitate and answer questions. An online survey platform is used to randomly move students from one station to the next, and states the tasks students must perform at each location. After completing each exploration station, students will receive a clue. After completing all required stations, students will have the code for a combination lock that they can use to unlock a box and get a prize.  

Deciding who to vote for can be hard. On top of that, finding information about local elections can sometimes be difficult, as can be figuring out if you agree with a candidate on an issue that you don’t know too much about. This activity engages students in the civic process and in research. Students will use internet searching to find information about candidates, and database searching to find information out about an issue. 

In this activity, students work in groups to craft a response to a presidential tweet from an assigned perspective (e.g. right or left leaning news source). In doing so, they are required to find, evaluate, and effectively use information to make a case. Unlike a research paper, which aspires to be neutral or unbiased, this activity asks students to respond to a tweet from a particular perspective, with a particular bias, requiring them to engage with their sources in a new way. The activity is followed by a discussion of students' interactions with the information they found and presented. 

The MLA provides short tutorial videos that help users make the most of the bibliography’s rich metadata and its advanced searching and filtering features. New and updated tutorials are released throughout the year.If you have a suggestion for a topic that you would like to see covered in a tutorial, please let us know by sending an e-mail to bibliography@mla.org.

The MLA has developed an online course to teach students how to use the MLA International Bibliography for college-level research. Each of the five units in the course presents a lesson, followed by progression questions to reinforce the lesson through active engagement with the bibliography, and a quiz.  Students will receive a badge upon passing each quiz and a course-completion badge after completing all the lessons and passing all five quizzes.The course usually takes students ninety minutes or less to complete and requires that they have access to the MLA International Bibliography on the EBSCO platform through their institution’s library. Students can create a free account to take the course and start earning badges.In January 2018, the MLA launched four new subject area modules to accompany its online course Understanding the MLA International Bibliography. Each module focuses on searching the bibliography for scholarly publications in one of four disciplines: folklore, linguistics, film (including television, video, and other broadcast media), and rhetoric and composition. Students who complete the new modules can earn badges in each of these four subject areas. Visit the course site to access the main course and new modules.Interested in other resources for teaching research and information literacy? Visit the Teaching Resources page on The MLA Style Center, where you’ll find lesson plans, assignments, and an instructor’s guide to integrating the online course into class curricula.

This lesson plan uses Kevin Seeber's process cards and our newly created set of process cards that focus on news sources.  In the activities using the process cards, our students were able to define and contextualize different types of information resources, including news sources.  The tranfer and apply assessment used to close the session provides an opportunity for the students to think about how they would integrate these types of information into coursework, the workplace, and their personal lives.

If there were a list of things I absolutely required all my students to understand before leaving my class, the relationship between mass media, politics, and science would be close to the top of the list. But there are a lot of moving parts in these relationships, so the terrain is difficult to traverse.  As one might expect of a difficult topic, there is much to read and a lot to unpack.   This pathfinder discusses how politics and our mass media system complicate the dissemination of important scientific information.