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. 

This is a lesson plan that centers around a 30-minute activity that gets students thinking and talking about the primary sources they create as they go about their daily lives, in order to prepare them to understand and contextualize the primary sources they encounter in historical research. They will also learn skills that can be transferred to future archival research. This works well as part I of a two-part interaction with classes. Typically, I go to their classroom for this lesson, meeting the students in a room in which they feel comfortable. They then come to the library several weeks later for a research-intensive workshop.

This is a participatory, variable lesson frame ready for you to modify to suit your instruction needs. This lesson and it's variations focuses on encouraging students to see themselves as information creators and part of the scholarly conversation and can also variously include conversations about about the scholarly information cycle and/or authority depending on instruction constraints and configuration.Start with StudentScholarLessonPlan.pdf below.

This is designed as a 75 minute lesson plan. It isn’t tied to specific course content, but can be tailored to a particular course and scaled to shorter or longer class sessions. It is designed as more of a theoretical, reflective introduction to concepts of privacy and security than as a nuts-and-bolts or tech heavy workshop, and it includes a debate activity entitled "The Rewards and Risks of Convenience." It could also be used as part 1 in a two-part workshop series in which the second focuses more on specific strategies/methods/software.

Studying music in an online setting requires that students and instructors leverage digital resources and participatory technologies with understanding and intentionality. Meta-literacy, a framework promoting critical thinking and collaboration, is an inclusive approach to understanding the complexities of information use, production, and sharing in a digital environment. This chapter explores the implications of meta-literacy for the online music classroom and identifies ways in which the librarian and music instructor can collaborate to promote student self-reflection on the use, creation, and understanding of musical information or content.