Catching up - late semester projects & the tour. . .

I have been a bit lax in posting over the past week but only due to the rapid pace of school & work related items. In fact I have made some good progress. The mini-review I for 881 is in final draft, the tour topic for 715 has solidified & I am focusing on reading/review at the moment. On the work side of things catawiki (http://wiki.zsr.wfu.edu/catawiki) got off the ground, and the strategic planning process is moving forward. If I can just push through DigitalForsyth &the second Mini Review (881), I can focus on a quiet December!

In short. . .Some good advances in a project a WFU regarding the hist390 class and the stumbling (by myself) across an article which mentioned an educational foundation for the work that class has been doing has me going off in a direction on my tour topic. I am glad to have a concrete thing to look at, rather than a more nebulous 'topic' which was quickly threatening to break my will to write literature reviews...

The topic, how digital libraries support inquiry based learning styles, is the outcome of a seemingly simple project that started in the fall - the goal of which was to 1)educate students in a history research on primary resource research adn 2)help build a digital library from an emerging-expert perspective. There have been lots of ideas from the library end on how to look at the project, from a suggestion that we evaluate the quality of the metadata to ideas surrounding looking at how the students feel about the process. I created a simple survey designed to get some qualitative feedback & hope to compare it against the data/logs (for some quantitative data). It may be hard to get to student motivation, but at least perhaps we can find out something about what they thought about the experience.

Through reading, i have been intrigued with PBL & IBL - it has been nice to read in another field (the ideas seem new & not so obvious!) I may still struggle with integrating some of these ideas but have the idea that these learning styles really describe (from a slightly different perspective) the information seeking styles we looked at early in the semester. . .