CTE Newsletter - Jan/Feb 2003 (Vol 15, No 3)
Instruction Commons Benefits Faculty, Students
By Amy Slagell, Associate Professor of English and Director of the Basic Public Speaking Course
"The first order of business when giving a speech in public is to have something compelling to say." Since this is what we tell students enrolled in Speech Communication 212, the basic public speaking course here at ISU, we require that they do research materials on the topics for their major presentations.
The World Wide Web has changed the way students do research, and the SpComm 212 instructors want to do all we can to help students gain access to the strongest materials for their speeches. We want them to rely on resources in the Parks Library rather than to cite heavily from the non-reviewed, rarely updated, sometimes unreliable resources available elsewhere on the Web. But despite their experience in Library 160, students can still feel overwhelmed and confused when they confront the wealth of materials available in Parks. For example, we often suggest that students look at indexes to find up-to-date resources such as journals, periodicals and newspapers, but the list of indexes at Parks Library, when printed out, is nine pages long. It can be difficult for students to find even the title of an appropriate index for their topics, let alone a relevant journal or an actual article.
It was that challenge that took my colleague Maggie LaWare and me to the Parks Library's Undergraduate (now Instruction) Commons. Working collaboratively with librarians, we have been able to create a website that supports student work on the particular assignments we have in the course. The materials on the website reinforce the terminology we use in the course. The site also supports students through the process of choosing a topic and beginning their research; most important, it leads them to our library's best resources for developing public speeches.
In addition, the Instruction Commons materials offer guidance for evaluating the sources students find and for citing those sources properly in a bibliography. To make sure students don't miss the opportunity to use these excellent resources, our brief research assignment requires them to log onto the site to find resources for their persuasive speeches early in the process of developing that speech.
The library website links to the course website and vice versa, so students can move seamlessly between materials I have developed and those created by the library faculty. Students report that the website materials are very useful. Some of the library's periodical resources are available electronically, so students have access to high quality information around the clock. As a result, the quality of student research is improving in our classes.
The Instruction Commons URL is http://www.lib.iastate.edu/commons/index.html.
(In fall 2000, Amy Slagell and librarian Kathleen Kern presented an award-winning paper about their collaboration on the Instruction Commons project at the National Communication Association Convention.)