Information Literacy Partner of the Month
November 2014
Congratulations to Dr. Seth Friese, Associate Professor of Chemistry, who is the SU Libraries' Information Literacy Partner of the Month for November. Susan Brazer nominated him, noting:
Seth first started working with me years ago to create a library component for the department's CHEM 403/413 independent study "capstone" experiences that all chem majors must complete. With his help, I created a series of 5 learning object-type modules (each one included a quiz) that the students needed to read/work their way through in turn, with each one building upon the previous module. We used this setup for several years. It sadly turned out to be a bomb. Despite our best efforts, students left them until the last minute and then did all modules in one massive gulp, often completing them in a single hour the day before graduation. So Seth and I spoke about revamping the entire setup. We are looking to the American Chemical Society's Chemistry Literacy standards, and are talking about how we could work to slowly yet systematically incorporate them into the courses, how the students could meet with me 3-4x during the semester, etc.
Seth also came to me this summer with a rough assignment in hand, and not only asked for my help in tweaking it, but also spoke about how he wanted me to do an instruction session for his CHEM 222 (Organic Chemistry II) students, and to create a LibGuide for them. He and I have met several times about this, and he is crazily enthusiastic about it. The students are going to be researching how to synthesize specific chemical products and will be searching the literature for procedures and techniques, using one of our more sophisticated search engines, SciFinder Scholar. The end result that the students will turn in will be an amalgam of things, one of which will be an annotated bibliography done in the style of the American Chemical Society folks, via EasyBib.
It is for this willingness to try different ways of working with a librarian to teach students how to find and use information effectively that we have chosen Dr. Seth Friese as the SU Libraries' Information Literacy Partner of the Month for November.
In addition to recognizing Dr. Friese on the SU Libraries' website and social media, we also will purchase a book in his field of study to be added to the Libraries' collection in his honor.