Monday Morning Coffee, Green Tea and Databases Getting Social

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For those of you who don't know, I am a librarian. Love this career choice because it gives me access to the future leaders of tomorrow. With my social media anxiety from the weekend, I have decided that the perfect combination of coffee, green tea and teaching a class has me grounded. Coffee to get me up, green tea to bring me down and throw in an information literacy class first thing in the morning and you have me going.

 I decided to pose this question to my class this morning.

What impact does social media have on your academic life?

There were twenty three students in this undergraduate class and I wanted to get their opinions on how social media impacts them academically. This is a group of undergraduate students at various stages in their academic careers and they are all under the age of 23.  

I posed my question.  Walked away.  Taught my lesson. 

A few things to know about what I do.  I am a reference librarian who teaches students how to locate resources in the library catalog. I probably teach about sixty sessions in an academic year and do on average, fifteen small group sessions.  I am constantly working with students and faculty doing research. 

One thing that many people don't know about the articles that they are accessing from databases is that "share" button.  You have the ability to share articles through email and guess what else...social media. 

 Databases have tapped into the social media world to help researchers in a big way.  Students, faculty and anyone who has access can share articles and searches through Twitter, Facebook and a host of other sharing avenues. I talk to them about creating Facebook groups to share articles in that never go away, because it is social media and your digital footprint is everywhere.   I teach this to students because so many of them ARE on social media and it is an opportunity to link their academic lives with their social lives.  Thing is... many don't want it.  

The responses were quite interesting and I think it may have to do with the maturity of the student.  (strictly my observation) Answers varied from "frequently distracts" to "that's where I get all of my news" to "easy way to network".  

This was a fun experiment and I am definitely going to look into this some more.  Look for more posts this week based on my findings.

Comments

  1. VanessaJuly 2, 2018 at 9:36 AM

    I can't wait to hear more about what your students think!

    ReplyDelete
  2. LeahJuly 3, 2018 at 7:06 PM

    This would be an interesting class assignment for a research paper. I think it's fascinating that students will share so much, but not a research article. I could see where creating a group and sharing the articles within the group could be helpful. I also could see this being great for myself and my professional contacts/mentors. What a great way to keep all those articles you want to have on hand, but don't always want to download and save. Please share any other answers you get from students next time you pose this question. Thanks for sharing!

    ReplyDelete

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