Fun Reads at an Academic Library: Encouraging College Students to Read for Pleasure

The article discusses the creation of reading programs in academic and public libraries to encourage students to read for pleasure in the U.S. At the California State University in East Bay, a collection of academic books was purchased to support research. A family reading program and online library skills tutorial for low-literacy adults were created at Oakland Public Library (OPL) in California

Library Widget in the LMS: Way Cooler Than it Sounds

Lightning talk on library widget in LMS (Learning Management System) platfor

Threshold Concepts and Information Literacy

What do we teach when we teach information literacy in higher education? This paper describes a pedagogical approach to information literacy that helps instructors focus content around transformative learning thresholds. The threshold concept framework holds promise for librarians because it grounds the instructor in the big ideas and underlying concepts that make information literacy exciting and worth learning about. This paper looks at how this new idea relates to existing standards and posits several threshold concepts for information literacy. This article won the 2013 Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Instruction Section (IS) Ilene F. Rockman Publication of the Year Award

Troublesome Concepts and Information Literacy: Investigating Threshold Concepts for IL Instruction

Librarians regularly encounter students who struggle to understand and apply information literacy concepts. A qualitative survey administered to information literacy practitioners asked about troublesome content and analyzed results using the threshold concepts pedagogical framework first described by Jan Meyer and Ray Land. A threshold concept transforms the learner’s view of content and helps integrate previously learned material; threshold concepts are portals that, once traversed, bring insight into how to think and act like a practitioner within a discipline. This project uses the data collected to propose seven threshold concepts for information literacy

Save a Horse, Ride a New Train of Thought: Using Threshold Concepts to Teach Information Literacy

The sun beat down on a high, lonesome hilltop in Hayward... where three librarians at Cal State East Bay were redesigning a credit-bearing first-year Information Literacy course in order to move the content online. They reckoned that creating this online hootenanny would require rustling up some fresh lessons and activities and distilling the class down to a few essential learning objectives, based on ACRL standards. One librarian thundered into town with talk of threshold concepts, a pedagogical strategy developed by Jan Meyer and Ray Land. Could threshold concepts serve as a lasso for students to snare a deeper understanding of what it means to be information literate? Threshold concepts, as described by Meyer and Land, transform and integrate the learner\u27s view of content; though potentially troublesome, they bring insight into how to think like a practitioner within a discipline. In this presentation, we propose threshold concepts for our discipline -- information literacy -- and describe how these concepts were used to redesign a credit-bearing information literacy course. We intend this presentation to serve as the beginning of a conversation with other librarian teachers about threshold concepts and how we might use them to rethink IL teaching and outreach. As a result of attending this session, participants will be able to: - Define threshold concepts and understand their application in teaching and learning. - Recognize the potential of threshold concepts to transform information literacy instruction. - Participate in a conversation about where our students experience thresholds while learning IL

A Threshold Concepts Approach to the Standards Revision

This article describes how threshold concepts can inform the revision of ACRL\u27s Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education

Assessing Threshold Concepts for Information Literacy

This presentation was offered as part of the CUNY Library Assessment Conference, Reinventing Libraries: Reinventing Assessment, held at the City University of New York in June 2014

Your Discomfort Is Valid: Big Feelings and Open Pedagogy

This article explores the affective reactions of 13 community college students engaged in an open pedagogy textbook creation project. The instructor and first author, a human development and family services faculty member and department chair at a community college in Oregon, received feedback from her students that the project impacted them differently than past learning experiences. Student engagement with research and the diverse personal experiences of their classmates fostered both personal challenges and growth. This article groups these experiences into themes and explores different theoretical lenses, including scaffolding (constructivism), transformative learning, threshold concepts and safe spaces/brave spaces. We discuss the support that students and faculty can use in similar learning situations, such as metacognition and cultural humility. Finally, we offer a visual model that open educators can use and adapt to consider how to raise or lower the stakes of an open pedagogy assignment

Catchment characteristics and seasonality control the composition of microbial assemblages exported from three outlet glaciers of the Greenland Ice Sheet

Glacial meltwater drains into proglacial rivers where it interacts with the surrounding landscape, collecting microbial cells as it travels downstream. Characterizing the composition of the resulting microbial assemblages in transport can inform us about intra-annual changes in meltwater flowpaths beneath the glacier as well as hydrological connectivity with proglacial areas. Here, we investigated how the structure of suspended microbial assemblages evolves over the course of a melt season for three proglacial catchments of the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS), reasoning that differences in glacier size and the proportion of glacierized versus non-glacierized catchment areas will influence both the identity and relative abundance of microbial taxa in transport. Streamwater samples were taken at the same time each day over a period of 3 weeks (summer 2018) to identify temporal patterns in microbial assemblages for three outlet glaciers of the GrIS, which differed in glacier size (smallest to largest; Russell, Leverett, and Isunnguata Sermia [IS]) and their glacierized: proglacial catchment area ratio (Leverett, 76; Isunnguata Sermia, 25; Russell, 2). DNA was extracted from samples, and 16S rRNA gene amplicons sequenced to characterize the structure of assemblages. We found that microbial diversity was significantly greater in Isunnguata Sermia and Russell Glacier rivers compared to Leverett Glacier, the latter of which having the smallest relative proglacial catchment area. Furthermore, the microbial diversity of the former two catchments continued to increase over monitored period, presumably due to increasing hydrologic connectivity with proglacial habitats. Meanwhile, diversity decreased over the monitored period in Leverett, which may have resulted from the evolution of an efficient subglacial drainage system. Linear discriminant analysis further revealed that bacteria characteristic to soils were disproportionately represented in the Isunnguata Sermia river, while putative methylotrophs were disproportionately abundant in Russell Glacier. Meanwhile, taxa typical for glacierized habitats (i.e., Rhodoferax and Polaromonas) dominated in the Leverett Glacier river. Our findings suggest that the proportion of deglaciated catchment area is more influential to suspended microbial assemblage structure than absolute glacier size, and improve our understanding of hydrological flowpaths, particulate entrainment, and transport

Vascular endothelial growth factor-A165b is protective and restores endothelial glycocalyx in diabetic nephropathy

Diabetic nephropathy is the leading cause of ESRD in high-income countries and a growing problem across the world. Vascular endothelial growth factor-A (VEGF-A) is thought to be a critical mediator of vascular dysfunction in diabetic nephropathy, yet VEGF-A knockout and overexpression of angiogenic VEGF-A isoforms each worsen diabetic nephropathy. We examined the vasculoprotective effects of the VEGF-A isoform VEGF-A165b in diabetic nephropathy. Renal expression of VEGF-A165b mRNA was upregulated in diabetic individuals with well preserved kidney function, but not in those with progressive disease. Reproducing this VEGF-A165b upregulation in mouse podocytes in vivo prevented functional and histologic abnormalities in diabetic nephropathy. Biweekly systemic injections of recombinant human VEGF-A165b reduced features of diabetic nephropathy when initiated during early or advanced nephropathy in a model of type 1 diabetes and when initiated during early nephropathy in a model of type 2 diabetes. VEGF-A165b normalized glomerular permeability through phosphorylation of VEGF receptor 2 in glomerular endothelial cells, and reversed diabetes-induced damage to the glomerular endothelial glycocalyx. VEGF-A165b also improved the permeability function of isolated diabetic human glomeruli. These results show that VEGF-A165b acts via the endothelium to protect blood vessels and ameliorate diabetic nephropathy