Our True Crime class has come to an end. As all of the students have been saying, it was a lot of work, but it was worth it. And it was worth it because of the students – the truecrimers – they rose to every challenge we gave them. Jim tells all about it with his usual eloquence and enthusiasm.
I approached this course from my librarian’s perspective. I’m interested in information literacy as a necessary component of lifelong learning. I’m also interested in information literacy as something beyond bibliographic instruction in how to use the library. It starts with creativity and curiosity, which we in the profession define down to “identifying an information need” and culminates in communication, the creation and presentation of information outputs. We had curiosity built-in from the start. All the truecrimers shared our fascination with these stories. We pushed them to exercise creativity, and what they came up with in their videos was remarkable. But there was also creativity in their wiki work, where they made decisions on how to break down the readings, what extra information to bring in, and what they came up with for discussions questions. The wiki, the videos, the discussions and the blogging were all forms of communications and presentation. We dispensed with the traditional research papers, yet achieved the same thing, or perhaps achieved something more, and everyone had a great time doing it.
We could have gone further into evaluating some of the information sources. I would have liked to see the class use more library resources and less Google. But we did get at some of those conversations. I think the class started to think twice about taking things at face value, and they had the experience of drawing on primary sources.
It was a lot of fun working with Jim and the group. I take something away from it professionally as well as personally though. It gives me a success story of a different way to run a class, and a different way to work with faculty. I don’t know if my own institution would give me the freedom to experiment like that, but I can tell the tale and maybe spark some ideas and start some new things.
Oh, and I got the term “crimer” from the Crimer Show on Twitter:
DETETCIVE: (shakes fist) CrimERRRR!
— Crimer Show (@CrimerShow) March 29, 2013
Image credits:
Crime scene part one cc2006 paral_lax
stage curtains from Sherane’s Closet
