Screencasts and Standards: Connecting an Introductory Journalism Research Course with Information Literacy

Abstract

Objective(s): Students will utilize critical-thinking skills and creativity to learn about research databases that are useful for finding information, particularly for journalism and telecommunications needs. Each pair will ultimately produce a screencast, that is, a video screen capture with audio narration, as a semester activity for this five-week course that (1) offers succinct background information about its assigned database, (2) explains database utility for students and scholars, (3) demonstrates focused searches with Boolean operators and special characters, and (4) evaluates sources from the search results for accuracy.

Video killed the multiple-choice quiz: capturing pharmacy students’ literature searching skills using a screencast video assignment

“…While librarian-created screencasts to teach database searching are well established in the literature, particularly in the form of tutorial videos [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20], literature on librarian use of screencast assignments to assess student learning is sparse. The only publication identified is by Kuban and Mulligan [21], who wrote about a database searching screencast assignment in a journalism research course taught mainly to first-year undergraduates. The focus of their assignment was to teach introductory information literacy skills.…”