What next for Bio 182?

To assist me in thinking about What To Do at our meeting on Friday 4 Dec at 0800 I've put together the following, and circulate it to you as an incitement. It's your course, in that it's supposed to serve the needs of the Biology faculty by teaching essential skills; this can be done in various ways, including ways I haven't thought of. --Hugh
For the last 6 years I have taught the "information access" part of Biology 182 (Use and Understanding of Biological Literature), which has consisted of six weeks of classes (in the last two years in the Parmly public computer lab) at 8 AM, one section in Fall term and two sections in Winter term, a course required for all majors. Each term at the end of the course I have felt more or less frustrated with how it's gone and what it did and didn't accomplish. Perhaps it needs a fundamental rethinking, or maybe some facets need something else tried. In any case the basic structure of the course will be different in Winter 1999, since it will meet as a single large section (50+ students) in one of the Addition classrooms.

The main purpose and point of the course is (I believe) to acquaint students with the full range of information in Biology and related sciences, including

The frame for these activities has been preparation of brief annotated bibliographies on individual topics, mostly chosen by students within parameters established by faculty supervisors: 'animal behavior', 'emerging diseases', 'physiology of disease', etc.

Ideally, students move from general ('tertiary' and 'quaternary') sources to scholarly ('secondary'/'review', then 'primary'/'research') material, going through a directed process of learning about the background to work being done on the leading edge of a subfield. The idea is that they'll be able to apply the skills and tools to whatever else they do in subsequent courses.
From the student point of view, Bio 182 is a necessary hurdle, doubly tiresome because of the barbaric hour and the niggling mickeymouse of precision required in citations. Enthusiasm for the wonderful world of self-directed learning and glorious new day of electronic access is well concealed, and I'm not sure how much actually sticks (to judge by the information-finding questions I get asked by alumni of the course...).
So how can this be done better? Most of my classes are pretty eloquent summaries [if I do say so myself] of densely-packed material that nobody was born already knowing. I feel that my various web pages are masterful guides to the [evolving] complexities, but in fact they're seldom used by students and [I fear] never by faculty.

One of the essences of the hunt for information (in this case, journal articles mostly) is that there's no single source that can point the inquirer to everything he or she needs.

(There are several databases that cover the territory of biomedical primary and secondary literatures pretty well, and the niceties of using them is a substantial part of the course. In 1999 these are:
Another essence of the hunt for information is that it's necessary to read and think about a lot of material in order to find what one does need. The requisite skills have to be developed by practise, and shortcuts are few and perilous. We (college teachers in general) don't address 'read and think about' very well, and make the tacit assumption that students have these skills. They mostly don't, but it's hard to dream up ways to intervene, inspire, instill something that pretty much has to come about because one wants it for oneself and goes to work to develop the requisite appetites and skills.
There's a practical problem too, with no very good solution: many of the articles students find via the various databases are in journals we don't have; they can use InterLibrary Loan, but there's a seemingly inevitable tendency to order whatever looks toothsome (all too often in desperation, at the last moment), making lots of work for our ILL staff. We have been able to find quite a lot in electronically-available full text form, but that requires a good bit of librarian time because there are quite a few places to look. So should we confine them to what we have, and forbid or severely limit ILL use for this course? Those don't seem like sensible strategies, especially since their topics often require them to narrow their focus, and thus point them toward more specialized sources. I have tried to encourage better use of abstracts as a selection tool, but the 'you have to READ it in order to annotate it' requirement means that the full text is necessary.
What are the skills we want students to have developed when the course ends? I assume that finding and evaluating primary and secondary material is the the essence of these skills, and that appropriate presentation of findings (the annotated bibliography) is a reasonable way to measure skill attainment. Yes no?
I'm tempted to experiment with requiring students to do their assignments as web pages (using the editor that comes with Netscape), to try out the notion that there's more pride in public documents, and that presentation skills are a useful accomplishment. The resulting web pages would be accessible to faculty supervisors and to each other. And I'm tempted to aim the exercises more at the process of explicating a topic (narrating the discovery process as a topic is defined, researched, refined) than at the [rather sterile, if character-building] final product of a bibliography in proper form. The bibliography can still be the final product, since that seems to have virtue for Biology faculty, but I'd like to see more possibility for students to produce something really interesting --to them, to me, and to their professors.

It would be VERY helpful to me to have an idea of the topics or topic areas you'll assign to your groups, so that I can start preparing myself --and so that I can get some idea of what kinds of resources they'll be looking for. I think they need more guidance through the process of topic development than I'm competent to give them, and that's one reason to have them do web pages that you can look at and respond to on an individual basis.

A tentative schedule of 6 class meetings, assuming that the spreadsheet exercise is moved to another course:

WED 6 Jan Making web pages, topics assigned

WED 13 Jan Working on topics: finding background information

WED 20 Jan Secondary literature: finding and interpreting

WED 27 Jan Meet with faculty supervisor to discuss topic, progress

WED 3 Feb Primary literature: using the database tools

WED 10 Feb More work on primary literature; bibliographies and annotations

WED 17 Feb (Break)

WED 24 Feb Meet with faculty supervisor with draft bibliography