* Photographs provided by iStockphoto
Thursday Afternoon Pre-Conference Workshop
Karen Nicholson
University of Guelph
Biography
Karen Nicholson is Manager, Information Literacy, at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, and a faculty member with the ACRL's Information Literacy Immersion programs. She has worked as an information literacy coordinator at a number of Canadian universities, including McMaster, McGill and Concordia, and as an embedded Teaching and Learning Librarian in McMaster University's Institute for Innovation & Excellence in Teaching & Learning. Karen has taught courses on information literacy to library school students as well as undergraduates, and has expertise in the areas of graduate outcomes, quality assurance and staff development. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. part-time at the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University.
Robin Sakowski
University of Guelph
Biography
Robin Sakowski is a Learning & Curriculum Support Librarian at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. As a reference and information literacy librarian, Robin has taught drop-in and for-credit information literacy classes for undergraduate and graduate students at McMaster University, the University of Toronto and the University of Alberta (Augustana Campus). She is currently on sabbatical pursuing research in the representation of the librarian in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the profession’s pursuit of embedded/integrated IL provision v.s. drop-in IL provision.
Friday Morning Plenary Session
Terry Doyle
Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at Ferris State University
Plenary Address: The New Science of Learning: How to Learn in Harmony with Your Brain
Almost daily neuroscience, biology and cognitive science researchers reveal new insights about how the human brain works and learns. The value of this research is its potential to elevate the learning success of all students regardless of their learning situations. This research about human learning requires changes in the way teaching is approached and in what students are told about how to be successful learners. This presentation will discuss many of these new research findings and suggest ways to apply them in a higher education setting. Topics will include findings on movements role in learning, exercise, stress, sleep, memory, attention, pattern recognition and the role the human senses play in learning and memory.
Biography
Terry Doyle is an author, nationally recognized educational consultant and Professor of Reading at Ferris State University where he has worked for the past 37 years. From 1998 to 2009 he served as the Senior Instructor for Faculty Development and Coordinator of the New to Ferris Faculty Transition Program for the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at Ferris State. Terry has presented over seventy workshops on teaching and learning topics at regional, national and international conferences since 2000. During the past five years he has worked with faculty in Taiwan, South Korea, Canada and faculty on one hundred and twenty different colleges and universities across the United States on ways to apply current brain research to improve teaching and students’ learning.
He is the author of the book Learner Centered Teaching: Putting the Research on Learning into Practice which was featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Selected New Books in Higher Education in 2012 and the book Helping Students Learn in a Learner Center Environment: A Guide to Teaching in Higher Education, published by Stylus, 2008. He is the co-author of the book New Faculty Transition -An Ideal Program published in 2004.
His newest book published in August 2013, co-authored with Dr. Todd Zakrajsek is titled The New Science of Learning: How to Learn in Harmony with your Brain and is written for college students. It has been described as breaking new ground in understanding how learning happens and suggest a new paradigm for how students should prepare themselves for learning. The book was a finalist for the 2013 USA Best Book Award in the category of Education/Academic.
Saturday Morning Plenary Session
Lee Van Orsdel
Grand Valley State University
Plenary Address: Expanding our Boundaries: Information Competency Writ Large
Academic libraries are expanding their strategic boundaries, radically revising their own goals to more robustly track those of the institutions they serve. At Grand Valley, we have had significant success in that regard, including embedding information literacy in the general education curriculum. But we had another opportunity as well, one that is rare in today’s economic climate. We had the chance to design and build a new main library. It opened last summer, and the University is calling it an academic game-changer. We agree, not least because the new library has given us many tools with which to make our intentions explicit and visible to students, faculty, administration, alumni and donors. This presentation will tell the story of one library’s efforts to expand its vision and to redefine its place in a rising university.
Biography
Lee Van Orsdel has been the Dean of University Libraries at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan, since 2005. Widely recognized as an innovative, thought-leading organization, GVSU Libraries won the 2012 ACRL Excellence in Academic Libraries Award. Van Orsdel is an active advocate for open access and a member of the Steering Committee of SPARC, the world’s leading coalition for reform in the areas of publishing and information sharing. She led development of the vision for Grand Valley’s new Mary Idema Pew Library, a $65 million project that was completed in June of 2013.
Van Orsdel earned a B.A. degree in History and French from Samford University, Birmingham, Alabama, an M.A. in History from Florida State University, and an MLIS from the University of Alabama.
