Increasing Student Engagement and Learning in the MLIS Program Chris Tomer School of Information Sciences November 12, 2015

Introduction Fostering student engagement is a matter of increasing concern within the setting of the MLIS degree program offered by the School of Information Sciences. In an effort to increase student engagement, several features have been added to the MLIS program's introductory course, LIS 2000 Understanding Information, in the last couple of years. The first of the new features has been to use the first week of the Fall term, the only point in the academic year at which students matriculate, exclusively for meetings of LIS 2000. During the first week of the term, students are organized into small groups, typically consisting of 4-5 individuals, and the groups are charged with the task of identifying a topic of relevance, investigating it collectively, and developing a presentation in the style of a conference poster session on the group's findings.

The purposes of the poster session were three-fold: to encourage students, working in small groups, to develop a more specific knowledge of an issue that librarians and/or archivists consider important in the context of professional practice; to serve as an "ice breaker," through which students came to know at least some of their peers and explored common points and differences in perspective; and to introduce students to the de facto standards of the MLIS program for public presentations. Poster Sessions

Library and information science, like many other areas of study, is increasing concerned with the uses of information technology. That concern extends to the idea that in order to exercise their responsibilities, librarians and archivists must necessary understand the technologies that are used to create and deliver where digital publications and services. But LIS continues to draw its students mainly from programs in the humanities, social sciences, and education, and while many of the students use computers extensively, few of them possess an acute sense of how computers or computer networks actually work. So, preparing students to work with the digital technologies that now define much of the service offered by libraries and archives is a challenge.

To meet that challenge, we decided to create a series of assignments in LIS 2000 Understanding Information that entail the use of a Raspberry Pi and introduce students to the Linux operating system, issues associated with networking, composition of Web pages and links, and programming under the Python language.

Each student enrolled in the course has been provided an instance of WordPress running Amazon Web Services. Assignments in the course oblige them to build a digital portfolio that reflects their academic work and other relevant experiences. Building the digital portfolio also provides a familiarity with content management systems in general, and WordPress in particular, as well as some understanding of how HTML and CSS are used to present content on the World Wide Web. Since WordPress instances are portable, it is hoped that the portfolio forms the basis for a dossier that is carried forward from the MLIS program into professional settings.