Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Impromptu Information Literacy Session

It has always been difficult to teach information literacy in the biomedical engineering program since there never been enough time or the proper place for it. In the past I was allowed to give a 15 minute lecture in Fundamentals of Engineering Design (FED 101) given to freshman. Today, on very short notice, I gave my short lecture to a large group on how to find information on sustainability in the field of biomedical engineering. These students were taking Humanities 101, but had not yet taken the Research Roadmaps where we teach them the fundamentals of how to find information from the NJIT databases.

I briefly discussed the peer review process as it applies to manuscripts being accepted for publication by a technical journal. I then explained how these articles can be searched in databases and used Scopus as an example since it is multidisciplinary. I showed them how to construct a search using terminology related to sustainability. I demonstrated the capability of sorting by relevance. Their assignment is to find just one paper with the abstract that explicitly considered sustainability in biomedical engineering or a closely related field.

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