WKU Library Participates in PIEP Afternoon Workshops for New First-Year Students
During August, the Wenzhou-Kean Library was given the opportunity to participate in the Pre-University Intensive English Program (PIEP). The Library’s role was to provide a full afternoon of activities each day for the two weeks in which the program was conducted. Each afternoon the Library Director had a group of about 65-70 incoming freshman students that were “pre-university”. What did the Library present to students that had not even started class? Three short library segments were created, along with an introductory pre-test, post-test and 5-minute breaks after the first and second segments. The first segment was called Organize Your Life and Your Research that used videos to emphasize the importance of an organized approach to life, leading to minimal wasted time and maximizing critical thinking. The idea of organizing academic research discoveries was introduced, including a demonstration of metadata and a demonstration of the free citation management tool called ZOTERO.
The second segment focused on fake news, in order to clarify what fake news actually is, as well as what it is not. Because the new Chinese students were having their first experience with the unfiltered internet, it could be expected that they would be more likely to encounter fake news stories. After watching a video about what American campuses are doing about fake news, students were shown three trusted sites that explain fake or distorted news: www.politifact.com, www.snopes.com, and www.factcheck.org. Then all the students were organized into teams of four to play a game to identify a real news story that is mixed in with several fake stories. All the correct responses could be found in one of the three trustworthy web sites. The interactive quiz site www.kahoot.com was used to present each question, and the students own cell phones (one per team) was used to submit the response, and score was kept on the classroom screen. The students enjoyed this segment.
The third segment of the afternoon was an introduction to the Library of Congress classification system, used to shelve Wenzhou-Kean English print books since 2014 and soon to be utilized to shelve Chinese books by subject, right next to their English counterparts.
In spite of the convenience of remembering that M is music or Q is science, students were also advised that they should always start with the OUGAN online catalog (http://ougan.wku.edu.cn), because many current books combine two or more subjects, like education and science, or statistics and economics. If a student or faculty member thinks all the books about sciences are in the Q section, many titles combining with science are elsewhere. An online catalog search is a must.
