What next for Bio 182?

I teach the "information access" part of Biology 182 (Use and Understanding of Biological Literature), six weeks of classes in the Parmly public computer lab at 8 AM, once in Fall term and two sections in Winter term, a course required for all majors. Each term at the end of the course I feel 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.

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'/'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. Another essence 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 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 a way 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.

I think next term I'll have students do their assignments as web pages (using the .html file type in the lab word processors), to try out the notion that there's more pride in public documents. And I'm tempted to aim the exercises more at the process of explicating a topic 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.
There's a practical problem with no very good solution too: 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, 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. I tried to encourage better use of abstracts, but the 'you have to READ it in order to annotate it' requirement means that the full text is necessary.