I’m back — and Educause Targets 21st Century Literacies as Key Issue for 09

Despite my best efforts, it’s tough to stay on top of blogging.

I noticed an important item in CHE today, though, “Educause Names Top Teaching-with-Technology Challenges for 09

I would argue that all the items on the list should be of interest to infolit folks, but in particular #2 on the list is “2. Developing 21st-century literacies — information, digital, and visual — among students and faculty members.” UW system is a pilot for the AACU LEAP initiative, which features information literacy among the essential learning outcomes for liberal education.   Faculty specifically requested that “technology literacy” be added alongside information literacy, and we’ve begun some preliminary meetings to identify synergies between the two.  While in the past our fear has been that technology literacy would confuse or subsume the information literacy issue, this new framework seems to level the playing field.

I’ve created a feed for changes to the wiki and I’m hoping to contribute, participate in these conversations on campus, attend EDUCAUSE, and whatever else I can afford in time and money.

21st century literacies

Last week, I gave a talk on our information literacy program – past, present, and future – to a group of thirty graduate students in LIS 626, “information literacy pedagogy,” taught by Madge Klais.   I enjoy these sessions partly because I really reflect and learn best when I am putting together a presentation, and also because I learn a lot from the class.

In planning the presentation, I reread a book chapter on the future of information literacy by Lisa Janicke-Hinchliffe for the Information Literacy Instruction Handbook produced by the ACRL Instruction Section last year. The chapter is short in length and presents a lot of interesting ideas, so I recommend it as a discussion piece.  One idea that I have also been thinking about a lot is that librarians can’t continue to limit ourselves to instruction about publication formats that are in the traditional library purview, i.e. books and journals.   As we are all becoming producers of information in a variety of formats, the distinction between our/good information and their/bad information is increasingly artificial.  It becomes more important to help learners to evaluate the usefulness of any/all information for their needs.

Most information literacy programs have embraced these ideas, but books and journals remain “our” information and our core business.  Partly because we have so much to offer when it comes to information from library collections.  And if we are addressing information in all formats, we have a lot of new problems to solve.

There was an article on  “Becoming Screen Literate” in the New York Times this week.  I recommend this article as well, here’s a snippet: “The fluid and fleeting symbols on a screen pull us away from the classical notions of monumental authors and authority. On the screen, the subjective again trumps the objective. The past is a rush of data streams cut and rearranged into a new mashup, while truth is something you assemble yourself on your own screen as you jump from link to link. We are now in the middle of a second Gutenberg shift — from book fluency to screen fluency, from literacy to visuality.”

A lot of groups on our campus are talking about multimedia literacy, media literacy, and technology literacy.  While it’s very important not to conflate these with information literacy, we certainly can’t stand apart from these conversations and initiatives.  Instead, we’ll have to see them as opportunities to start the solving the problems (copyright, discovery of moving images, training) that are at the intersection of 21st century literacies.

Digital Storytelling

I spent Thursday at the systemwide Digital Storytelling Conference put together by Cheryl Diermyer of AT.  From the program description: “While there is no doctrine defining a digital story as a distinct genre, it has become generally associated with a short film (less than 5 minutes), which is a mixture of a written and recorded voiceover with still and moving images, and often a soundtrack. Digital stories are often told in the first person voice and can be used to create connections between students, instructors and content.”

There were many great speakers at this conference, including Joe Lambert of the Center for Digital Storytelling (why didn’t I know about this when I was at Berkeley?).  Unfortunately, I missed the faculty panel for another meeting, but I look forward to talking to Margaret Nellis of UW about her project.   Many applications of digital storytelling involve community organizing, oral history, and service learning.

The most interesting speaker for me was Liv Gjestvang of the Ohio State University Digital Union.  I originally met Liv at the Learning Technology Leadership Insititute this summer, and she has a really interesting background as a video artist and community-based work.   OSU’s Digital Storytelling Program is more academically-focused and she talked about some of the lessons learned in building faculty and staff participation in a program that both tied to the academic mission of the university and retained the personal aspect of storytelling.  Librarians actually initiated their program and remain integral to it. They’ve created an online repository and YouTube page.   I’m looking forward to talking more with Liv and connecting with the librarians she works with.

I see a lot of potential for libraries and information literacy in this kind of program:

• There’s a potential for students to develop/demonstrate a continuum of skills from information use to production of knowledge.  It would be interesting to take a team approach to developing courses that do this.   Lots of opportunities for engagement and assessment of student learning outcomes.
• Could we support people looking for images and audio and help them manage the intellectual property issues?  Some projects used geocoding, which is an intersting tie-in.
• There’s an opportunity for reflection in students telling their own stories, which is part of information literacy beyond learning outcomes that we don’t get at very well.
• We saw some examples where faculty interest students in their research / courses by creating videos.  I can see potential for using this to get students excited about their role in the research university.
• Use it to explain to students different majors or disciplines.
• Librarians at OSU created a digital story about OED and an interesting special collection, so about a particular resource or making research exciting.

The OSU examples are here, and we saw many other interesting examples I could share if people are interested.  Some intersect with other technologies like geocoding.

ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and IT ‘08

The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and IT 2008 was released today.  You can link to the key findings here, but the full findings are also freely available online.

This year’s study includes some information literacy questions based on the ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education.  At first glance (I haven’t read the full report yet), these look like student self-report of selected items related to searching web-based sources (freely available and licensed databases).  Here’s what they found:

• 79.5% rate themselves highly for their ability to “use the Internet effectively and efficiently to search for information,” with almost half rating themselves as “very skilled” and another third rating themselves as “experts.”
• About half of respondents also say they are “very skilled” or “expert” when it comes to “evaluating the reliability and credibility of online sources of information” or “understanding the ethical and legal issues surrounding the access and use of digital information.”

I’m looking forward to examining this section more closely, but if anyone else gets to it first I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts.

This year’s report also includes a special focus on social networking sites.  One of the PIs for this study, Judy Caruso, is right here at Madison and I heard her talk about ECAR last year at a brownbag.

K-20 Information Literacy in Wisconsin

This afternoon, Jo Ann Carr and I facilitated a discussion, “Not a Bridge to Nowhere: K-20 Collaboration in Information Literacy” for the WiscNet 3rd Thursday series.   Maddy Covelli, formerly Head of STS and now at WiscNet, is working on reviving the series and this was the first session.   So I want to thank everyone who participated, including many of our colleagues at Madison. WiscNet “serves Wisconsin’s education, library, government, and affiliated organizations by: Providing high quality, cost effective network services and adding value to the network through the services we provide; Helping people use information technology services effectively; Fostering information and resource sharing; and Embracing partnerships with government, consortium, education and information provider organizations.”   We should invite Maddy to tell us more about it sometime.  She travels for work and they’re touring the supper clubs of Northern Wisconsin.

Our session was about bridging K-12 and higher ed information literacy efforts in the state: “The students and the environments of K-12 and Higher Education  are changing. The diversity and amount of information these students encounters continues to increase. What is our vision for preparing Wisconsin learners for the 21st century? How can we build the bridge of lifelong information literacy to help students at all levels to navigate these new environments?”  I learned a terrific amount in putting the presentation together with Jo Ann Carr, she is an amazing resource since she is so involved in many of these initiatives.  I’ve posted our slides and handout and I think the presentation will be archived eventually.

Here are some interesting points I think:

• There are some strong parallels between the LEAP initiative in higher ed and the Partnership for 21st Century Skills in K12.  Wisconsin is very involved in both of these initiatives.
• The framework for information literacy of educators presented by Shinew and Walter in “Instructional Literacy Instruction for Educators: a global perspective on needs and opportunties” has very interesting parallels to our interest in faculty consultation / assignment design in higher ed.
• The Council on Library and Network Development (COLAND) draft vision report is an important document for us all to read.
• We have some amazing outreach efforts already underway across campus, but particularly in College and Ebling.
• Steve Baumgart will participate in a panel on this topic at WLA, where we should learn even more.

Widgets and Course Content

An news item in the Chronicle of Higher Education today “Professor Uses Web ‘Widgets’ to Share Course Content” features a project by Mark Marino, a Lecturer at USC to create  “Web widgets for online course materials [to further] the goals of open courseware, efforts by professors and colleges to give away their lecture notes and other teaching materials online.”   Marino’s page uses PageFlakes.   Other instructors can build their own web pages by repurposing the widgets and creating their own.  This is something we’re talking about a lot in the library and across campus, and the project helps to get some new ideas for what modular content can be.

What is included in the collection is a lot of content related to Web 2.0 authoring, multimedia literacy, and even “ICT”  is mentioned (that’s Information and Communication Technology).  But the content related to research is pretty thin, mostly a module about Zotero.   It seems like the lack of reference to licensed content relates to the impulse to keep the widgets entirely open and portable (rather than institution-specific), but that rationale is not explicitly stated.

The move toward this kind of development seems to be a big opportunity for libraries to create their own instructional widgets, and I’ve seen some.   But what about widgets, portable/open or institution-specific, that dig more deeply into the full scope of information literacy competencies.  I would love to see some cool examples.

By the way, I feel out of my league in this area because I’m not a programmer, but Marino’s widgets are not particularly sophisticated from a visual design or programming standpoint.  Maybe we need to be bolder.

and finally, I used to work at USC and we had a great collaboration with the Writing Program.  I hope the  instruction librarians there are being invited to this project and given some resources to join in.

IT Strategic Planning: Early Priorities for Teaching/Learning and Outreach

August 11, I attended the IT Strategic Planning event on Teaching/Learning and Outreach.  It would be great to see more librarians at these events so that we can share our perspectives and report back.  You can also participate by visiting the web site and giving your feedback.

This meeting was to provide feedback on an initial set of priorities; the full list will be posted on the web site in the notes section.  Items that are most related to information literacy include a focus on student and faculty technology competencies.  The purpose of the meeting was to provide feedback on an early draft of priorities related to teaching/learning and outreach.  The draft priorities for technology literacy on the flip chart read, “develop and support the technology skills of students/faculty and instructional staff,” but the handout for the session included some more nuanced language including technology literacy and competencies.

The discussion touched on models for accomplishing this and whether competencies could be defined at the campus level.  We discussed the Report of Raccreditation Team 4, which addresses competencies for global citizens and leaders and includes a section on information literacy written by a group of librarians.  Their team discovered that 80% of students take four courses in their freshman and sophomore years, so there’s an opportunity for integration there.  Although I can guess what those courses might be, I need to reread their report to be sure.

We also talked about “leveling the playing field” by providing a basic level of support/resources for teaching and learning across departments, as well as local access to support.

Lunchtime Listening — “More Information, Less Knowledge”

Here are a few interesting tidbits from the webcast, “More Information, Less Knowledge?” It was hard for me to concentrate for the full hour, my mind must be warped by Google and multitasking!

Nicholas Carr, who wrote the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” was one of the panelists. He said, “one thing we know from neuroscience is that the human brain is very adaptable. … Reading .. and other patterns of thinking aren’t hard wired into our brain, they’re learned behaviors …. New technologies can change, at a very deep level, the circuitry of our brains…. Although it’s too early to have proof that that’s happening with the Internet at a biological level, there are some important clues out there that the internet is beginning to have an effect on cognition and memory ….”

IT Strategic Planning Session on Teaching and Learning

At this session we discussed four themes: instructional technologies, student learning, staffing/support, and classroom/learning spaces. There is a web site for the IT Strategic Planning that includes all the notes.

One topic we discussed in the Student Learning group was establishing a set of technology literacy competencies for students, enabling students to learn about and adopt new technologies.  We discussed curricular integration strategies such as making sure technology literacy is included in gen ed discussions and finding exemplar courses for teaching with and enabling technology literacy. This, of course, has interesting parallels to the strategies we use for information literacy, and we have some hard work ahead to pursue alignment/collaboration with these efforts (rather than being in competition).

Campus-Level Solutions to Developing Students’ Research Skills

An article in Inside Higher Ed today, Research Methods Beyond Google, highlights two initiatives that explore how we can promote information literacy at large, decentralized research institutions.  The Cornell Undergraduate Information Competency Initiative just got underway this year, and UC Berkeley’s Mellon Library/Faculty Fellowship for Undergraduate research was an initiative I worked on in my previous position.  Both models focus on working with faculty fellows to redesign assignments and courses to promote information literacy or research-based learning.   Berkeley’s program has now moved to working with departments.

The central idea behind these programs, to quote Inside Higher Ed, is that “the gap between students’ research competence and what’s required of a modern college graduate can’t easily be solved without a framework that encompasses faculty members, librarians, technicians and those who study teaching methods.”  Bringing all those players together in true collaboration to promote effective practices requires sustained effort and a willingness to work outside the usual boundaries of our responsibilities is a huge challenge that requires sustained effort and resources, as well as a campus commitment.

Our own efforts in this area are focused in two areas: getting involved in curriculum redesign processes at various levels and developing tools/models that librarians can use in these conversations.  We’re also piloting collaborative course and assignment consultations with other campus units.  The accomplishments of these programs provide some good inspiration to keep at it.