Link to InfoLit colaboration with all CSU's
Information Literacy
Information literacy is not something that you teach but is the result of your teaching! So as we investigate this we need to think not so much about what we're going to teach (we teach mostly what we have taught for years) but rather about what are the best ways to teach to help our students arrive at this outcome and methods of assessing these outcomes.
Why literacy is Important
If we're not teaching anything fundimentally different than what we have traditioanally taught then why the big push for "Information Literacy"? The push for information literacy is a response to the importance of the information and it's use in our economy. It is a general belief that we will assist our students but providing them experiences while here at Western that encourage them to develop habits of reflective and critical evaluation of information used in decsion making.
Resource Based Learning
It is also important to stress to faculty the difference between the learning taking place in the classroom where the methods of learning and the outcomes of learning are more closely control by the faculty member and learning taking place where the learner is responsible for selecting, organizing, evaluating, and reporting provided by examining multiple resources.
Importance of that instruction not be only academic
If information literacy is to be taken as a serious requirement for students to take into their working lives it has to be more than just "library-based-researh". Tools and information resource that are available out side of the library must be addressed
ALA/ACRL And the Definition of Information Literacy
In on of the articles that Veronica had suggested Information Literacy and the Academic Library: A Critical Look at a Concept and the Controversies Surrounding It Edward Owuusu looked a various approaches both behaviorist and constructivist and found them to be vary simalar. His study brings him to believe the following:
That dilemma involves not definitional uncertainties but rather difficulties of execution, arising within the dynamics of the educational environment, the deliberations of its power brokers, and the influence and results the relative image and power of the participating interests allows.
They over-reach
- many of the standards and performance indicators are outside the purview of the librarian;
- some exceeded what could be realistically demanded of subject faculty;
- others presented obscurities that neither librarians nor teaching faculty could realistically claim an ability to address;
The standards are bold, broad and ambitious requiring a change not only in what we can do as librarians but also requiring major shifts in the Academic culture and general society as a whole. To quote Owusu-Ansah
What Should We be Doing
If the problem as described by Owusu-Ansah is not the definition of information literacy but how "to delineate specific and executable ways of effectuating information literacy".
Process vs. Content
In the classroom most but not all teachers are teaching content not process. It has been argued that becuase most fields are changing so fast and becuase fields are so deep that it is silly to teach content and teaching process will better equip our students for the future. As with most issuse some kind of mix is desired. Library instruction is in large part generic and about process but for that process to be internalized it must be tied to content.
Many authors have stated that we need to get students to think of learning as a dialog. A dialog about what is known and not known. I dialog between news ways and old ways. As librarians we can help instructors expand the dialog to resouces out side of the classroom. The elements of IL which are the same but different for each field should include:
- some indication of how reaseach is done in a field of study and how new knowledge is added to the field;
- literature structures for the discipline;
- library systems that organize and identify that literature comprise particular discipline contexts.
- help in formuilating questions and stratgeies for navigating and manipulation all of the above
Links
ALA front page for information literacy
Notes about what Information Literacy means
Construtivist models and Control of Learning Models
Ruberick for assessing resouce based learning
Questionable assumptions about resource based learning