Sports analogies are overused in business, but this time we must go ahead anyway, because in her webinar “Creating a Buzz: Getting Faculty and Students Excited About Library Resources,” Brandy Burbante indeed hit it out of the park, scored a touchdown, took it to the house...take your pick!
K-12 librarians and those who serve college and university students have their own forums—the recent TLA conference would have found many K-12 professionals, for example, while ACRL naturally attracts the post-secondary crowd. The professional literature they read doesn’t overlap much, either, and they may not often visit each other’s libraries, except perhaps as patrons or parents. But there’s so much the two “camps” can learn from one another.
Information Literacy, InfoLit Learning Community, Community Colleges, k-12, Universities
The latest issue of College and Research Libraries includes an examination of how 15 librarians use the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education in their work. “Implementing the ACRL Framework: Reflections from the Field,” by Don Latham, Melissa Gross, and Heidi Julien, reports some good news: the framework is being used by the librarians surveyed, though more it is implicit in their work than explicitly spelled out. Less positive is that some reported librarian and faculty opinions that the document is “too highly conceptual to be practical for students.”
Information Literacy, InfoLit Learning Community, ACRL Framework, Community Colleges
As you no doubt tell students, research is a conversation, and this week the conversation involves student misperceptions of the research process.
This is a topic recently explored in a 2018 paper by Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe, Allison Rand, and Jillian Collier, all librarians at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Their work, “Predictable Information Literacy Misperceptions of First-Year College Students,” in turn continued a conversation, as it leaned on Understanding by Design by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe (2005), a seminal book on instructional design that discusses how, in all fields, “any domain of learning, instructors will have developed a sense of the typical errors learners make.” In their paper, Hinchliffe, Rand, and Collier describe a study they performed (the research-gathering step of the study was sponsored by Credo and Hinchliffe presented a related Credo webinar) in which they interviewed librarians about first-year students’ misunderstandings about the research process. Freshman students, they found,
Adaptive Learning Using Assessment
Those of you lucky enough to see students for more than one-shot sessions are likely doing some assessment of student progress in your classes. Or maybe you’re embedded in a professor’s class where assessment of IL learning is allowed. Either way, consider guidance from a 2017 article by Johannes Peter, Nikolas Leichner, Anne-Kathrin Mayer, and Günter Kramplen, “Making Information Literacy Instruction More Efficient by Providing Individual feedback”
Join the InfoLit Learning Community now. Already a member? Log in here.
Planning and running an information literacy program is challenging enough—the extra steps involved in marketing your work can sometimes fall by the wayside. We’ve lately put together some materials that help make marketing easier and that can even get faculty doing marketing on your behalf.
Join the InfoLit Learning Community now. Already a member? Log in here.
Next week, Credo’s InfoLit Community will welcome speakers from Penn State Libraries, who will talk about how they set up and now run their successful Search Bar, a student-run research service in its second year of operation. The Search Bar is a peer-to-peer space with writing tutors, tech tutors, and peer research consultants; staff attribute its success to students’ finding peers more approachable than librarians.
Join the InfoLit Learning Community now. Already a member? Log in here.
For those who missed last month’s Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy (GICOIL), or simply couldn’t make it to all of the stellar presentations, Credo offered a reprisal of some of the presentations in a webinar on October 25. The webinar featured the event’s keynote speaker as well as presentations by three of the many insightful librarians who were featured at the conference.
Join the InfoLit Learning Community now. Already a member? Log in here.
This year’s Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy took place in Savannah, GA, on September 27-29. Attendees heard from a great variety of speakers who addressed an equally wide variety of information literacy topics, among them teaching faculty how to take on information literacy topics in the classroom, using OER to create affordable learning materials for students, and several presentations on combating fake news. Some of the presenters have allowed Credo to host their slides so that our readers can benefit from their insights.
Join the InfoLit Learning Community now. Already a member? Log in here.
This review, by Credo’s Henrietta Verma, appeared in the October 4, 2018 edition of Booklist Online. The collection of essays by librarians and educators describes innovative classes and projects that use Wikipedia to advance information literacy. Are you using Wikipedia editing or other practices related to the site in IL instruction? Please let us know in the comments below.
