Information Literacy

Challenging IT Leaders to Mashup, Twitter, Tag, and Poke:  New IT Strategies for a Digital Society.  Susan Metros, Deputy CIO, University of Southern California

2008 Midwest Regional Conference Opening General Session

Notes: 

This session has been recorded and is available for podcast at http://connect.educause.edu/blog/gbayne/podcastchallengingitleade/46499.

Metros slides are available in pdf at http://www.educause.edu/upload/presentations/MWRC08/GS01/Metros%20EDUCAUSE%20Midwest.pdf

An outstanding and energetic speaker, Susan Metros offered a thought-provoking discussion of what it means to transform the things we do in support of new learners and general education as well as our faculty’s teaching and research.

Her initial premise was that General Education is not on people’s radar screens and she asked the following questions:

• Who are out students?
• What does it take to be literate?
• What we can do about it?

She put these is the context of:

EFF recently blogged about the way they're using embedded video and steps that they've taken to protect the privacy of users visiting their pages. They've created a script that prevents embeded sources from automatically downloading when you visit a page. In effect, they've created a system that offers the ability to opt-in to view the embedded media, rather that force feeding content from third parties (and associated usage tracking) into the attention stream of their audience. This seems like an important step towards elevating thought and providing protective measures aimed at third party sources (whether that mean viral video, widgets, maps, images or mashups of various web services).

They've implemented these protection measures using a Drupal module and they'll be contributing this back to the community!

This 73 minute podcast features the 4th Annual Robert C. Heterick Jr. Lecture, given by Henry Jenkins, Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT. The lecture is entitled, "What Wikipedia Can Teach Us About the New Media Literacies".

Emblematic of the new participatory cultures and the emerging practices of collective intelligence, Wikipedia has drawn fire from academic institutions and traditional gatekeepers. Using segments from a forthcoming documentary about the Wikipedia movement produced by MIT's Project NML, this session will discuss how educators might use Wikipedia to introduce students to the ways that new forms of cultural production and knowledge sharing are reshaping the research process.

In this hour-long podcast, we feature a panel discussion from the 2007 Seminars On Academic Computing entitled, "Information Literacy in the Digitial Age". Panelists in this discussion include:

In this podcast, we feature 15 minute interview with Craig Gibson, Associate University Librarian at George Mason University. This interview was recorded at the ELI 2007 Fall Focus Session in Boulder, Colorado, where Mr. Gibson presented a speech entitled, "Prisms Around Student Learning: Information Literacy, IT Fluency, and Media Literacy". A podcast of that speech can be found here.

In this 37 minute podcast, we feature the opening plenary session from the ELI Fall 2007 Focus Session. The speaker is Craig Gibson, Associate University Librarian at George Mason University. His speech is entitled, "Prisms Around Student Learning: Information Literacy, IT Fluency, and Media Literacy"

The family of literacies now promoted in higher education (information literacy, IT fluency, and media and visual literacies) continues to multiply. These educational agendas call for more pervasive collaboration among all stakeholders (faculty, administrators, librarians, technologists, student life staff, assessment specialists, and others) because of conceptual and programmatic linkages and convergences among them. The blending of these literacies can become a catalyst that taps into student learning and engagement at a deep level and effects cultural change within and across institutions.

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