Documents Contributed by ECAR and Information Literacy and Fluency

Presentation at the Sixth Annual ECAR/HP Summer Symposium for Higher Education IT Executives, June 11-13, 2007, Boulder, Colorado. In January 2007, Michael Wesch released a video on the history of the Web called "The Machine is Us/ing Us." The video quickly tracks the transformations of the Web from its beginnings as a place to retrieve information into a vibrant user-generated and user-organized platform of RSS feeds, blogs, wikis, social networks, and folksonomies that encourage, enhance, and capitalize on collaboration. At the video's end, Wesch suggests that these transformations require us to begin rethinking virtually everything, from authorship and copyright to our sense of identity and selfhood. These new technologies also have profound implications for education. What possibilities and challenges do they bring to our teaching? What should we be teaching to students who are habituated to a new media environment where Google and Wikipedia are always at their fingertips? How are these technologies changing the way students learn and assess information?

This case study, written by three Net-generation college students, describes how exposure to digital literacy early in life has influenced the college experiences and lives of tomorrow's digital cognoscenti. As a companion to the ECAR Study of Students and Information Technology, 2005: Convenience, Connection, Control, and Learning, this case study illustrates to those who supply technology to our institutions' students what will pass muster with some of our more digitally precocious students.

Presentation at the November 2004 ECAR Symposium. The University of Kansas presents the results of its project to integrate IT and library functions with the goal of focusing on student success.

Integrating information literacy into the academic curriculum requires the participation of technology specialists, faculty, librarians, and administrators. This research bulletin describes the integral part each of these professionals plays in helping learners take advantage of the electronic tools used in today's higher education environment.