Presented at ELI Meetings, Information Literacy and Fluency

In this session, we will discuss our experience at George Mason University in redesigning our student technology fluency program. We will describe the external and internal factors that prompting us to rethink our approach as well as the challenges we faced and how we responded to them.

The Fourth Annual Robert C. Heterick, Jr., Lecture

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.

How do you make a digitally fluent university? What are the ingredients, who decides the recipe, and how do you ensure the many cooks are spicing not spoiling the broth? Six months into an ambitious transformation program we will share the sweet and sour of our expectations and experiences.

Additional contributor: Paul A. Helm, Sheffield Hallam University.

This session will investigate possibilities for the design of learning spaces in both the virtual and the built world. When centered on the widespread social uses of new-media literacies, the architecture of innovative learning environments includes participatory pedagogies, open access to digital resources, opportunities for dialogue, and global distribution networks.

The ELI 2007 Fall Focus Session, Being Net Savvy: Developing Skills for a Rapidly Changing World, explored what it means for students, faculty, and staff to be net savvy, and why it is a critical skill in a Web 2.0 world. ELI developed a video summary of the event for use as a persistent learning resource. It provides an overview of the major concepts presented and discussed at the session, such as what it means for students, faculty, and staff to be net savvy and the potential pitfalls of not being net savvy in an online world. It also highlights the need to address issues of information literacy / fluency, media literacy, and good digital citizenship across the curriculum, as well as across professional development and student life programs.

Joan Lippincott, associate executive director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), contributed a video interview with her daughter, Meg Lippincott, to the program for the ELI 2007 Fall Focus Session, Being Net Savvy: Developing Skills for A Rapidly Changing World. A sophomore at Vassar College, Meg provides a student perspective on how students seek information for their academic work. Her views are drawn from her experiences helping peers at her college library reference desk as well as her own efforts. Meg discusses aspects of information literacy and her definition of a "net savvy student." Her friend Jan Zhan, a student at University of Maryland, shot the interview.

In this video from the University of Central Florida, students interview other students to uncover what they know and don't know about information fluency, starting with the question: "What is IF (information fluency)?"

UC Berkeley's Mellon Fellowship for Undergraduate Research offers one model for strengthening the connections between undergraduate research, information literacy, and educational technologies. The initiative engages many issues: supporting instructors' pedagogical approaches; sustaining cross-departmental collaborations; leveraging resources to transform curriculum; assessing student learning; and evaluating faculty, departmental, and institutional change.

UC Berkeley's Mellon Fellowship for Undergraduate Research offers one model for strengthening the connections between undergraduate research, information literacy, and educational technologies. The initiative engages many issues: supporting instructors' pedagogical approaches; sustaining cross-departmental collaborations; leveraging resources to transform curriculum; assessing student learning; and evaluating faculty, departmental, and institutional change.

The introduction of new media tools and texts inevitably creates social tension as the roles of information receivers, producers, and gatekeepers shift with the changing literacy landscape. In particular, the traditional relationship between alphabetic literacy and schooling gives way to a complex and expansive view of multiple, critical literacies and their uses. How can educational institutions rethink the literacy and learning connection within the context of pervasive communication devices and shared knowledge networks? Instead of focusing on the challenges of integrating net savvy students into existing institutional practices, an assets model for new media education leverages everyday literacy skills and enlists students as partners in the design of relevant, customized, and dynamic learning environments in a digital world.

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.