locate, evaluate, and use effectively

Yesterday I attended the first of three online sessions offered by the Teaching, Learning and Technology Group in cooperation with ACRL on “Collaboration for Information Literacy: Faculty Learning Communities and other Collaborative Approaches to Support and Improve Undergraduate Information Literacy.”  This year, I am fortunate to have been a participant in OCU’s Faculty Learning Community on Teaching with Technology.  The workshop I am attending deals with applying the FLC model to collaboration between librarians and teaching faculty to improve student research skills.

By coincidence, ACRLog reported yesterday on Project Information Literacy, a national study of student research and information-seeking behavior.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, the survey revealed, among other things, that the majority of students put off work on research assignments until 2-3 days before it is due; find the variety and quantity of information sources available to them for their research overwhelming; and don’t hesitate to use Wikipedia, either as a tool for getting a handle on their topic or a source.

The main presenter of yesterday’s online workshop was Eric Resnis, a librarian at Miami University of Ohio who is the facilitator of his institution’s Faculty Learning Community for Improving Student Research Literacy.  Some examples of projects undertaken by community participants include the study of Information Literacy standards; citation analysis of student research papers comparing outcomes for students who received Information Literacy instruction in their courses with those who did not; the development and administration of a survey on student perceptions of the research process and information-seeking behavior; and a standard project that almost all of the participants now undertake is to revise a course syllabus to incorporate Information Literacy standards into the assignments.

I look forward to reporting on the remaining sessions.