Information Literacy Guide for Higher Education Students

This guide is meant to help higher education students navigate the information gathering process from a variety of platforms, mediums, and environments, as well as outline some tools that will help them to become active learners.  According to the Society of College, National and University Libraries in the United Kingdom, SCONUL, (2011) “Information literate people will demonstrate an awareness of how they gather, use, manage, synthesize  and create information in an ethical manner and will have the information skills to do so effectively” (p.3).  By accessing, utilizing and engaging in collaborative environments students will be encouraged to not only access information but produce and share information thereby empowering them to become literate citizens.  The SCONUL (2011) model for information literacy is developed around seven pillars:
Seven Pillars
• Identify
• Scope
• Plan
• Gather
• Evaluate
• Manage
• Present
For more detailed objectives, goals, skills and outcomes of the seven pillars please visit http://www.conul.ie/media/Complete-Guide.pdf

Traditional Information Gathering Tools
 Google- a search engine
Google Scholar- search engine comprised of academic papers and articles
Library website (Here I would insert the college library website)
Library
Web 2.0 Tools- the Web 2.0 is a collaborative online environment that encourages active participation through both the consuming and producing of information. Some examples of Web 2.0 tools are
• YouTube-site where one can upload and share any type of visual or audio file
• Blogs-personal weblog
• Wikis-site that allows for collaborative editing of information
• TED-powerful talk that spread ideas in Technology, Entertainment, and Design
• NPR-Public radio
• Podcasts-a digital audio file that one can download to a computer to portable device
• Facebook-a social networking site
• Twitter-a microblogging site that requires users to post in a  140 characters or less
• Flickr-a website for images and videos
Applications for Creating and Sharing Information
Google applications-signing up for a Gmail account will gain you access to a number of applications. A particularly nice feature of Google is that all changes are saved immediately. The applications include:
• Slides-an application for creating slide presentations
• Docs-an application that allows for real time collaboration when creating documents
• eBlogger- an application that enables you to build your own weblog
• Sites-an application that allows you to build your own website
• Hangouts- an application that allows you to work collaboratively with others in real time both visually and audibly. Hangouts can be used in combination with all of the other applications to create a collaborative environment
• Drive- online storage for all of you documents
Website and Blog Builders
• Wix
• Weebly
• Godaddy
• Edublogs
Presentation Tools
• Prezi
• Sparkol
• SlideDog
• PowToon Studio

While this list of applications and tools is not exhaustive, it is a good place to begin to locate, create, and share information. Becoming an active information gatherer and participator in the information world will help you to gain the skills needed to successfully reach your educational, personal, and professional goals.

References

About NPR. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/about/aboutnpr

Mackey, T. P. & Jacobson, T. E. (2011). Reframing Information Literacy as a Metaliteracy.
College and Research Libraries, 72(1), 62-78. Retrieved from
crl.acrl.org/content/72/1/62.full.pdf+html

O’Reilly, T. (2005). What is Web 2.0. Retrieved from www.oreilly.com

Podcast. (2016). Retrieved June 30, 2016 from the Wikipedia: https://en.wkipedia.org/wiki/Podcast

PowToon’s Awesome Blog (2015).  7 Best Awesome Presentation Tools for 2015. Retrieved from
https://www.powtoon.com/blog/7-presentation-tools-2015

The SCONUL Seven Pillars of Information Literacy: Core Model For Higher Education. (2011).
Retrieved from https://www.sconul.ac.uk

TED. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com

Interview

Interview

I interviewed a 14 year old, gay, African-American male who used Facebook to “come out”. I was interested to find out how  his social media presence and personal identity was affected.

1). Which form of social media do you prefer and why?

I would say Facebook because even though I have all these friends at school there are people I can’t get in contact with unless I’m on Facebook, like I have family that lives in Hawaii, Arizona, and Kentucky. Like its good to be connected in one type of way even if we are not there together.

2). How do you think facebook has affected your social life?

I think it’s maybe better because it’s like we talk to people on the Internet is easier than for me to talk to people in person, boosts my confidence and stuff like that. I think it helps me better. When I put on Facebook that I was gay I got a lot of negative comments like, “oh, no don’t say that.” but some people were really good. That’s why I say it helped my confidence and it makes it easier for me to talk to people.

3) How connected to do think you are?

I think we are connected but not connected. Like we’re connected cause we’re talking to each other and having fun and hanging out in a type of way but just because we’re talking doesn’t mean we’re really there together. Like we can talk but we’re not there with each other. So even though we think we’re connected we are not really connected at all. We still thousands of miles apart.

4.) Have you used social media for any other reasons than just Facebook?

I used to have a Kick but that was really boring cause I just texted people I already knew and I had their phone numbers so there was really no point of texting them on Kicks.Instagram is really boring you don’t see anything but pictures.

5). Do you belong to any groups?

On facebook I am part of this Anime group cause I like to stay caught up on my Anime.

6). Would you consider yourself a geek when it comes to Anime?

Yes, I love Anime.

The responses that my student gave are supported by Ito, M., Horst, H., Bittanti, M., Boyd, D., Herr-Stephenson, B., Lang, P.G., Pascoe, C.J., & Robinson, L. (2009) article. The authors state when discussing the friendship nature of online networks, “ Our description of friendship-driven learning describes a familiar genre of peer-based learning, in which online networks are supporting those sometimes painful but important lessons in growing up, giving youth an environment to explore romance, friendship, and status just as their predecessors did” (p. 11). My student chose to use Facebook as the vehicle for making public his sexual orientation. While he did receive some negative feedback, he still saw social media as helping to boost his confidence. The authors also stated, “.., for many gay teens the Internet can become a place to explore their identities beyond the hetoerosexual normativity of their everyday lives” (p. 18). My student found that he felt more comfortable talking to people on the Internet than he did face-to face. This might be a direct result of his need to explore his own identity while at the same time gauging the acceptance of his sexual orientation by his friends.

In addition, the authors note that students often transition from using online resources  to hang out, friendship-driven activities, to messing around, interest-driven activities. This was evidenced in my interview as the student stated that he had joined an online group based on his interest in Anime. This group allowed him to stay connected to what was new in the Anime world.

Overall, it was interesting to to talk with a young person about his usage of online resources. His reactions and statements were clearly supported by research. It was also interesting that I used my phone to record his interview, another way in which new technologies have affected our everyday lives.

References

Ito, M., Horst, H., Bittanti, M., Boyd, D., Herr-Stephenson, B., Lang, P.G., Pascoe, C.J., & Robinson, L. (2009). Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project. Retrieved from  https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/free_download/9780262513654_Living_and_Learning.pdf

  

I chose this True Religion ad for my deconstruction project. Honestly, as I worked on my essay  I can see why we were limited to 2 pages tops. I could have written a whole research paper on this ad. As I looked at the ad I began to see how it appealed to a certain race and class. While promoting jeans, a truly authentic American garment,  the ad also seems to be promoting the idea of what it means to be American; looks, dress, lifestyle. The appeal of youth, health, beauty, sexuality balanced with the laid back unfocused background seems to suggest that this is what American life is all about, what the True Religion can give you.

While working through this assignment, I could not help but think of the Jenkins article and his reasons as to why we should teach media literacy, more specifically  the challenges of transparency and ethics. As young people begin to engage more and more with new media technologies these two challenges will have to be addressed, transparency and the authenticity of what is being interacted with along with how to encourage young people to be ethical in their decision-making (Jenkins, 2006).

I also began to think about the readings by Lankshear and Knobel (2011) and their suggestions of active citizenship and critical media, "We now understand literacies as socially created constitutive elements  of larger human practices-discourse-that humans construct around their myriad purposes and values" (p. 76).  The educational goal should be to promote active citizenship (Lanshear and Knobel, 2011). If as educators we recognize and embrace this notion then it is our responsibility to effectively teach young people about new media technologies.

References

 Jenkins, H.J.(2006). Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century. Retrieved from:https://www.macfound.org/media/article_pdfs/JENKINS_WHITE_PAPER.PDF

Lankshear, C. & Knobel, M. (2011). Literacies Social, Cultural and Historical Perspectives. New York, NY: Peter Lang.

Week Five

When watching the video Living in an Acoustic World I couldn't help but think of many of the points Jenkins addressed. One of the most interesting concepts McLuhan spoke on was the end of secrecy and the monopoly of knowledge, a direct result of the electronic environment, "with the end of secrecy goes the end of monopolies of knowledge. There can no longer be a monopoly knowledge in learning, in education, or in power" (McLuhan). Jenkins (2010) stated "Participatory culture is emerging as the culture absorbs and responds to the explosion of new media technologies that make it possible for average consumers to archive, annotate, appropriate, and recirculate media content in powerful new ways" (p. 8).  Both men make the point that no longer are a select few in the visual world the creators of knowledge and definers of literacy. As we move to a more acoustical world everyone can create, share, interpret knowledge; we can be both consumers and producers of information.  Through affinity spaces and the participatory culture of  new media environments more and more people are participating in society in ways that were once out of reach. But whose responsibility is it to teach critical media literacy?

According to Jenkins, new media skills should be a part of the educational curriculum, "the new participatory culture places new emphasis on familiar skill that have long been central to American education; it also requires teachers to pay greater attention of the social kills and cultural competencies that are emerging in the new media landscape" (Jenkins, 2010, p. 27). It is necessary to for the American education system to begin to teach critical media skills in order to avoid the three main issues surrounding new medias; inequalities, transparency, and ethical challenges (Jenkins, 2010).  

Everyday in my classroom I see so much when it comes to  issues of technology and new medias. What I have found is that for the most part the current educational system does not see how new media technologies fit into the big picture, or as Green mentioned across the curriculum. Beyond using computers for simple information searches, teachers and support staff feel that technology should be taught in isolation and restricted to tech ed. McLuhan shared that knowledge creates ignorance and gets in the way of progress. I see this statement come alive everyday, and even more so with the implementation of the Common Core. There is no room for new media instruction in this new curriculum, no room for creativity, individual thinking, critical thinking, or collaboration; it is  an endorsement of  what McLuhan termed "private identity". It almost seems as if education is like the railway train McLuhan spoke about "moving goods along a track" and that "Many educators think that the problem in education is just to get the information though, get it past the barrier, the opposition of the young, just to move it and keep it going."


Jenkins, H., Clinton, K., Purushotma, R., Robison, A.J. & Weigel, M. (2006). Confronting the challenges of participatory culture: Media education for the 21st century. Chicago: The MacArthur Foundation. Retrieved from http://www.newmedialiteracies.org/files/working/NMLWhitePaper.pdf  


McLuhan, M. Living in an acoustic world. (PDF Document). Retrieved from http://www.marshallmcluhanspeaks.com/media/mcluhan_pdf_6_JUkCEo0.pdf

Week three

Wow! There seems to be so much to talk about this week!! I can say that I have truly learned a lot. First, I must say the Networks, Power, and Democracy was a bit over my head at times. What I did understand was that while in theory the Internet should allow for a more democratic society because choice and openness which should allow for a  more equal distribution of wealth, services, and goods, in reality this has not always been  as seen in the case of civil societies.  What I really found interesting was the example of the blogosphere that she used. When talking about the blogosphere Saskia pointed out the the blogs at the top, those with the greatest amount of traffic and reach, soon became more like traditional media sites where the information flowed from one-to-many simply because of the sheer number of followers; it became too hard to maintain a collaborative space.

Raquel Recuero surfaces the many issues surrounding social network sites. She did discuss the many ways that youth especially can become involved in activism for a more democratic society, how they can become more socially engaged and begin to think critically about important issues and topics. On the flip side she also addressed the negative side of social network sites such as privacy, sharing too much information, bullying, and most importantly discursive violence and discourse.

 The article I choose to read also examined the challenges found in the blogosphere.
The article I read for this week entitled The Spirit of Paulo Freire in Blogland: Struggling for a Knowledge-Log Revolution examines many issues surrounding blogs, klogs, blogs on intranets meant for employees to share on, and warblogging. Freire dealt with how to create a more democratized society through collaboration, co-creation of knowledge, and empowerment. His most most notable work being the Pedagogy of the Oppressed addressing what he called "banking education" (knowledge flows one way from teacher to student. Students are like empty banks that teachers are responsible for filling or depositing into).

Blogs can be seen as sites of co-creation of knowledge through collaborative efforts. Klogs are meant to give employees space to refine their tools of the trade and provide space to deal with issues. Klogs have not taken off because of issues such as management using klogs to monitor employees. Employees are often resistant to using klogs in the true spirit they were meant to be used  in fear of reprisal, " While klogs can craft a form of groupware to assist in this knowledge management, they can also appeal to business hierarchies that want to know what their employees are thinking and doing"  (Boese, 2004). Recuero also brought this up when asked about participation. She stated that her fear was that people would not comment on issues because they were afraid of the repercussions.

Boese also discussed warblogging, or blogging by journalists who are immersed in the war environment. These blogs are meant to bring a human face to the war, a much different spin than the whitewashed traditional mass media reporting. Yet, agencies such as CNN have shut down their journalist's warblogs for many reasons including the blogs challenged U.S. notions of who and what we are as a nation, "The challenge was to try to make meaning from conflicts between the two different universes of discourse, one severely restricted by mass media assumptions about the patriotic attitudes of the US audience, and the other, in the blogosphere, situated much more firmly in the discourse of international media coverage, which differed significantly from the U.S. war coverage in its skepticism toward the U.S. point of view" (Boese, 2004).

The theme running through each of these seems to be that there is a real disruption in long held notions of who creates knowledge, who in in control of knowledge, the ramifications of empowering the masses with the ability of fully participate in a public sphere that was once a very private sphere, " ...repression and backlash by elites are often the result of the 'oppressed' gaining too much power of voice and consciousness" (Boese, 2004).

Week 2

“We gather at the communal watering hole as we always did; only now we don’t reach out to those around us. Instead, we communicate with far-flung souls using means that would be indistinguishable from magic for all but our most recent ancestors” (Varnelis, 2012, p.16).

As I read this portion of the chapter I was reminded of my son’s wedding. At the rehearsal all five of the would be bridesmaids sat on the front pew of the church, waiting for instructions. Interestingly enough each was texting her cell phone. Someone had the decided to take a picture of this crazy scene and the next day we all joked that they were actually all texting each other.  It seemed so strange to see five young women sitting together involved in conversation but not with each other. Each was so immersed in what was happening on their phone that they had in essence “left the building.”  “But they are not engaged in debate or dialogue with each other. If they come together, it is simply to establish an ambient visual experience of bodies I near proximity, which is as psychically necessary in this wired and wireless age as it was in the day of Australopithecus (p.17).   Have we become so connected to outside communities that we forget, ignore, or find less value in the ones that we physically move in and out of every day? Are we more connected to the communities that we are connected to via laptops, phones, tablets? How do we as educators help students to learn the value of both? I find that even when students are talking amongst themselves it is so often about what is happening on Facebook, twitter, Snapchat, or Instagram. Their conversations are dominated by who did what, where, when and how.  It seems as if they go through withdrawals if they can’t check their social media at least every five minutes, at times risking having their phones taken away or even suspension from school.  I worry about many of their futures as I see face-to-face social skills deteriorating as their online social presence grows.

Week One-Blogging

"The distinctive contribution of the approach to literacy as social practice lies in the ways in which it involves careful and sensitive attention to what people do with texts, how they make sense of them and use them to further their own purposes in their own learning lives"

(Gillen and Barton, 2010, p. 9)

The educational field has been always slow to adopt changes that challenge time honored methods. Today the integration of technology into classrooms and the notion that it can be integral to developing literacy is often resisted at all levels. Gillen and Barton (2010) state, "Education is of course a field of systematically shared priorities, polices and practices and so can be difficult to shift unless research-based evidence, top-down policy change and bottom-up creative shits instituted by teachers all combine to pressure for wholesale change" (p. 10). Yet, many within the educational community recognize that if digital literacy is not embraced, "there will be an increasingly vast gap of practice, understanding, and of disposition of knowledge" (p.7). The question then becomes how does the educational community fuse prior practices and methods with the new technologies.

One method is weblogs or blogging. Blogging joins together the practice of storytelling with technology. Storytelling has long been used in classrooms as a way to encourage students to read, write, as well as strengthen verbal literacy (Huffaker, 2005). Blogging, a chronological diary, allows learners to express feelings, interests, connect with other bloggers, be creative just to name a few. The benefit of blogging though is that students are no longer confined to walls of the classroom. Both Gillen and Barton (2010) and Huffaker (2005) point to the fact that students can now collaborate and build communities in ways that are not possible  in traditional learning environments. 

Recently I took a position as a long-term sub at an inner school as a tech ed teacher for seventh and eighth graders. The district has multiple tech ed vacancies and, as a result, the students have been without an instructor for some time. Needless to say I walked into a war zone. There is no formal curriculum available, little to no support from the BOE, and because I am not a certified tech ed teacher, the usual activities that the students would participate in such as using power tools was strictly off limits. But, what I did have was my own computer lab. I decided to introduce them to blogs. While a select few were familiar with blogging the majority were not. I met some resistance at first, but as soon as they realized that they could be creative with the blogs, use them to tell their stories, write about what interested them, and connect with each other they quickly bought in. I found that they were working on their blogs at home and on their down time. Those who did not have computers at home but did have smart phones were working from their handhelds. I see the benefits of blogging manifest in my classroom daily as I witness students who once felt that digital technology was out of their reach ask for the opportunity to work on their blogs. 

week 1

References:

Gillen, J., & Barton, D. (2010). Digital Literacies. Teaching and Learning Research Programme. 1-32.

Huffaker, D. (2005). The educated blogger: Using weblogs to promote literacy in the classroom. AACE Journal, 13(2). 91-98.