Hot Topics Winter ‘09–Information Literacy
Posted by communitycollegelibraries on February 23, 2009
Information Literacy
Read CJCLS list.
What level of info. literacy? Palo Alto has: Information Resources Certificate, 7 classes, free Continuing Ed. Credit, introduction to Library, Databases, MLA, APA, Web search, Info. evaluation. Instructors can schedule a BI class, also available online (students take a quiz). No quiz in face-to-face. Palo Alto enrollment 8,000. Faculty offer extra credit for certificate completion. Some discussion of problem of babysitting for absent faculty. Palo Alto requires professor presence. They offer desktop instruction for faculty, face-to-face, one-on-one with librarian.
Faculty know their discipline but they don’t know all library has to offer to support the discipline. Outreach to public-public can attend the courses.
Distance Learning-possibly create position to deal with distance ed., produce online content.
Vendor representative (Demco) talked about training issues. Their training is task oriented, based on marketing research, and is face-to-face.
Northampton CC (?) worked to get faculty involved. They wrote a grant for support to assess information literacy. Faculty members now advertise the Info. Lit. program to other faculty members. Another CC (?) has 10 Info. Lit. classes for “at risk” students. Total of 70 classes, 2 reference librarians. Online tutorials requested by faculty for their online students.
Another group also addressed information literacy, particularly in the online environment. Bucks Co. CC developing web tutorials. Cuesta College is migrating workbook from PDF to interactive print to online. CA consortium pushing open access textbooks.
Bucks Co. CC & Oakton CC offering >12 credits free to recently laid off workers.
2nd part of this discussion
John Berry, past ALA president, spoke about the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the 21st Century Skills program. There is an Eluminate group. A matrix of skills needed and how to address them. Various literacies are included: Information, Media, Financial. Other skills to be developed are: creativity, innovation, critical thinking, problem solving, life & career skills, health literacy, science & number literacy, etc. He said this was “traditional, transitional, transformative.” This grew out of a P-21 initiative. Idea is to use best practices, audience is educators, librarians, leadership, business. There will be a Conference Within a Conference at ALA Annual in Chicago-workforce development and innovation in Community College Libraries.
Learning Commons
One CC had money from a technology fee. Space came from re-purposing audiovisual area. Issues as part of the LC–Tutoring department, does it use or not? Are librarians going to be part of LC?
