Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

"Critically Appraising for Antiracism" - Ramona Naicker
Recording of session delivered at Critical Approaches to Libraries Conference (CALC) 2021.

Link to chat transcipt: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sRGIj6FLqsB3C4HYAG6XcarAoMFKXg-t/view?usp=sharing

There is a series of "case studies" on the CILIP Information Literacy website, with librarians describing how they have shifted IL teaching online. So far there are contributions from: Delyth Morris (Subject Librarian for Medicine at Cardiff University); David Bedford (Academic Support Librarian at Universities at Medway); Sarah Smyth (Assistant Librarian at Ulster University); Lesley English (Faculty Librarian (Teaching and Learning) at Lancaster University); Eleanor Barker and Veronica Phillips (Medical Library at the Un

In case you are interested, I came across it whilst searching for articles from this other PhD study of IL integration in New Zealand higher education

I've been revisiting some of my favorite books this summer. Doing that has reminded me of some ideas that I've shared in the past and also sparked some new ideas. One of those ideas is using multimedia creation tools to create alternatives to traditional book reports. Here's a handful of ideas for alternatives to traditional book report projects.

We’ll all be teaching infolit online for the foreseeable future (I hope) and it is, as anyone who’s done much of it will tell you, a very different experience to being in a room with people.

I do a lot of training online already for overseas audiences, so I have some familiarity with this. For what it’s worth, here are some tips for retooling your sessions to work in a webinar type environment.

Information Fallout is a narrative-based learning tool designed to introduce information literacy skills to students. It is based around attaining and using six “Info Tactics:”

• Consider the context of a source when evaluating it.
• Consider the creation process when looking at a source.
• Give credit to other people’s ideas.
• Ask questions for better research.
• Appreciate that research evolves over time through the contribution of many researchers.
• Seek out different sources and types of sources.

Those Info Tactics align to the six concepts outlined in the ACRL “Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education.” Here are those concepts with related Info Tactics in parentheses:  

• Authority Is Constructed and Contextual (Consider the context of a source when evaluating it.)
• Information Creation as a Process (Consider the creation process when looking at a source.)
• Information Has Value (Give credit to other people’s ideas.)
• Research as Inquiry (Ask questions for better research.)
• Scholarship as Conversation (Appreciate that research evolves over time through the contribution of many researchers.)
• Searching as Strategic Exploration (Seek out different sources and types of sources.)

Information Fallout is meant to introduce these information literacy concepts to students. Librarians, teachers, instructors, and other educators should pair the game with further discussion or lessons or assignments to more fully articulate the details of the framework skills.

Learning Objectives

Information Fallout sets out six learning objectives for students. These are assessed by a series of multiple choice questions embedded within the narrative. To proceed through the narrative, students must answer those questions correctly.

• The student will be able to demonstrate that context influences authority.
• The student will be able to identify an element of the creation process that may be an indicator of quality for school work.
• The student will be able to assert the importance of citing sources.
• The student will be able to rank a research topic based on a question as being more effective than one that provides an overview.
• The student will be able to articulate that scholarship evolves over time.
• The student will be able to identify one or more reasons why it is important to consult more than one source when conducting research.