Have you read Christine Bruce’s new book, “Informed Learning”?
I recommend that everyone who teaches read this book! It asks us to consider how learners use “information” to learn. I imagine that most of us would agree that information plays a key and fundamental role in student learning, and that teaching learners to use information in a more sophisticated manner helps them to learn better. What Christine Bruce, and other researchers she describes in the book, recommends is using an approach that will make our teaching more effective. She asks us to employ a pedagogy that has learners focus on information as they learn.
I recently collaborated with a professor and an IT person to develop assignments and activities leading up to the creation of a podcast recording. One of our goals was to teach students to become more critical of the information they encountered in learning about the topic and creating the script for their podcast recording. We selected one of the readings for the course and asked students to evaluate it’s credibility and then share their evaluation with a small group. The idea was for students to see how others might go about this task differently than they did. When the class came back together we discussed the different approaches. While the session was considered successful by the professor and myself, I have been thinking about what we might have done instead to reach our goal more effectively.
After thought – sometime shortly after the session students were to review two podcasts of their own selection and consider: audience, structure, and information use. These same aspects were to be considered in later evaluations of each others podcasts (peer review) and eventually their own. Rather than have a librarian-led session focusing specifically on “evaluation” of credibility, I think we should have addressed the aspects (audience, structure, and information use) as part of the class discussion of all the readings, focusing discussions specifically around them early in the semester. This would have reinforced a critical stance and been more relevant to the immediate task of learning about the topic. The students would have been repeatedly exposed to various evaluative approaches of their fellow students, which would have fueled their own critical abilities as the worked on the final assignment of making their own script/recording.
Bruce, C. S. (2008). Informed Learning, Chicago: ACRL.
