Information Literacy and Student-centered Learning

Coalescing thoughts - What is the relationship between information literacy and student-centered learning?  Typically the need for information literacy is associated with information ubiquity. However, doesn't active learning require students to engage with materials to create meaning rather than passively receiving information? Would not this, at least sometimes, involve locating, and certainly evaluating and applying information to learn? While I see in the literature references to needing to teach students information literacy skills in a student-centered way, I haven't as of yet seen mention of a relation between the developments of the two concepts. More to come on this...

New Article Coming Out in C&RL News

Some Purdue colleagues, Tomalee Doan and Catherine Fraser Riehle, and I have had an article accepted at College and Research Libraries (C&RL) News that discusses our work with an initiative going on Purdue to help faculty develop their courses to be more student-centered. The initiative is called, Instruction Matters: Purdue Academic Course Transformation (IMPACT), and provides teachers with a team comprised of staff from Purdue's Information Technology at Purdue (iTAP) and the Center for Instructional Excellence (CIE), as well as a faculty member from the Libraries. Library faculty view the project as a great opportunity for embedding information literacy into courses because we are there when teachers are making curricular and pedagogic decisions, and therefore open to solutions they may not have thought of yet! Definitely a win-win!

Library 2.012 Conference Session

I will be presenting this Wednesday at the Library 2.012 Coference at 12 noon (EST) with Diana Wakimoto from UC East Bay and Ginny (Virginia) Tucker, who teaches at San Jose State, about figuring out the publishing and presenting opportunities from your doctoral thesis work.

Visting the University of Borås

The next leg of my journey in Sweden took me to the University of Borås, where Christine Yates and I gave seminar presentations. Unlike at the conference in Jönköping, these presentations were focused on our research in relation to library and information science, rather than on methodology. There is a nice littl news article on the U. of Borås website about the event. Also, I had the opportunity to talk one-on-one with Louise Limberg, a professor emeritus at Borås whose work has been instrumental to my own research. It was fascinating hearing Louise's slightly different take on some of the issues I discuss with my doctoral group.  

The Best of Times

School of Education and
 Communication, Jönköping University

I had a wonderful time in Sweden last week, which began at Jönköping University, where the Phenomenography and Variation Theory Conference (SIG 9) of the European Association of Research for Instruction and Learning (EARLI) was held. I presented the first morning with another doctoral candidate, Christine Yates, from Queensland University of Technology (QUT). Christine  presented the initial findings from her study of health information literacy of aging adults in Australia. I presented on the findings from my pilot (paper on this to hopefully be out soon), and my use of the methods to examine information use as part of overall learning. Christine is a full-time student at QUT in Brisbane AUS, and of course, I am in the Gateway (distance) part of the program, so we had never met. Our presentations both went off successfully and we had an interesting discussion after each. It was exciting, of course, to discuss my work with notable phenomenographers.