Teaching, Learning, Blogging

I met with Jennifer Little yesterday. As part of her work in the library, she is working on some projects related to information literacy. Her projects grew out of a portion of the recent USCA Strategic Plan calling for information literacy on two levels--as part of the core curriculum (general education) and within the disciplines. Over the past several years, my asssignments in aegl 101 have been moving in that direction, and, well, I've begun to believe that one of the characteristics of a "college-educated" individual is the ability to use (in all the manifestations of that term) information. As such, I'm primarily interested in the concept of informational literacy within general education . . . aegl 101, to be exact.

As we were talking, I began to bat around some ideas for a theme for the course. "Information Literacy and Technology" was my first thought, but, after thinking about my original laptop proposal, I began to wonder if we can really separate literacy from technology. It seems to me, whether we are talking abbout cave drawings, scratches on papyrus, the printing press, the Dewey-Decimal system, card catalogues, electronic databases, the world wide web, new media, etc., we are talking about technology. The ability to manipulate such technology seems to be at the heart of what we mean by literacy. Now, I'm leaning more to combining the terms in the course theme . . . something like "Information (Techno)Literacy." I kinda like that, but I'll continue to toss it around a bit.

Part of me is getting frustrated with this "theme" idea, but, on the other hand, the theme is important to me in designing the specific assignments. Of course, one of the obvious assignments might be to compare a couple of web sites to the library, but, and this always happens to me over the summer, I want students to explore more than that. I am intrigued by the notion in some recent research of the internet as a "physical" space. The most obvious manifestation of this is in MOOs and MUDs, but I'm convinced that course management tools such as Blackboard provide a space that makes the experience more convenient for students and instructors alike but simultaneously confines the ccourse in much the same manner as the traditional classroom. I'm thinking of the internet as a vast library, like the Great Library of Alexandria, which, by virtue of its vastness, only a few can navigate successfully. To that effect, I'm thinking of an assignment that asks students to consider our own library's physical space and the "physical" space of the internet. I have to work that out, though, and work on other assignments.

I also changed the commenting feature on this blog from the folks in the UK to another commenting server . . . the name escapes me. This server seems to load a bit faster, though, and provides "feedback on feedback." The interface of the feedback on feedback isn't so hot, but it does send out an automaticc email to let folks know when they have received feedback on their feedback.I hope that allows for more discussion rather then the "one-way" evaluation I have come to loathe. I've contacted the good folks at the ETC about setting up the commenting feature on their blogs. We'll see how many problems that creates . . . probably plenty. I'm afraid the process of setting up the commenting feature is a little more complicated than I would like.

Well, that's all for now. More later.