Stephen Bell on Teaching Information Literacy Skills, from ACRLog 11/25/2008

Here's an interesting post on today's ACRLog from Stephen Bell, in which he addresses the debate about how to best provide students with the information literacy skills they need: librarian taught for-credit-information literacy courses, or information literacy integrated across the curriculum. Bell references articles/blog posts by William Badke and David Watt, which are also worth a look.

CJARL Meeting - December 12, 2008 10am-12pm

Information literacy is hardly a new concept among librarians. However, it now seems like the rest of the world is finally starting to catch up to us. Over the past few years, a growing number of non-Librarian faculty in high education have begun to realize that accessing and interpreting information is increasingly relevant to student success.

This is good news.

What’s even better news is that many of our academic Librarian colleagues throughout New Jersey are also noticing this trend. Just as we’ve been discussing information literacy competencies and standards during our CJARL meetings, our colleagues on the User Education committee of the New Jersey Chapter of ACRL and VALE’s Shared Information Literacy (SIL) committee have been doing the same.

The progression standards are currently being conceived according to two areas: (1) high school to collegiate progression and (2) 2-year college to 4-year college progression.

That said, it’s about time that we convene all three groups for a kind of “mini-summit” geared toward hashing out our thoughts and ideas on progression standards.

Eleonora Dubicki of the NJACRL-UE committee has graciously arranged accommodations for the joint meeting to take place in Magill Commons (part of the dining/conference facilities) at Monmouth University from 10am-12pm on Friday, December 12, 2008.

This meeting will take the place of our previously-scheduled meeting from 10am-12pm on December 12.

It promises to be a great meeting.

-Gary

"Panel Issues Guide to Using Copyrighted Material in the Classroom"

This brief article from "The Chronicle of Higher Education" refers to a very interesting--and handy--report created at American University in D.C. on the subject of copyright. The report is written in easy-to-understand language that many teaching faculty will appreciate:

The guide argues that discussion of copyright in education has too often been shaped by copyright holders, "whose understandable concern about large-scale copyright piracy has caused them to equate any unlicensed use of copyright material with stealing." The authors say they hope their work will help professors understand their rights better under current law.

"Wikipedia and the Meaning of Truth"

I suppose we're still discussing wikipedia. Just when you thought the worst was over. Seriously, though, it really is still necessary to keep this on our radar screen. -Gary

"Wikipedia and the Meaning of Truth: Why the online encyclopedia's epistemology should worry those who care about traditional notions of accuracy."

By Simson L. Garfinkel

With little notice from the outside world, the community-written encyclopedia Wikipedia has redefined the commonly accepted use of the word "truth."

Why should we care? Because ­Wikipedia's articles are the first- or second-ranked results for most Internet searches. Type "iron" into Google, and Wikipedia's article on the element is the top-ranked result; likewise, its article on the Iron Cross is first when the search words are "iron cross." Google's search algorithms rank a story in part by how many times it has been linked to; people are linking to Wikipedia articles a lot. [more]