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Wesleyan University Information Literacy as a Key Capability • Writing Over the next year, the faculty will be looking at the curriculum and asking itself how it can go about the ambitious project of both concretely defining what it means to possess one of these capabilities, and how to support faculty in their teaching of these capabilities, and students in the acquisition of these capabilities. The library and ITS will continue to work with the faculty both on the Information Literacy key capability, but also asking the question of how Information Literacy skills might support the acquisition of the other key capabilities. For example, how might knowledge of statistical databases and statistical software help with quantitative reasoning? Or knowledge of PowerPoint support speaking? In the case of ethical reasoning, we think there are wonderful opportunities to take examples from the very real world of peer-to-peer file sharing to create modules that will help students think both about the ethical use of info rmation in particular, and ethical systems in general. With support from the Mellon Foundation and the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education, we have continued to develop LoLa ( http://lolaexchange.org ). We have established a national editorial board for Information Literacy modules being headed by Michelle Millet from Trinity University . We have also contracted with the MIT Library to catalog the Learning Object repositories which the editorial board is evaluating. We expect that by the end of December we will have cataloged and evaluated over 200 Information Literacy modules. We have architected LoLa so that the materials in LoLa can be discovered via Google Scholar, via Merlot, via Federated Search technology (beginning with Metalib), and eventually via WorldCat. We will also be asking the editorial board to define gaps in LoLa's Information Literacy collection as a means of defining our module development priorities. During the summer of 2005 we installed in the main reference area of Olin library an Information Commons which has opened to great enthusiasm within the student body. We have used this opportunity to re-engage with our faculty as a means of talking with them about what sorts of training and exposure to info rmation resources they need in order to complete their academic work. This has resulted in a series of small projects where librarians, faculty, and technologists work together to create activities that serve the curricular goals of the course, and simultaneously provide students with info rmation literacy instruction. Examples of these activities taking place this fall include upper level research courses in the English, Anthropology, History, and Classical Studies departments for which students are working on projects that will involve various research and technological tools and methods specific to the classes and individual projects. As mentioned above, the LoLa Information Literacy Editorial Group will be creating a short-list of modules that we will pursue in order to make more complete the collection of modules within LoLa. On our campus, we are also continuing to work with our faculty to develop modules. Modules that we are presently working on include a module on the ethical use of info rmation vis-à-vis peer-to-peer file sharing (which will be part of a larger module on the methods of ethical argumentation), and a set of modules for use on an intellectual property website. At Wesleyan, the CTW Mellon Information Literacy Project representatives continued working with Wesleyan’s Pedagogical Renewal Committee to implement the grant at Wesleyan. In addition, we used our funding for positions to hire a programmer to assist in developing electronic information literacy modules developed at the three schools and to develop a database for sharing those modules with each other and with other liberal arts colleges interested in using electronic tools for incorporating the teaching of information literacy into classes at other campuses. Class Projects We continued working with the classes and departments which served as our pilot projects in the first year of the grant: Sociology 202
– Sociological Analysis – Mary Bosworth and Algernon Austin In Mary Bosworth’s class, her students again produced a review of the literature for a research proposal which served as their final project for the class. In preparation for that project, they completed assignments such as a brief literature review and a “research log” outlining the resources they used and how they used them to evaluate how well various resources and strategies worked. They also used materials from the library’s Special Collections and Archives. In Algernon Austin’s class, students completed a research paper as a final project which incorporated research methodologies they learned over the course of the semester. They also worked on assignments such as finding and evaluating primary source materials on a particular topic. The library created an online tutorial on Writing a Literature Review (http://www.wesleyan.edu/libr/tut/litrev/) for students in these classes. Philosophy senior
seminars The library created a brief guide on Writing an Annotated Bibliography (http://www.wesleyan.edu/libr/pathfind/annotbib.htm) for philosophy students. In addition
to those departments, the Anthropology department has a course, Anth
201 – Anthropological Theory (taught last year by Gina Ulysse),
which is required for all new anthropology majors. Students completed
a set of assignments using the literature of the field:
In addition, there are two groups working on a review of Wesleyan’s First Year Initiative program of offering at least one small seminar for each first year student. Both groups are interested in incorporating information literacy more significantly into the program. There is also an effort to develop a quantitative reasoning center at Wesleyan, modeled after our Writing Workshop program and aimed at providing instruction and assistance for students learning the use of statistical and other quantitative methods in the social sciences. These discussions have included not only representatives from most of the social science departments at Wesleyan, but also representatives from Trinity and Connecticut Colleges in the hopes of making this a consortial program. Those of us working with the Mellon Information Literacy grant here are involved in developing this program. Information Literacy Database In the second year of our grant, we completed the general structure of “LoLa,” a database of learning objects and learning activities (www.lolaexchange.org). Since many of the online tools being developed for projects on each of the three campuses are useful at the other campuses, we are developing a sharable database which librarians, information technology specialists, and faculty can take from and contribute to. The database features learning objects such as tutorials, animations or simulations to illustrate a concept, interactive activities, and other online instruction tools, and also learning activities, assignments for which students use the learning objects to complete. If an instructor finds an appropriate learning object for a particular purpose, that instructor can assign an already recorded activity or create a new activity that uses the learning object and then add that activity to the LoLa database. Thus, these learning objects can be used in a variety of ways by different instructors in different classes to teach the concepts of information literacy. To help us develop the database and create learning objects to include in it, we have hired an instructional designer both to create learning objects and to teach us principles of designing effective learning objects so that we can continue developing sharable learning objects after the grant period is complete. We are still early in the stages of developing new learning objects to include in LoLa as well as redeveloping already existing objects in LoLa. In addition
to the three schools in our consortium, we are opening LoLa to other
interested liberal arts colleges who are working on integrating information
literacy into their curricula. To this end, we have presented LoLa as
a work in progress at a variety of venues, including the American Library
Association 2004 annual conference and the New England Library Instruction
Group’s 2004 annual program. At Wesleyan, the CTW Mellon Information Literacy Project representatives are working with Wesleyan’s Pedagogical Renewal Committee to implement the grant at Wesleyan. We determined that since the PRC includes the academic deans, it would have the proper authority to make decisions on which proposed projects to fund. We are also working with the newly established Mellon Center for Faculty Career Development to publicize and promote this initiative. We have a list of departments interested in discipline specific and advanced information literacy instruction for their majors, and also of faculty teaching First Year Initiative courses interested in incorporating general and introductory level information literacy instruction for new students. Initial Projects As pilot projects, we worked primarily with four classes in two departments: Soc
202 - Sociological Analysis – Mary Bosworth Phil
331 - Being Good and Acting Well – Kelly Sorensen Sociology
293: Jobs, Unemployment & Social Welfare - Jonathan Cutler Information Literacy Database To share ideas and results such as these listed above from the individual campuses, Wesleyan decided to use the IT staff money from the grant to hire a programmer to develop a sharable database which librarians, information technology specialists, and faculty can take from and contribute to. We have recently begun work on the general structure. The plan is to input ideas and modules for methods of incorporating information literacy instruction and practice into the curriculum of a class, and also to include analyses of the results from the different uses of the modules. The database will be searchable in a variety
of ways: one will be able to retrieve a list of modules especially useful
for a subject (such as sociology), an information literacy standard
(such as ethical use of information), or academic skill (either from
a general list such as how to do a literature review, or a campus specific
list such as how to read non-verbal texts). The modules will include
online tutorials or other instruction tools which can be used as provided
or modified to fit a specific class. For example, we are working on
a tutorial on writing a literature review that can be easily modified
for specific disciplines by including such things as discipline specific
examples of good literature reviews, links to appropriate indexes of
publications, or discipline specific standards for literature reviews.
As another example, we will soon begin work on a flexible, modifiable
tutorial to teach social science students how to use statistics in their
research. We have faculty representatives from several departments at
Wesleyan, and we plan to include social science faculty from the other
consortial colleges in this effort.
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