User:Dpwood

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Go to mini course: ...Taking Another Look at the Information Cycle in Information Literacy

About me

My professional life has a journey. Time spent and experiences in F2F, blended, and virtual classrooms shifted my focus from teaching History in higher education to Academic Librarianship. Time spent and experiences as an Instruction and Research Librarian lead me to educational learning and teaching. I have a MA in History and a MS in Information and Library Science and am nearing completion of a Certificate Program in Online Learning and Teaching. I live in Upstate New York with my human family and fuzzy friends.

My Topic/Purpose

Teaching the Teacher: Taking Another Look at the Information Cycle in Information Literacy This course can be a learning experience or a refresher for educators/ wanna-be educators that are digital natives and digital immigrants that would like to learn/refresh their information cycle knowledge and skills to integrate the information cycle and information sources into class/course content to enhance the learning experience for their students from grade school-14.

Needs Assessment

Information cycle literacy and the ability to select the most suitable source based on the information cycle is a valued commodity in an educational climate where learners are viewed as consumers. As educators we are inundated with literacies, but studies have shown that real learning is achieved in research-based learning spaces and knowledge of the information cycle and the ability to select suitable sources is a core component of the research process. The need-to-know goes beyond achieving real learning and learner successes. As educators (and in our personal lives), we all know how difficult it is to keep up in a technology landscape that is always under construction and transforming the way that information is gathered and received. At all levels of society there is a push to change the digital culture due to increased awareness of misinformation that has the potential to misinform and mislead that has educational and real-world implications. Knowing the cycle and the tools to select information sources that have authority in learning spaces taught in educational institutions decreases the threat of misinformed information. As much as we do not like to talk about it, the generational divide between digital natives and digital immigrants is a threat to information flow. Awareness of the cycle bridges the gap and contributes to the stop misinformation campaign. Last but not least, my experiences in F2F, blended and virtual classrooms created my passion to be an advocate of teaching the information cycle under the information literacy umbrella. In class after class there was a disconnect between knowledge and procedure when learners were seeking information for assignments and projects that convinced me training was needed. The anxiety of not being able to find information stated in requirements affected the well-being of my students, at times, mine. For all these reasons, real learning, the technology landscape, a decreased threat to misinformation, the divide between digital natives and digital immigrants, and a lack of information knowledge and source skills that affects well-being, information cycle literacy needs to move from the nice-to-know to need-to column.

Analysis of the Learner Context

Teaching the Teacher: Taking Another Look at the Information Cycle in Information Literacy is an asynchronous course that can be accessed on The Knowledge Forum. Access is needed to a computer and the internet to complete the course. There are no time restrictions, so the course can be done at your leisure. The time commitment is determined by the learner.

Performance Objectives

This is a self-guided course meant to promote thinking and develop strategies to integrate the information cycle into developed class/course material based on blended instructivist, connectivist, and constructivist theories and Blooms’ Revised Taxonomy. Through guided discovery, participants will read, watch, and create learning interactions to integrate the information cycle into content developed beforehand.

By the end of this course participants will

•  understand the information cycle and information sources
•  be able to connect the information cycle to information sources
•  have the ability to integrate the information cycle into class/course content through guided discovery and KASI

There are no formal assessments as such as the information sources within the information cycle are situational to grade level and curricula area. That being said, a self-assessment and/or peer assessment at the end of each module is strongly suggested as we should not ask learners to do what we ourselves do not know how to do and for a sense of security that discipline, institutional, and organizational standards are met.

References and Resources

Anderson, L., Krathwohl, D., & Bloom, B. (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: a revision of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives (Complete ed.). New York: Longman.

Clark, D.R. (2004). Concepts of leadership. Retrieved from http://nwlink.com/~donclark/leader/leadcon.html

Larson, M. B. and Lockee, B. B. (2013) Streamlined ID: a practical guide to instructional design. New York, NY: Routledge.

Rossett, A. Sheldon, K. (2001) Beyond the podium: delivering training and performance to a digital world. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass/Pfieffer

To be continued...