Ewan McIntosh
University of Stirling, Scotland
http://edu.blogs.com

For many educators, “information literacy” is just another buzzword with little meaning for their day-to-day teaching and the learning of their students. So far, it’s fallen to IT departments and librarians to teach students the intricacies of university email systems or library catalogs.

Information literacy in the 21st century, however, is less about technicalities and more about the way we teach. Students learn in the classroom and outside it.

Social software has created new ways to seek information. Less relevant today is the official reading list and the subsequent frustration when paper books and journals are not in stock. Far more relevant are the decisions formerly taken by the educator but now transferred to the students to make. It this viable information I’m looking at? How can I turn it into useful knowledge? How can I gain a greater wisdom in my subject? Knowing where to find knowledge and how to interpret it is where information literacy comes in.

This screencast will explore some of the reasons why these skills are not being taught as well or as often as perhaps they should be. If taught, and not just caught, skills in exploiting social software can help student and teachers make better judgement on information and opinion and turn this into valuable knowledge. If caught, and caught wrongly, social software can lead to false information, narrow scope and less rigor.

View the screencast (59:36); will load directly in a Flash-enabled browser.

Download the enhanced podcast (59:36, m4a, 30M); requires Quicktime, iTunes.

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Tags: Blogging, Information literacy, RSS, higheredblogcon

Stewart Mader
Brown University

A Wiki can be thought of as a combination of a Web site and a Word document. At its simplest, it can be read just like any other web site, with no access privileges necessary, but its real power lies in the fact that groups can collaboratively work on the content of the site using nothing but a standard web browser. The Wiki is gaining traction in education, as an ideal tool for the increasing amount of collaborative work done by both students and teachers. Students might use a wiki to collaborate on a group report, compile data or share the results of their research, while faculty might use the wiki to collaboratively author the structure and curriculum of a course, and the wiki can then serve as part of each person’s course materials.

As The Science of Spectroscopy, a well-known educational web site, has grown in popularity, we needed an efficient way to include the growing number of suggestions and additons coming from our users. Editing a static website based on emailed feedback was inefficient as we had to balance it with competing demands on our time. The website was converted into a wiki, so that the growing number of readers can now become writers and collaboratively build a richer and more useful tool.

View the screencast (28:59); will load directly in a Flash-enabled browser.

Download the Quicktime version (.mov, 35M).

Get the full paper (PDF).
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Visit the web site and wiki: The Science of Spectroscopy

Using Wiki in Education - my blog which includes a list of wiki tools, ideas and example uses, interviews with people using and developing wiki tools, and a wiki where you can submit your ideas and examples.

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Tags: Wikis, Teaching, higheredblogcon