Monday, January 30, 2012

Information Literacy in the wild: free book

This book, Information Literacy in the wild, is an outcome of a module at the School of Information at the University of Michigan, USA: Information Literacy for Teaching and Learning which is taken by Masters students in librarianship and in Education. The students have to observe a mentor's teaching practice on placement, do some of their own teaching and develop a teaching intervention or tool in a placement for the class. There are 27 short chapters in which students reflect on their teaching experiences. The chapters are grouped by the educational context: school classroom, school library, college, university, public libraries and a couple of other other contexts.
In an introduction, the designer and coordnator of the module, Kristin Fontichiaro, talks about the rationale behind the class and introduces the book. There is a one-page module outline at the end of the book and you can find the full class outline here
I haven't read through all of the chapters yet: the most appealing to me are the ones in which reflection dominates over description e.g. Caroline Mossing's "How to tame a bird unit". However, altogether it is a really nice idea and well executed by the students and their teacher.

Fontichiaro, K. (ed) (2011) Information Literacy in the Wild. Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Library. You can download it free for eReader: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/115254 and as a pdf: http://www.fontichiaro.com/uploads/2011/wild.pdf
Photo by Sheila Webber: Early primrose, January 2012

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