Friday, August 26, 2011

Curriculum for Information Literacy

There is a lot of material published about a recent project which proposes a "Curriculum for information literacy". Jane Secker won a Fellowship as part of the Arcadia Project, which meant that she was seconded to Wolfson College, Cambridge, to work on a research project aiming to develop an information literacy curriculum for undergraduate students. She worked there with Emma Coonan, Research Skills and Development Librarian at Cambridge University.

They developed a wiki which has the main publications from the project, and some additional material e.g. a list of literature, methodology: http://ccfil.pbworks.com/w/page/39773468/Welcome!

The project reports are linked from: http://ccfil.pbworks.com/w/page/42119030/project%20reports. There is an Executive summary, the report outlining the curriculum, a document reviewing and reflecting on some of the key ideas that inspired them, and a report identifying the main themes that emerged from interviews that they undertook with some experts in the area (including me). The curriculum itself is licensed under a Creative Commons License, so they are interested in other people using it.

They took the view that "information literacy should be transformational for the learner, changingtheir attitude, behaviour, outlook and even their world view. Therefore this curriculum has teh potential to change lives and make a real difference to society." (from the Executive summary).

Jane blogged about her experience at http://elearning.lse.ac.uk/blogs/socialsoftware/ There is an introduction to the project, as presented by Jane recently, on her Slideshare and I have embedded it below (incidently, her slideshare also has the presentation that she gave for my Masters students last semester as part of my Information Literacy Research class).

Photo of lilypads, in Puerto Rico, by Sheila Webber, August 2011

No comments: