Things I Found Today

...via Twitter and reading my Bloglines feeds.

The first one is this short slide presentation :

A Teacher's Guide To Web 2.0 at School

View more documents from Sacha Chua.

I added the author's blog (http://sachachua.com/wp/) to my reader after browsing her posts.

Another discovery is this series of short films from Project Information Literacy, a research project of the iSchool at the University of Washington. There are five in the series and all are worth watching, but I especially liked these:

PIL InfoLitDialog, No. 3: Frustrations


PIL InfoLitDialog, No. 1: Wikipedia


Project Information Literacy is a national study about early adults (college students) and their information-seeking behaviors, competencies, and the challenges they face when conducting research in the digital age. What PIL learns will apply to how K-12 teaches research, too.

National Information Literacy Awareness Month

Official notice of the importance of information literacy! President Obama has declared October National Information Literacy Awareness Month. From the press release,

Rather than merely possessing data, we must also learn the skills necessary to acquire, collate, and evaluate information for any situation. This new type of literacy also requires competency with communicationtechnologies, including computers and mobile devices that can help in our day-to-day decisionmaking....Though we may know how to find the information we need, we must also know how to evaluate it.

You can read the entire press release here.

If Only They Knew How To...

An academic librarian has compiled a list of what she wishes college freshmen knew about research. Which means, what she wishes they would learn in their K-12 experience. Her original list was created in 1989 and published in Research Strategies: A Journal of Library Concepts and Instruction 6, no. 4 (Fall 1988): 189, but she revises the basic ideas in a blog post at Inside Higher Education Blog U. Among her "great expectations:"

1. Knowledge, information, and opinion: what they are and how they relate...
4. Primary and secondary sources: an understanding of their nature, distinction, variety, and use in all fields...
8. Databases: concept and experience retrieving citations or data; fluency in Boolean logic...
9. What resources, services, policies, and procedures to expect in any library...
10. The importance of accurate citations and a research log.
11. Principles of selecting and evaluating sources:

Some of these are the same things the panel of academic librarians mentioned; others will come up as we work on MILI throughout the year. Nice to know we are all on the right track, at least according to this librarian!