Incorporating Information Literacy Into Oberlin First Year Seminars

The Framework outlines the threshold concepts for information literacy, or the concepts that, "once grasped by the learner, create new perspectives and ways of understanding a discipline or challenging knowledge domain. Such concepts produce transformation within the learner; without them, the learner does not acquire expertise in that field of knowledge."

This article argues that writing teachers can encourage students to adopt a rhetorical perspective toward research-based writing by characterizing products of research in terms of how writers use them in their texts. It maintains that the standard nomenclature for treating sources (primary, secondary, tertiary) is anti-rhetorical and proposes an alternative: Background for materials a writer relies on for general information or for factual evidence; Exhibit for materials a writer analyzes or interprets; Argument for materials whose claims a write engages; and Method for materials from which a writer takes a governing concept or derives a manner of working.

The Indiana University Faculty Learning Community realized that the mental operations required of undergraduates differ enormously from discipline to discipline and that these ways of thinking are rarely presented to students explicitly. IUFLC Fellows from fields as diverse as creative writing, marketing, and genetics, and, as knowledgeable about their research areas as few people in the world, began to explore how students learn this content. This model takes advantage of the differences in thinking among academic fields in order to decode each individual discipline. Following the model, faculty answered a series of questions to define crucial bottlenecks to learning, dissected the ways an expert deals with the issues that causes the bottleneck, and invented ways to model this thinking for students.

This book identifies the key rhetorical moves in academic writing. It shows students how to frame their arguments as a response to what others have said and provides templates to help them start making the moves.

The ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education combined with the Decoding the Disciplines model provides a structure for critical reflection to help unearth and clarify tacit, or unspoken, expert disciplinary processes and values related to information literacy. This article details a pilot project designed to explore the process of unearthing unspoken assumptions about disciplinary information literacy through reflective questions designed using the theory of Decoding the Disciplines and the structure of the Framework, and details themes which emerged from several of the author's experiences with librarians and teaching faculty working through the reflections. The themes are presented as potential further sites for inquiry and to generate ideas for identifying and addressing discipline-specific roadblocks, both practical and cultural, through the Framework.

Resources to help faculty, educational developers and administrators to apply the Transparency Framework (of purpose/task/criteria) in contexts including assignments, curricula, assessment and strategic initiatives, all toward the goal of enhancing student success equitably.

Challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color. Through an analysis of textual and media searches as well as extensive research on paid online advertising, Noble exposes a culture of racism and sexism in the way discoverability is created online.

For nearly every issue facing today’s young people—from climate change and income inequality to student debt and the legalization of marijuana—the place to find up-to-date information is the internet. However, both reliable information and deceitful sources flood students’ screens. To thrive as members of a democratic society, students must be able to sort through this digital thicket. This study asked 263 students to evaluate one of two websites. About half of the students completed a task about “fake news”; the other half a task about a website that hid its true backers. Students struggled. They employed inefficient strategies that made them vulnerable to forces, whether satirical or malevolent, that threaten informed citizenship. Alarmingly, students’ approach was consistent with
guidelines that can be found on many college and university websites.

Discusses what ChatGPT does and how it differs from search engines.

Learn about the rise of fake news, particularly those information behaviors that have perpetuated its spread; discover techniques to identify fake news, especially online; and explore methods to help library patrons of all ages think critically about information, teaching them ways to separate fact from fiction.

This guide teaches students to evaluate the information that reaches them through their social media streams, providing concrete strategies and tactics for tracing claims to sources and for analyzing the nature and reliability of those sources.