Information Literacy, part 1

Reading blogs by fellow teachers is thought-provoking. Here's what Clancy Ratliff's Culture Cat blog has to say about librarian visits to classrooms as a response to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on October 4, 2006, by Todd Gilma, called "Show Your Librarian Some Love".

Here at OSU, our first year composition program (mostly first year students) has a standard information literacy portfolio (worth 10% of the term grade) consisting of an online guided (and graded) research activity through Course Management System/module Blackboard followed by a 50-minute class visit to the library where the assigned librarian guides students through further thinking about information literacy and their particular projects for the class. Granted this is not nearly as much time as we want students to have on developing their skills, but it is a start. We hope these activities will help students to have a stronger understanding about finding information online and in print, evaluating that information, selecting it, intergrating it, and using it in their work.

ps: Speaking of cool rhetoric blogs, check out what Michael Edwards Vitia blog has to say today about rhetoric (but not yet about librarians in the classroom). I'm guessing I should send him William Matthews's poem "A Poetry Reading as West Point" but he has probably already seen it.