Friday, October 31, 2008

Information Literacy in history

Here are my notes on the two other presentations in the same session as our research presentation at conference, L'education à la culture informationnelle [Education for/in information culture], held in Lille, France October 16-18 (as mentioned in the previous post).

1) David Del Testa (a US academic/historian) et Abby Clobridge (Librarian): D’internautes aux historiens : une pédagogie hybride pour colmater l’observation et l’analyse dans un cours d’histoire aux USA [Internauts to historians : a hydrid pedagogy for developing observation and analysis in a US history course]
This described how students had chosen, digitised and catalogued World War 2 posters. This developed students' information literacy skills, and also helped their development as historians, using real historical documents and reflecting on the documents’ context and provenance. It was a collaboration between a history academic (the course leader) and librarian at Bucknell University, USA.
There is material similar (I think, more detailed) to what was presented at http://www.facstaff.bucknell.edu/aclobrid/portfolio/nercomp08.htm
This web page includes links to a ppt and to documents mapping learning outcomes to those of Middle States and ACRL for information Literacy.

2) Jean-François Courtecuisse : Les pratiques documentaires des étudiants face aux présupposés méthodologiques des disciplines [Students’ information behaviour and disciplinary suppositions about methodology]
This was a description of a study of the information behaviour of history students, based on interview data. They were predominantly using the internet (generally a limited range of sites) and books, neglecting other potentially valuable information sources. There seemed to be an absence of awareness/discussion about the nature of the literature and search tools. Some students said they were cautious about using the internet because they knew it might have unreliable information.

Photo by Sheila Webber: Old Lille, October 2008.

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