Tuesday, April 19, 2011

LILAC Report: A practical model for curricular integration #lilac11

Next report from t the LILAC (Information Literacy) conference 18-20 April 2011 in London, UK (this is a photo from the exhibition today). I am now in the session A practical model for curricular integration of information literacy in higher education presented by Li Wang (University of Aukland, New Zealand). This is the abstract.
She talked about four approaches she has identified for IL education in higher education. These are: extra-curriculum (e.g. workshops not attached to any particular programme), inter-curriculum (contributing at some points); intra-curriculum (embedding) and stand-alone (a separate module in the course curriculum). All approaches can be useful, used together.
She presented an example from Engineering which introduces a case study in which the requirement for information literacy is embedded. The involvement is virtual, integrating IL and library material and support into the online case study. Librarians worked with academic staff to develop this.
Wang talked a bit about her PhD thesis which uses the work of Vygostsky (I am hoping to link to it below - if I don't find it immediately, I will try to add it later).
She looked at the curriculum firstly in terms of What: what is the intended curriculum. Then there is the Who - who is involved in integrating IL into the curriculum (e.g. academics, librarians, other support people, Heads of Department). This should involve collaboration and negotiation (she identified a collaboration model). You need to work to identify potential core course and relationships. There is also How should you integrate the curriculum, thinking about aspects such as assignments, online activities, learning outcomes, which need to be contextualised through the whole module and the whole programme. She gave examples of learning outcomes related to various frameworks etc. e.g. Bloom's taxonomy, professional requirements, graduate attributes. The Outcome of all this should be information literate students!
There was a lot of content in this presentation and I wasn't able to capture all of it: I may blog about it again when I can look at it in more detail.

Wang, L. (2010) Integrating information literacy into higher education curricula: an IL integration model. Unpublished PhD thesis, Queensland University of Technology.

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