Thursday, August 14, 2014

The Information Cycle as a Metacognitive Cultural Tool #iflalimerick

My 2nd post from the IFLA Information Literacy Satellite conference held in Limerick, Ireland. The first talk in the track I'm attending now is Crossing the Threshold: The Information Cycle as a Metacognitive Cultural Tool, Amanda Clossen (Pennsylvania State University, USA). She talked about Vygotsky's concept of the zone of proximal development, and the idea of using cultural tools in the classroom (which, for example "present in generalised form the essential features of a given phenomena").
Clossen then presented a version of the Information Cycle - with the process of information being captured to start with in social media and finally (some time later) ending up in books and thus through to someone's own knowledge and research. She talked about how she had used this cycle in a classroom, targetting different stages in different weeks of the class. She felt that this connected them to sources that they were already using and to new resources as the class progressed and that they were critically evaluating what they found. The speaker noted that nevertheless this was challenging to fit into the limited time that (as a librarian) she was allowed.

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