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Sara Thompson

SocialTech: Computer Science is not Digital Literacy - 0 views

  • digital literacy - which she defines as "those capabilities that equip an individual for living, learning and working in a digital society"
  • While it was still around, Becta defined digital literacy as  “…the skills, knowledge and understanding learners need to participate fully and safely in our increasingly digital world. 
  • For me, the main characteristics of the many of the available definitions of digital literacy are that: it supports and helps develop traditional literacies – it isn’t about the use of technology for it’s own sake or ICT as an isolated practice it's a life long practice – developing and continuing to maintain skills in the context of continual development of technologies and practices it's about skills and competencies, and critical reflection on how these skills and competencies are applied it's about social engagement – collaboration, communication, and creation within social contexts
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  • Not being able to code doesn't make you digitally illiterate. Not being able to participate in  social, economic, cultural and political life because you lack the confidence, skills and opportunity to do so is what makes you digitally illiterate.
fleschnerj

U.S. House Introduces SKILLS Act - 0 views

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    Defines an "effective school library program" to be staffed by a state-certified school librarian, have up-to-date materials including technology, teaches digital literacy skills, and finally, has regular collaboration between other education professionals over curriculum. Replaces Improving Literacy Through School Libraries with Improving Literacy and College and Career Readiness Through Effective School Library Programs which would award competitive grants to underserved local schools and school districts to develop an effective school library program. Allows school librarians access to professional development funds under Title II of ESEA.
Sara Thompson

Student success courses catch on, slowly, at community colleges | Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

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    Community colleges can improve graduation rates by offering a course that teaches students how to navigate college with lessons on study skills, time management and how to find the bursar's office. Yet while "student success" courses are increasingly common, resistance remains strong at many community colleges.
Sara Thompson

Faculty Workshop on Comprehensive Exams - 0 views

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    This amazing workshop document was shared in this discussion: http://friendfeed.com/lsw/76c9d2b8/if-this-workshop-results-in-changes-people-are?source%3De-best  It looks at how information literacy is involved with students taking comprehensive exams.  The workshop is for faculty development, to train faculty on scaffolding students up to the skills they will need for the exams.  
Sara Thompson

"I need three peer reviewed articles" or the Freshman research paper | Information Want... - 0 views

  • And every year, I become more and more convinced that having first-year students use peer-reviewed literature in their research is a terrible idea that takes the focus away from what is important for them to learn.
  • Expecting a first-year student to be able to grasp literary criticism and science articles written for other PhD’s seems crazy to me.
  • It becomes more about finding an article that is at least somewhat related to their topic than finding good evidence for their argument.
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  • I understand perfectly that faculty want their first-year students to find quality resources and they want their students to have an understanding of scholarly communication. But is the best way to do that forcing them to find scholarly articles for a research paper? That requires so many different skills that many of these students don’t have yet: 1. The ability to turn a topic into a search strategy 2. The ability to search in library databases 3. The ability to look at a citation and determine whether it is a scholarly journal or not (or maybe they’ve just checked a box in a database which means that they never need to learn this important skill) 4. The ability to read an abstract and determine whether the article is relevant to their topic 5. The ability to read a scholarly journal article and synthesize information from it 6. The ability to integrate evidence from the scholarly literature into their paper 7. The ability to write effectively
  • Another thing that the focus on requiring students to only find peer-reviewed sources does is that it distances them from research and information literacy.
  • But when the focus is on telling students that the only quality stuff comes from the peer-reviewed literature, we are distancing what students learn in school about information literacy from what they will do in the real world.
  • I also love the idea of giving all students in a class peer-reviewed articles from different disciplines and have them analyze them together. It can not only help them to understand and dissect peer-reviewed literature, but it can also show them the differences in scholarly communication in different disciplines.
Sara Thompson

Should We Really ABOLISH the Term Paper? A Response to the NY Times | HASTAC - 1 views

  • And for my own account of the decision not to use term papers when I taught at Michigan State, you can check out a piece I published in Academe in Sept-Oct 2011.   In some ways, it is more assertive on this issue than Richtel's piece, and is highly critical of the establishment English Department that too-often forgets its own importance as society’s “keeper” of two of the three R’s of traditional literacy, namely “reading” and “‘writing.’”   I won’t rehearse my critique; here's the link:  http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/academe/2011/SO/Feat/davi.htm).
  • She is also working with composition teachers around the country who are documenting similar findings that, in fact, this generation comes in reading and writing more and better–and, yes, differently–than earlier ones, not worse.  Lunsford uses the same metrics to assess these students as were used to evaluate past ones.  Her website is:  http://www.stanford.edu/~lunsfor1/
  • We have a Word Press class website.  Students blog every week about the reading and project-based assignments they create.   The two students charged with leading the class that week have to respond to every blog.  The students respond to one another.  
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  • When I put their semester's work into a data hopper, even I was shocked to find out that they were averaging around 1000 words per week,
  • I argue that the open architecture of the Web is built on the principle of diversity and maximum participation--feedback and editing
  • Students learn to evaluate one another's thinking and challenge one another--and, far more important, they learn from one another and correct themselves.  I cannot think of a better skill to take out into the world.
  • I respond more too.  Like my students, I feel like I'm not spending as many hours reading and grading term papers, but, I know, from the end-of-term data crunching again, that, in fact, I have spent more time responding to their writing than I used to. 
  • the tipping point in these classes is when someone the student doesn't know, an anonymous stranger, responds to their work.  When it is substantive, the student is elated and surprised that their words were taken seriously.   When it is rude or trollish, the student is offended.  Both responses are good.  The Internet needs more people committed to its improvement, to serious discourse.
  • As I often do with classes, I did a diagnostic, found that many of my students were woefully lacking in basic writing skills.  I asked them what they most wanted from a writing class, and quickly transformed the class into a "writing as if your life depended upon it" workshop.
  • The "final" in the class was for each student--with lots of readings by me and the rest of the class--to apply for three or four summer jobs and internships.  That year, every student landed a position. 
  • More recently, I asked graduate students why they often left their term papers until the end and, with sadness, they confessed it was often because the whole exercise of writing a research paper is so debilitating and terrifying they often developed writer's block or writer's anxiety and needed the deadline to motivate them to write.
Deb Robertson

Is There a Difference Between Critical Thinking and Information Literacy? | Weiner | Jo... - 1 views

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    This paper investigates the similarities and differences between two important ideas in information processing and knowledge utilisation. Those ideas are [critical thinking] and [information literacy]. This suggests that [information literacy] and its associated procedures could significantly augment current instruction in [critical thinking] and indeed, the possibility has been explored by some authors in the current literature. A merging of the two ideas would involve [information literacy] providing tools and techniques in the processing and utilisation of knowledge and [critical thinking] supplying the particulars and interpretations associated with a specific discipline. This type of integration could lead to instructional programs similar in concept and application to those in research methodology where methods from statistics are integrated with the techniques and skills associated with a specific discipline. The development of a curriculum of this type would change functions and perceptions from private, individualised mentation, now associated with [critical thinking], to a more easily learned and practiced process suitable across the breadth of disciplines.
fleschnerj

Information Professions 2050 - 0 views

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    The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science celebrated the ending of its 80th anniversary year by taking a forward look at the future of our field and its graduates. The Information Professionals 2050 (IP 2050) Conference brought in information and library science leaders who discussed key issues related to future visions, skills and values. Themes of the day included the areas of the 1) Information Industry, 2) Libraries and Archives, 3) Education and 4) Information Trends. The contributors are thought leaders of our profession and included: * Marshall Breeding, director for Innovative Technologies and Research, Vanderbilt University Libraries * Anne Caputo, executive director, Dow Jones' Learning and Information Professional Programs * Bonnie Carroll, president, International Information Associates * Mary Chute, deputy director for Libraries, Institute for Museum and Library Services * Lorcan Dempsey, vice president and chief strategist, OCLC * Michael Eisenberg, professor and dean emeritus, University of Washington School of Information * Buck Goldstein, University entrepreneur in residence and professor of practice, Department of Economics University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill * William Graves, senior vice president, Academic Strategy at Ellucian * Elizabeth Liddy, dean and trustee professor, Syracuse University School of Information Studies * Charles Lowry, executive director, Association for Research Libraries * Joanne Marshall, alumni distinguished professor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill * Nancy Roderer, director, Johns Hopkins University Welch Medical Library * Roger Schonfeld, director of research, Ithaka * David Silver, associate professor, University of San Francisco * Duncan Smith, co-founder, Novelist (EBSCO Publishing) Moderators included, * Susan Nutter, vice provost and director of Libraries, North Carolina State University * Sarah Michalak, university librarian and associate prov
Sara Thompson

Essay on making student learning the focus of higher education | Inside Higher Ed - 1 views

  • Culture -- in higher education, and in our society -- is at the heart of the matter.
  • We have reduced K-12 schooling to basic skill acquisition that effectively leaves most students underprepared for college-level learning. We have bastardized the bachelor’s degree by allowing it to morph into a ticket to a job (though, today, that ticket often doesn’t get you very far). The academy has adopted an increasingly consumer-based ethic that has produced costly and dangerous effects: the expectations and standards of a rigorous liberal education have been displaced by thinly disguised professional or job training curriculums; teaching and learning have been devalued, deprioritized, and replaced by an emphasis on magazine rankings; and increased enrollment, winning teams, bigger and better facilities, more revenue from sideline businesses, and more research grants have replaced learning as the primary touchstone for decision-making.
  • The current culture -- the shared norms, values, standards, expectations and priorities -- of teaching and learning in the academy is not powerful enough to support true higher learning. As a result, students do not experience the kind of integrated, holistic, developmental, rigorous undergraduate education that must exist as an absolute condition for truly transformative higher learning to occur.
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  • Degrees have become deliverables because we are no longer willing to make students work hard against high standards to earn them.
  • Rethinking higher education means reconstituting institutional culture by rigorously identifying, evaluating and challenging the many damaging accommodations that colleges and universities, individually and collectively, have made (and continue to make) to consumer and competitive pressures over the last several decades. What do we mean by “damaging accommodations?
  • We mean the allocation of increasing proportions of institutional resources to facilities, personnel, programs and activities that do not directly and significantly contribute to the kind of holistic, developmental and transformative learning that defines higher learning.
  • We mean the deplorable practice of building attractive new buildings while offering lackluster first- and second-year courses taught primarily by poorly paid and dispirited contingent faculty.
  • We mean the assumption that retention is just keeping students in school longer, without serious regard for the quality of their learning or their cumulative learning outcomes at graduation.
  • The primary problem is that the current culture of colleges and universities no longer puts learning first -- and in most institutions, that culture perpetuates a fear of doing so. Isolated examples to the contrary exist, but are only the exceptions that prove the rule.
  • In calling for the kind of serious, systemic rethinking that directly and unflinchingly accepts the challenge of improving undergraduate higher education, we are asking for four things; taken together, they demand, and would catalyze, a profound, needed, and overdue cultural change in our colleges and universities.
  • 1. The widespread acceptance and application of a new and better touchstone for decision-making in higher education, linked to a strong framework of essential, core principles. A touchstone is a standard, or criterion, that serves as the basis for judging something; in higher education, that touchstone must be the quality and quantity of learning. A touchstone and a clear conceptual framework link our advocacy for change to a powerful set of ideas, commitments, and principles against which to test current policies, practices, and proposals for reform.
  • 2. A comprehensive re-evaluation of undergraduate education and experience guided by those core principles. This must occur both nationally, as an essential public conversation, and within the walls of institutions of all types, missions, and sizes.
  • 3. The leadership and actual implementation and renewal of undergraduate higher education needs to be led by the academy itself, supported by boards of trustees, higher education professional organizations, and regional accrediting bodies alike. Such rethinking ought to be transparent, informed by public conversation, and enacted through decisions based on the new touchstone, improving the quality and quantity of learning.
  • 4. Learning assessment must become inextricably linked to institutional efficacy. The formative assessment of learning should become an integral part of instruction in courses and other learning experiences of all types, and the summative assessment of learning, at the individual student, course, program, and institution levels should be benchmarked against high, clear, public standards.
  • Cultural problems require cultural solutions, starting with a national conversation about what is wrong, and what is needed, in higher education. The country should reasonably expect higher education to lead this conversation. For real change to occur, discussions about the quality and quantity of learning in higher education and the need for reform must occur at multiple levels, in many places, and over a significant period of time -- most importantly on campuses themselves
  • If enough change occurs in enough places, and if our public expectations remain high and consistent, learning may become the touchstone for decision-making; the quality and quantity of learning -- documented by rigorous assessment -- may become both each institution’s greatest concern and the basis for comparisons between various colleges and universities
  • Richard P. Keeling is principal, and Richard H. Hersh is senior consultant, for Keeling & Associates, a higher education consulting practice. They are authors of the recent book, We’re Losing Our Minds: Rethinking American Higher Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), from which this essay is partly excerpted.
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    The core explanation is this: the academy lacks a serious culture of teaching and learning. When students do not learn enough, we must question whether institutions of higher education deliver enough value to justify their costs. Resolving the learning crisis will therefore require fundamental, thoroughgoing changes in our colleges and universities.
Deb Robertson

InformationFluencyTransliteracyResearchTools | Scoop.it - 2 views

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    PP slides from a lecture given by Dr. Jane Secker at the University of Sheffield iSchool on March 1st, 2012.
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    This presentation offers some interesting graphics and new ways to define what I am trying to figure out we are trying to accomplish with our instructional opportunities and classroom collaborations.
Sara Thompson

21st Century Literacies: Syllabus, Assignments, Calendar | HASTAC - 0 views

  • Peer evaluation:  You must do your assignments satisfactorily to fulfill your contract.   Each week, two or three students will work as a peer group in charge of leading our joint education for two or three classes.  During that unit, the peer leaders will assign readings as well as writing or multimedia assignments--and they will be charged with determining if each student has satisfactorily completed the assignment.   They will be charged with providing written feedback on all assignments.  Their goal will be to ensure that each student satisfactorily completes the assignment and they will work with each student to make sure they succeed.
  • How to Crowdsource Grading, I described this method: http://www.hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/how-crowdsource-grading
  • SYLLABUS We will be co-creating a syllabus in this course.  Professor Davidson will begin, there will be several special guests or other events, but the remainder of the course content will be assigned by peer-leaders charged with offering a challenging, creative, informative, inspiring, participatory educational experience (No Talking Heads Please!) for the class.   Peer-led classes might that involve reading/seeing/listening to/experiencing imaginative works (including scientific papers,) attending lectures, visiting art museums and going to concerts together, or visiting businesses and community organizations to understand how these literacies are changing.  I will get us started with some readings and a museum visit and a collaborative public wiki-based writing assignment.   We have a number of exciting visitors coming this term.   The rest of the syllabus will be filled out by the peer leaders and will evolve over the course.
Sara Thompson

Flow - A Measure of Student Engagement « User Generated Education - 0 views

  • The characteristics of “Flow” according to Czikszentmihalyi are: Completely involved, focused, concentrating – with this either due to innate curiosity or as the result of training Sense of ecstasy – of being outside everyday reality Great inner clarity – knowing what needs to be done and how well it is going Knowing the activity is doable – that the skills are adequate, and neither anxious or bored Sense of serenity Timeliness – thoroughly focused on present, don’t notice time passing Intrinsic motivation – whatever produces “flow” becomes its own reward
  • (http://austega.com/education/articles/flow.htm)
  • Intellectual challenge was measured by Csikszentmilhalyi’s theory of flow. (Source for the following http://www.cea-ace.ca/education-canada/article/sorting-students-learning)
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  • In the past it was often assumed that disengaged students were easy to identify: they were the young people at the back of the class, the ones making their way to shop or special classes, or those lingering down the street well after the bell had rung. Data from What did you do in school today? suggest that disengagement is not – and may never have been – limited to small groups of students or as visible as we once thought. Over half of the students in our sample (n=32,300) – many of whom go to class each day, complete their work on time, and can demonstrate that they are meeting expected learning outcomes – are experiencing low levels of intellectual engagement.
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    "The Canadian Education Association's (CEA) released a report What did you do in school today? - a three-year research and development initiative designed to assess, and mobilize new ideas for enhancing the learning experiences of students. Intellectual challenge was measured by Csikszentmilhalyi's theory of flow."
Sara Thompson

Online Tutorials - Computer & Information Literacy - cil.usu.edu - 0 views

  • Each of the CIL tests has an online tutorial and a practice test so you can really test your CIL skills before taking the actual tests. Some students prefer to just come take the tests, and if they don't pass, they can see in which areas they did poorly, so they know what they need to study on the tutorials. You can also come in to one of our Tuesday or Thursday night Short Courses and have a CIL Technician review one of the tutorials with you.
    • Sara Thompson
       
      How do they enforce these CIL tests? What motivates students to take them?
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