Seminar 03F - Developing an Information Literacy Faculty Institute on Your Campus

I know this is sort of back to front, my earlier digital literacy post was the last 1 1/2 hours of the above pre-conference workshop but seemed to me to stand alone. The rest of the day session was Cornell sharing their model for an Information Literacy Faculty Institute. This was a really good session and I particularly liked the way they did not present a blueprint of "how to run your own" but got us to consider how we might approach different aspects of the institute within the context of our own institutions, so more like "how might this work for you?". They also recreated some of the activities that they do with their faculty as part of the institute and I was impressed by their willingness to devote time in the institute sessions to have an open and frank discuss the concepts, prior experiences and issues, rather than just moving straight to "how to".

I suppose it is only fair to flag that the institute was not entirely about what I thought it was going to be about before going any further (insert appropriate "divided by a common language" reference here). I thought it was going to be a professional development institute for faculty about, and to develop their own, information literacy skills. In fact it was about a professional development institute for faculty focused on curriculum design, specifically about assessment/project design, facilitated by educational developers, learning technologists and librarians that encourages use of authentic learning opportunities and builds undergraduate student research skills. So not what I expected but then not a bad thing either.

The things I really liked about their model:

• collaborative curriculum design with a broad range of support available to participants (rather than silos of learning design, technology and information resources support)
• time and space to discuss concepts and concerns not straight in with instrucutions
• mixture of presentations, workshop activities and mini-showcases
• how they extended the community beyond the face to face sessions
• their use of video and campus journalism to capture and promote the institute
• the openness of all involved to not stick to rigid definitions and remits
• assignment of specific library/ed dev/learn tech staff to individual faculty members "their own design team"
• ongoing help after institute to turn plans into reality
• focus on improving students' learning experience, their engagement in learning and their research skills
• use of rubrics to evaluate the institute and the projects within the institute

The things that I don't think travel (ie don't easily fit into our context) but are worth mentioning anyway in case you disagree:

• application process focuses on attracting "star faculty" so my usual concerns about usual suspects and interested people doing interesting things
• the summer institute is a full week (good for engagement but seems to limit who might be able to get involved)
• incentive - each participant got a stipend ($1500 first year, $1000 second year)
• focus for the full week was on designing a single assignment for a single module (so to me seems very resource heavy for size of output and also quite "safe" not really challenging how they might redesign other aspects of the course or extra-curricular opportunities

We also had some really good discussions in the session about the issues of terminology - is it competency, literacy or fluency? is it information, digital, academic, research, learning? how the words can be really important but that also people can get too hung up on the words and allow that to stifle action. There was also a good discussion about undergraduate student research projects and the trends towards undergrad research journals and student conferences that might sound good in principle but reinforce the "your research isn't real research like mine" perspective and, as described by one of the participants, are like "sitting at the kiddie table at thanksgiving".

I've got a pack of further information if anyone is interested