Infoglut or Information Literacy? Using Blended Learning for Student Research in \u27New Information Technologies\u27

Our collaboration joins the perspectives and expertise of librarian, as information literacy specialist, and faculty, as ethnographer of communication practice. This work is situated within the introductory course New Information Technologies, which challenges students to think critically about information technologies and reflect on their identities as citizens of a global information society. Focused on the theory and practice of new information technologies, the course is ideally suited for blended learning explorations. In the course, student teams investigated global internet censorship and produced short research presentations with various digital collaborative tools. The project aimed to develop students\u27 capacities to discover, organize, analyze, create, and share information in order to achieve their goals as information literate learners and engage as active participants in a learning community. Together, we scaffolded key questions and practices for digital scholarship and modeled research process elements. We used blended pedagogies to promote students’ collaborative research and individual reflection on research processes. The digital photo journal assignment, for example, asked students to document and reflect on their information seeking, organization, evaluation, analysis, and integration. The journal aimed to both uncover and authentically assess students’ negotiations with information literacy threshold concepts, deepening their awareness of themselves as engaged learners within the blended digital environment. Students’ work highlights the possibilities and obstacles for active, blended learning to foster students’ metacognitive skills and habits of mind such as organizing, documenting, and reflecting upon their own learning. As we show in this blended learning endeavor, the development of students’ content knowledge is inextricably linked to their critical information literacy. We will highlight the digital tools that were instrumental to this work, while emphasizing the pedagogical practices that were key to its success. Finally, we want to champion the opportunities for collaboration among faculty and librarians that blended learning invites