Wednesday, March 31, 2004

USU/OCW Here's a "preview announcement" from David Wiley about the soon to be opened Utah State University OpenCourseWare site. I expect that many other institutions will be emulating MIT's OCW in the near future, at least I hope so. It's very important that the two major models for accessing online course materials (the LOR and the course-based model) both continue to develop and converge. JH _______ I can't make a "formal announcement' yet, as we're still working on the official name (probably Open Sustainable Education) and other details, but I can safely say that we now have administrative approval and pilot funding in place for an OpenCourseWare type project (ala MIT) at USU. The USU collection will be specifically strong in agriculture (i.e., irrigation engineering, orchard development, etc. -- Go Aggies!) but include resources from other university courses as well. Formal announcement coming soon· Our focus in developing the model has been economics, or trying to put together a project that meaningfully contributes open resources of the highest quality possible while costing the least amount of money. If we succeed as we intend, not only will release a wide variety of resources to the world but we'll also release a model for doing low-cost OCW style projects together with open source infrastructure for doing them. Of course, there will be support for social interaction around these materials via our OLS project (the OLS pilot with MIT/OCW opens to the public on April 5; more on that soon). I'm really excited. If any of this sounds like fun, don't forget the two open faculty positions in our department! [autounfocus] 12:53:13 PM    COMMENT []

Information Literacy Instruction in Higher Education: Trends and Issues This ERIC Digest report provides an overview of some of the information literacy efforts available at US institutions. "Information literacy instruction (ILI) requires a shift in focus from teaching specific information resources to a set of critical thinking skills involving the use of information." "This ERIC Digest examines characteristics of successful programs, presents approaches currently being taken by academic libraries to support ILI, and addresses common challenges in developing and maintaining ILI programs." "Information literacy instruction is alive and well on campuses today. However, there is much work to be done before integrated ILI across the curriculum is standard practice. Some challenges include motivating students to learn information literacy skills; assessing student mastery of concepts and skills; training librarians to serve as instructors and instructional designers; advocating the value of information literacy in an environment of competing literacies; and preparing students for business settings that demand a more specialized level of information fluency." I would argue that assisting instructors and students to become more aware of online instructional resources should be part of the the ILI efforts. JH 12:33:08 PM    COMMENT []