Clarence Maybee, Assistant Professor and the Information Literacy Specialist for the Purdue Libraries, gave a seminar at the University of Borås, in Sweden in August, 2012. The seminar was hosted by the Swedish School of Library of Information Science at Borås and included presentations by Maybee and Australian information literacy researcher, Christine Yates. Maybee presented the preliminary findings from his doctoral research examining informed learning lessons. Informed learning is a pedagogy developed by Dr. Christine Bruce (the presenter of the 2012 Information Literacy Research Symposium at Purdue), that suggests that students should learn to use information while engaged in learning about subject content. Maybee’s presentation focused on his analysis of one informed learning lesson designed to teach undergraduates a way of understanding a language and gender topic by investigating how the topic developed through research over time. Not surprisingly, students experienced the lesson in different ways. However some experienced the lesson as being about learning specific information techniques to understand language and gender topics (informed learning), while others experienced the lesson as being solely focused on learning information techniques.
