Information Literacy @ Purdue

The IMPACT Symposium was held on the morning of Wednesday, April 6, 2016 in Purdue Memorial Union’s East and West Faculty Lounges. Dr. George Kuh, professor emeritus at Indiana University and the founding director of the widely used National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), spoke at the Symposium about high impact education practices, such as undergraduate research, learning communities, and writing intensive courses. Dr. Kuh said that through all of our endeavors, we must teach students to:

• Reflect on their experiences in and out of the classroom,
• Apply what they have learned to new challenges and opportunities, and
• Integrate what they are learning from different courses and out-of class experiences.
  

  Dr. George Kuh presenting at the 2016 IMPACT Symposium

Hosted by Purdue’s IMPACT program (Instruction Matters: Purdue Academic Course Transformation), a University-wide initiative in which instructors redesign foundational courses to make them more student-centered, the Symposium aimed to promote discussion of innovative teaching and learning at Purdue. The Symposium planning committee was comprised of Libraries faculty Clarence Maybee (Chair) and Michael Flierl, and ITaP staff Suzanne Ahlersmeyer and Sheree Buikema.

Of the 100 attendees at the Symposium presentation, 70 stayed to engage in faculty-led table discussions about three themes that Dr. Kuh spoke about: 1) forging tomorrow’s workforce, 2) empowering diverse learners, and 3) fostering student success. The ten table leaders were faculty who had previously participated in IMPACT.

In the afternoon of April 6^th, Dr. Kuh facilitated an Assignment Charrette workshop with a group of instructors from IMPACT and the Teaching Academy. An architectural term, a charrette is an intense creative effort in a limited time period. The fifteen instructors who attended this workshop shared and discussed ways to make one of their assignments more effective.

Researchers from the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication & Information at Nanyang Technological University have conducted a study analyzing the publishing trends of information literacy scholarship. Their team examined a total of 1,989 records from Scopus bibliographic database between 2003 and 2012. The information literacy research conducted by faculty and staff at Purdue University Libraries is featured very prominently in the results of this review. Michael Fosmire, professor and Head of PSET Division, is identified as a prolific author, having published eight or more articles during this period of time. A 2006 article by Clarence Maybee, Information Literacy Specialist, was one of the most highly cited articles during the period covered in the review. Most notably, Purdue Libraries are on the top ten list of institutions with authors producing publications on information literacy. Correcting for different ways that affiliations are listed in Scopus, we are the number one producer of information literacy publications in the world! Reflective of our important contribution to information literacy education, this is a tremendous accomplishment of which we should all be very proud.

The full-text of the article is available from the Nanyang Technological University institutional repository.

Purdue Libraries presents a new information literacy mission statement:

Purdue University Libraries’ research-based information literacy programming empowers Purdue’s diverse communities of learners to use information critically to learn and to create new knowledge, fostering academic, personal, and professional success.

A team of Libraries faculty (Catherine Fraser Riehle, Ilana Stonebraker, and Clarence Maybee) led a process in fall 2015 to revise the Libraries’ information literacy statement to reflect our current mission, which aligns closely with campus goals for learning. The statement was developed through an inclusive process that included input gathered from stakeholders in the Libraries as well as faculty from other departments.

The extended version of the new mission statement is available on Purdue Libraries’ website:

https://www.lib.purdue.edu/infolit/mission

Mike Flierl, Information Literacy Instructional Designer, attended the Augustana Information Literacy Workshop held in Camrose, Alberta.  While there, Mike learned about using ACRL’s Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education from Sharon Mader, ACRL’s Visiting Program Officer for Information Literacy. He also presented on strategies for communicating about information literacy to faculty in other disciplines. When he returned Purdue, Mike presented the key points of the workshop to Libraries faculty during a bi-monthly brown bag meeting.