The CTL May College Blog

Information Literacy and Web 2.0

This looks like an interesting blog: Information Literacy and Web 2.0.

The subtitle is Learning and Teaching Challenges and Opportunities Associated with the Development of Information Literacy in the Web 2.0 Environment.

Seeing and Perceiving

I've been saving images about seeing and perceiving.  Here is a good one, an old stereophotograph.  If you can't read the text, it says,"Which is the largest hand?"

Skills vs. Knowledge

During our final discussion yesterday, several of my colleagues questioned the skills vs. knowledge dichotomy.  I appreciate their concern, and very much agree that skills and competencies count as forms of knowledge.

But I do still think that there is an important distinction that can be drawn, that is very relevant to our discussions about what effect we hope that liberal education has on our students.

Developing skills and competencies is very important.  As we've discussed, this makes our students better able to do certain things:  analyze, synthesize, reason, communicate, etc.

But when I originally raised the question about whether there are other kinds of knowledge we want our students to have by the time they graduate, I was getting at something different that I believe is also very important:  Do our students have a good understanding of the world?

We wouldn't necessarily have to specify exact factoids of knowledge that we want everyone to know -- I agree that it would be a nightmare to try to do that (and of dubious value)!  But we can approach such a question in a more general, but still meaningful, sort of way.  For example, what are the ways that we hope that students can map the world by the time they graduate?  We have talked about how we want our students to have global awareness, cultural awareness, environmental awareness, and historical awareness.  These are some ways of mapping the world, and they can be analyzed to a finer level of detail as well.

Don't we want our students to have a pretty good understanding of the cultural diversity of the world, its religious diversity, its biological diversity?  Don't we want our students to have a pretty good understanding that much of what happens is structured by some combination of natural laws plus the operation of human agency?  Don't we want our students to have a pretty good understanding of the best scientific knowledge of patterns of natural processes (laws of nature) and patterns of human behavior and human interaction?  Don't we want students to have a good working knowledge of the major social systems that structure our lives:  political systems, major world religions, economics, processes of information sharing, the arts?  Don't we also want our students to also have a historical perspective on all of the above?

Another metaphor that may be helpful:  this is about giving students different lenses with which to examine the world around them -- not specifying exactly what they must look at and how exactly they must see it. 

I worry that we are too quick to devalue knowledge just to "information," and too quick to think that in this age of the internet and information overload, the content of what we teach is not important because everyone can just "look it up" when it becomes relevant for them to "know" something in particular.

What I'm trying to describe is a sense of knowledge that is not just facts or information. It is, instead, expanded awareness and enriched perceptiveness.  It requires the practice of examining the world through different lenses.  It is not just passive absorption, but involves a more subtle kind of skill or competence that involves the ability to get outside of oneself and encounter a greater world that is Other to what one already knows.  It requires the development of strategies that enable one to meet this world on its own terms, and then integrate this new awareness responsibly and meaningfully into one's understanding.

We already do teach in ways that foster this kind of ability and this kind of awareness in our students.  What I am trying to say here is that we must bring this dimension of education too into our discussions.

Your Anti-Transcript

I once heard a faculty member complaining about how many St. Lawrence students didn't know such-and-such from his discipline.  With horror, I realized that I didn't know such-and-such about his discipline myself, because I had not taken even one college-level course in his discipline!

Out of curiosity, I later pulled out the SLU course catalog and decided to see if it was actually possible for an SLU student to take a course in every discipline.  The answer is that it would be very very hard.  I think what I came up with was that only a student who does a single 8-course major could possibly do this, if such a student planned very very carefully.  But most of that student's coursework would be 100-level courses, and faculty would not be very happy with that.

Now emboldened by this finding (if a St. Lawrence student can't do it, and St. Lawrence's requirements are not that demanding, it was surely impossible at my college, which had more demanding requirements), I decided to take stock of my education relative to the full list of academic departments and programs.   I decided to use St. Lawrence's listing, since this is my current academic home. 

So I made a list of all the departments and programs in which I had not taken even one college-level course.  I encourage you to make such a list as well.  This is your Anti-Transcript, showing the Shadow Side of your own formal education!

I think that this is part of what makes these conversations about general education requirements so difficult.  We all do have gaps in our education.  If we are not careful, we can get defensive about those gaps.  We can try to pretend that the fields of study we have not studied at all are not really all that important -- but we don't really know that, because we don't know what we don't know.  Or, out of embarrassment about those gaps, we can overcompensate by wanting to require what we had not been required to study, in an attempt to ensure that our students do not later come to regret the gaps that we later came to regret in our own education.

Part of what is exciting about discussing general education requirements is how much we can learn from each other about our different fields of study.  Is there anything in your field of study that you regard as so essential that you really do wish everyone knew it?  Are there ways to teach each other (faculty in other disciplines as well as students) this essential knowledge and these essential skills, besides just through courses?

Questions for the Afternoon Session

May College 2008
Collective Response to and Suggestions for the Draft Learning Goals

Academic Affairs would like the participants in May College to take our draft and comment on it, revise it, add to it.  We would ask you to post your group’s consensus or alternatives on the blog, but if you choose not to, to hand in a written version to Eve Stoddard at the end of today so we will have a written record for our fall deliberations.

The draft we produced has three clusters of goals:

•    Education for global, national, and local citizenship
•    Core competencies or capabilities/literacies/skills
•    Knowledge of different epistemologies/disciplines/areas

It is possible to conceptualize the first as the overarching goal and the second and third as means to that end, or it can be viewed as parallel to the others.

The questions we would like you to consider are as follows:

1.    Which of these do you want to see as part of our institutional goals?

2.    Are there additional ones you think should be included?

3.    Would you word the goals differently? How?

4.    Which would you exclude or change dramatically?

5.    How important are skills versus knowledge?

6.    How important is real-world experience and application of knowledge—production or creation of something based on classroom learning?

7.    Would you prefer a set curriculum or menu of choices as we have now as opposed to a system in which students with their advisors are responsible for demonstrating how they have achieved the goals the faculty has set forth?

8.    Would you prefer a structure like that Bates or Hobart that requires some balance of disciplinary and interdisciplinary major and minor or concentrations as opposed to a distribution system?

9.    Do you think co-curricular experiences should play a role in the satisfaction of general education requirements? If so, how?

10.    What role should the body and/or the self play in general education goals?

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Liberal Learning Goals for SLU—draft
Educating for Local and Global Citizenship

Civic responsibility and self-knowledge: What is our responsibility living in communities at various scales? To the environment, to other people, to society, to knowledge?

•    Recognition of difference and the impact of inequality
•    Ability to work in diverse groups
•    Critical self-reflection
•    Environmental awareness
•    Second language/knowledge of other cultures

Capabilities/Competencies—
•    Writing well
•    Reading closely
•    Speaking well
•    Listening well
•    Critical thinking
•    Creative expression
•    Ability to use technology productively
•    Quantitative reasoning
•    Information Literacy (research, accessing and evaluating information)
•    Scientific reasoning
•    Visual literacy

What should students know?

    They should understand multiple epistemologies/ disciplinary approaches to knowledge creation.

They should be able to work across disciplines and collaboratively to do complex problem-solving, to produce new knowledge ethically and creatively, and to practice experientially what they have studied.