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Abstract:
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This presentation will focus on challenges that ônon-traditionalö research projects, especially those that employ blogs, wikis, and other types of interactive technology, pose for developing and assessing information literacy skills in a changing environment. For the past two years, I have been collaborating with Dr. Katheryn Giglio, Professor of English at the University of Central Florida, on a project designed to use student-generated research wikis as a vehicle to enhance the information literacy skills of our students. The students involved were primarily English majors in upper-division Shakespeare courses during the 2008/2009 academic years. While this project brought about some success, we also experienced a number of challenges along the way. First and foremost was assessment. Wikis engaged our students to a greater degree than might be expected with a traditional research paper. They also created a greater sense of community and collaboration in the classroom, produced more immediacy to studentsÆ work and provided insight into how students seek, organize and use information. However, we also discovered that much of the value of wikis is tied to the experience of creating and using them, which makes assessment difficult. This presentation will address this challenge and discuss the results gleaned from our information literacy assessment, which was designed to go beyond the subjective notion of experience and allow us to say more concretely what it is that wikis do, how they affect studentsÆ information seeking behavior, and what this means both for instructors and librarians. |