On behalf of the University of Michigan’s SI 641 / EDCURINS 575 : Information Literacy for Teaching and Learning class, I invite you to download a copy of our 170+ page book, Information Literacy in the Wild.

In this book, we share our experiences doing observations, teaching, and online resource creation related to information literacy in public libraries, K-12 classrooms, K-12 school libraries, college classrooms (online and face-to-face), academic libraries, educational outreach projects, the natural history museum, and more.

As their professor, I couldn’t be more pleased with their honest, unvarnished looks at what’s working in information literacy and what isn’t. So much of library literature is written as if there’s never a problem — everything goes off without a hitch. Ooh, doesn’t that make us jealous? But what I love about the deft hand of these writers is that they lift the veil and show you when the boat rocked and then what they did to right it.

Thanks to the tireless efforts of our classmate Kristel Wieneke, we did a limited print run (shown above) for friends and family courtesy of the the University of Michigan Library’s Espresso Book Machine.

But we’re releasing it for free in digital format for everybody else!

You can download it for your eReader for free here:
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/115254

Or you can download it in a formatted-for-print PDF here:
http://bit.ly/infowild

So if you want to know what happened when a bird unit flew into a Physics classroom, what Lady Gaga has to do with synthesis, what it means to use a chainsaw to cut cake, what a Tyrannosaurus rex has to do with information literacy, or what database-a-phobia is, we hope you’ll download our book.

Then share your feedback with us!
informationliteracyinthewild [at] umich [dot] edu

(And that’s not all … they also created some amazing IL online resources … but I’ll save sharing some of those for another day.)

PS - To learn more about the Espresso Book Machine, check out this video!

Lately, it’s become really clear to me that many of today’s students simply, really, truly, sincerely don’t know that borrowing words and images from others and plunking them into one’s own work is problematic. They. Just. Don’t. Know. Right up through college.

So here’s a real-world example that may help students see the consequences of unattributed literary mashups …

Little, Brown Pulls Novel, Citing Plagiarism - NYTimes.com via kwout

From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

What I advocate here is not to dispense with teaching students how to use sources but rather to abandon our fixation on the form rather than the function of source attribution. Here’s why: We cannot control how much time and effort students invest in a particular writing assignment; we can only influence how they distribute their energies. Professors’ overattention to flawless citation (or grammar) creates predictable results: Students expend a disproportionate amount of precious time and attention trying to avoid making mistakes. Soon, they also begin to associate “good” writing with mechanically following rules rather than developing good ideas.

This is a superb article to discuss at a staff meeting, especially given the national focus on college readiness. Are we doing enough to focus on the content?