The Citation Project: The Movie

Some of you may have read the Inside Higher Education article about Rebecca Moore Howard and Sandra Jamieson's recent presentation at CCCC about the Citation Project (http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/04/11/study_of_first_year_students_research_papers_finds_little_evidence_they_understand_sources).  The actual video of the presentation is available online at http://www.viddler.com/explore/yscmcgraw-hill/videos/48/?secreturl=81189253. 

Extended deadline: Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

We have extended the deadline for proposal submissions for the Georgia Interational Conference on Information Literacy until May 30, 2011.

Mike Palmquist will be this year's keynote speaker. You won't want to miss it!

For more information, please visit our Web site at http://ceps.georgiasouthern.edu/conted/infolit.html .

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

Call for Proposals

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy. September 22-24, 2011

Deadline: April 15, 2011

Location: Coastal Georgia Center in the historic District of Savannah

Please submit your proposal via the website. The online submission link of the website will provide all of the information you need to create and submit a proposal.

http://ceps.georgiasouthern.edu/conted/infolit.html

For more information, contact:
Janice Reynolds
912-478-1755
janreyn@georgiasouthern.edu

2011 Graduate Research Network at Computers and Writing Conference

The Graduate Research Network at the 2011 Computers and Writing Conference invites you to join us! We need presenters and discussion leaders. GRN discussions are informative, exhausting, and not to be missed. Please spread the word! http://class.georgiasouthern.edu/writling/GRN/2011/index.htm

Follow the links for information about the CW/GRN Travel Grant Fund as well.  Apply for a Travel Grant, or donate to the fund if you can.

Hope to see you there!

Sample Video - LILAC Wiki

Sample Video - LILAC Wiki

I have published some sample Research Aloud Protocol (RAP) videos to YouTube, linked from the LILAC Wiki.  There is also a video interview with one of the students.

YouTube now allows videos up to 15 minutes in length, but I am trying to constrain the videos to 10 minutes or less.

The next step will be to determine some kind of coding scheme for the RAP captures, as well as to develop a survey instrument.

Progress is slow, I know--but I am also working on an article for an upcoming collection.  More information to follow. 

And, of course, I'm looking forward to meeting with the folks from the Citation Project at the Georgia Conference on Information Literacy this weekend.  Hope to see you there!

Citation Project at the 2010 Georgia Conference on Information Literacy

Join us for a special workshop at the upcoming Georgia Conference on Information Literacy.

Post Conference Workshop
Georgia Conference on Information Literacy
Post Conference Workshop
Coastal Georgia Center
October 2, 2010
1:00 - 4:00 PM
This workshop is free for all registered conference attendees.
Please RSVP to:
Marie Williams, Assistant Program Development Specialist
marieawilliams@georgiasouthern.edu


Understanding Students' Use of Sources through Collaborative Research
Facilitators:
Rebecca Moore Howard, Syracuse University
Nicole Chantelle Howell, Syracuse University
Sandra Jamieson, Drew University
Kelly Kinney, Binghamton University
Kathryn Navickas, Syracuse University
Tricia Serviss, Auburn University
Missy Watson, Syracuse University

April 15 is the deadline!

Reminder! April 15 is the deadline, not just for the IRS, but for submissions to present at the 2011 Georgia Conference on Information Literacy as well! http://ceps.georgiasouthern.edu/conted/infolitproposals.html

We are in the process of putting together a workshop with Rebecca Moore Howard and Sandra Jamieson for the Citation Project (and LILAC Project) probably post-conference (Saturday afternoon?) as well.

I think it's going to be a productive and informative conference. Hope to see you there!

Presentations at CCCC

Going to the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) in Louisville? Rebecca Moore Howard posted on her Facebook page: Citation Project at CCCC: workshop W5; panel F12; panel P14. Come on down, y'all! (Oh, yeah, and I'm on panel F12, along with Rebecca Moore Howard, Jim Purdy, and Randall McClure).

Hope to see you there!

Reminder: 2010 Georgia Conference on Information Literacy

Submissions for the 2010 Georgia Conference on Information Literacy are due April 15, 2010!

For more information or to submit your proposal, visit the Web site at http://ceps.georgiasouthern.edu/conted/infolitproposals.html

Georgia Conference on Information Literacy

Georgia Conference on Information Literacy

Deadline for proposals: April 15, 2010

New Report on Information Literacy

I know this isn't really an information literacy news blog (yet?), but this seemed worth sharing: the folks over at Project Information Literacy have published a new report, "Lessons Learned: How College Students Seek Information in the Digital Age." Here's a quote from the abstract (via Resource Shelf):

A report of findings from 2,318 respondents to a survey carried out among college in six campuses distributed across the U.S. in the spring of 2009, as part of Project Information Literacy. Respondents, while curious in the beginning stages of research, employed a consistent and predictable research strategy for finding information, whether they were conducting course-related or everyday life research. Almost all of the respondents turned to the same set of tried and true information resources in the initial stages of research, regardless of their information goals. Almost all students used course readings and Google first for course-related research and Google and Wikipedia for everyday life research. Most students used library resources, especially scholarly databases for course-related research and far fewer, in comparison, used library services that required interacting with librarians. The findings suggest that students conceptualize research, especially tasks associated with seeking information, as a competency learned by rote, rather than as an opportunity to learn, develop, or expand upon an information-gathering strategy which leverages the wide range of resources available to them in the digital age.

I haven't really looked through the report enough to know what I think of their methodology, but they seem to have a tone of optimism that, frankly, surprised me. (E.g., "As a whole, our findings strongly suggest that many of todayʼs college students dial down the aperture of all the different resources that are available to them in the digital age." All?)

Worth reading! Full text pdf, 3MB

Thoughts on a Big New Project

I'm in the early stages of planning my dissertation project--which means, of course, that I'm uncertain about topic, scope, method, and everything else. But I'm also excited, so it seems only natural to share that excitement here by posting my very first draft of thoughts. Feel free to comment on anything that seems exceptionally wacky.

Introduction
I see productive ground to explore between two existing projects:

• The LILAC (Learning Information Literacy Across the Curriculum) Group studies student research habits by observing the paths they actually take when they need information for academic work. In other words, LILAC studies how students research.
• The Citation Project studies samples of student writing to analyze how they incorporated sources into their work. In other words, the Citation Project studies how students use the works they research.

Together, these projects promise to increase our knowledge about the overlapping activities of finding and integrating sources.

I propose a project that studies students as they perform both of these tasks (finding and integrating sources), but with an added dimension: I want to study some students as they compose traditional research-based essays and other students as they compose multimodal, remix-based work. This angle will produce stories about the variety of ways that students find and integrate sources when working in different mediums and when they have very different rhetorical purposes and audiences.

In short, I picture two student situations to investigate simultaneously. Student A must decide how to tackle the research and writing of a print essay, which will be read only by classmates and her instructor, and which is expected to follow academic standards for citation as best as she understands in that setting. Student B must decide how to tackle the research and composition of a multimodal assignment that may involve using found visual, audio, and video material, and which may be posted online for wide distribution, and which is expected to follow the rhetorical conventions of noteworthy multimodal compositions.

Methodology
This project uses a blend of methods, which flow from my desire to A) follow the genealogy of the LILAC Group and the Citation Project, and B) study students working in different classroom settings, with different assignments. These methods include:

• Video Capture / Speak-Aloud Protocol: As students search for sources, I will use Camtasia or similar screen-capture software to record students' paths to find sources, recording their narration of their reasons for their choices.
• Citation Analysis: I will then analyze the final products that students submit for class by comparing their cited sources to their finished texts. With multimodal assignments, this stage will be especially interesting and challenging, as conventions for citing different kinds of sources vary among discourse communities; therefore, I will ensure that students will have been exposed to a number of examples of multimodal compositions that cite sources in different ways (if at all).
• Case Study / Interview: I have strong relationships at two nearby institutions: an extremely large state university, and a small liberal arts college. At this initial stage, I imagine conducting in-depth case studies of the work of six students at each school--ideally, giving me a case study sample of three students writing each kind of essay at each school, for a total of twelve students. Alternatively, depending on the willingness of individual instructors to work with me, I could follow students as they first write traditional academic essays and later write multimodal compositions in the same class, for the same instructor. These case studies will be supplemented by surveys of the students' entire classes and by interviews with the instructors.
  

November is "National Information Literacy Awareness Month"

THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary

___________________________________________________________________

For Immediate Release October 1, 2009

NATIONAL INFORMATION LITERACY AWARENESS MONTH, 2009

- - - - - - -

BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

A PROCLAMATION

Read the entire proclamation at http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Presidential-Proclamation-National-Information-Literacy-Awareness-Month/

Thanks, Janice

I'm finding that entry fascinating reading. (I'm still figuring out how to work blogs, and I haven't found out how to set thing so that I get informed when there are new postings, which means I forget to check back . . . in fact, the only reason I found this was that I was trying to get to my own test blog, posted something, and then discovered it was actually on Lilac . . . ).

This should be a comment on Janice's post, I know -- but I don't know how to delete a mistaken post, so I'm converting it.

2009 Georgia Conference on Information Literacy

What can I say, except it was a great conference this year! I have posted some rough notes from sessions I attended at http://mywabbit.blogspot.com/2009/10/notes-from-2009-georgia-conference-on.html . Of course, there's no way I can do justice to the conference sessions!

I enjoyed meeting some of you face-to-face at the conference and at the LILAC Project meeting. I will be posting notes and following up via email as soon as I can pull the information together. I appreciate the good ideas and the interest. Don't forget to post your ideas here and sign up with our LILAC Wiki at http://lilac.wetpaint.com/ to contribute/edit the documents we will be posting there as well!

More later.

LILAC Project Meeting at Georgia Conference for Information Literacy

For those of you who will be attending the 2009 Georgia Conference for Information Literacy, we are on the program! http://ceps.georgiasouthern.edu/conted/infolitprogram.html

Our meeting is scheduled for 5:30pm on Friday, September 25, 2009. I hope you will be able to attend!

In the meantime, don't forget to post here and/or to to our Wiki if you have ideas, resources, or anything else you would like to share on this important project. I hope to post more soon. I've been working on a draft for a grant proposal and, of course, drafts of IRB materials.

Hope to hear from you all soon!

We have a wiki!

I created a wiki for us at http://lilac.wetpaint.com/ (hence the widget in my previous blog post). There isn't much there yet, but I am hoping that some (or all!) of you will take a look and help to edit the documents -- or post some of your own that might be useful for our project(s).

My sabbatical semester is at an end, but the project is not. The Georgia Conference on Information Literacy now includes a link to the Invitation to Participate in the LILAC Project on its home page, and we will have a scheduled session at the conference on Friday, September 25, where we can meet to discuss plans and, hopefully, invite other interested people to join us. If you can make it to the conference, I hope you will join us! If not, your participation in the blog and the wiki are just as important.

I will be posting a sample video of the "research aloud" protocol I plan on using to the Wiki site (as soon as "the powers that be" give me access to the streaming server). A former student of mine agreed to "pretend" to be a research participant for the video and given me permission so we/I can also use clips from it in presentations, or discuss it in journal articles, presentations, or whatever. I'll let you know when the video is available.

In the meantime, I hope that you all are winding down from classes, and I hope you have a wonderful--and productive--summer! I'll try to post more soon--and I hope YOU all will, too!

LILAC Wiki

I've been playing with setting up a WIKI for us to use, and I couldn't resist trying this widget.

LILAC Plans – Rough Ideas

Welcome to the LILAC Group! We now have a solid core to begin with. Below are some of my tentative plans. But this isn't my group; it belongs to all of us, so please post your feedback, critiques, ideas, or what-have-you, so we can move forward. I anticipate this project will grow and continue as a long-term one, with new people joining, some people "idling" when necessary or dropping out when need be, and with more work growing out of what we start here. There are plenty of opportunities: books, articles, dissertation and/or thesis projects, conference presentations, curriculum development, textbook materials, working with toolbar or software designers, grant writing, or whatever directions various participants take.

So, here are my initial ideas:

1. Sign on participants

Obviously, I have already begun to sign on a few participants, which is how you all got here. I've attached a .pdf of a flyer I developed as an Invitation to Participate. Feel free to use it—or design a better one (noone ever accused me of being artistic, you know!)—if you would like to spread the word. Right now, I am the only one with administrative rights to the blog, so just let me know if you would like to add someone as author and I'll take care of it (we can add up to 100 participants). Of course, anyone is welcome to post comments (they are reviewed, briefly, by me, just to try and avoid spam whenever possible). If someone else would like administrative rights to the blog, I'd be happy to do that as well.

Last week I visited a graduate class in Rhetoric and Composition at the University of South Florida, and in mid-April I will be meeting with some faculty in the English Department and the College of Education, as well as librarians, at Kennesaw State University. I hope to entice some of them to join us as well. Right now, travel is out of my own pocket, so while I am happy to visit local institutions, I can't afford too much travel. Luckily, we have this blog! (I love the digital age!)

As Co-coordinator of the Georgia Conference on Information Literacy, I also plan on asking the planning committee to provide meeting space and time for participants to get together at this year's conference (September 25-26, 2009, Savannah Georgia. See the Call for Proposals at http://ceps.georgiasouthern.edu/conted/infolitproposals.html ). Some of you already plan on attending; I hope more of you can join us. At any rate, I will also ask the planning committee to include the Invitation to Participate or a link to it on the Conference Web site and in the Conference program, so that others at the conference can come and hopefully join in.

2. Design study

1. share info on IRB materials (that way, participants can use information from each other to help with their own institutional IRB forms).
2. questionnaires/surveys (Survey monkey?)
3. research-aloud protocols (CamStudio?)
4. permission forms
5. interviews w/students
6. interviews w/faculty
7. interviews w/librarians
8. etc.

If you have ideas, drafts, or what-have-you, please feel free to share them!

3. Post plans for studies at our own institutions

I plan to begin with just one or two students in first-year composition classes at my institution (along with their teachers). I will

1. Sit in with the class during any "library" instruction and/or
   
2. Interview the teacher about what kinds of skills are being taught and what assignments students will be completing
   
3. Administer questionnaires to students
   
4. Observe student research practices and record student using "research aloud" protocols (I Plan to have students use a computer in my office with CamStudio running to capture What they actually do on screen while they talk about their choices).
   
5. Review a copy of the students completed research project to see what they've actually used, how they've used it, etc.
   
6. Interview student after they have completed their project
   
7. Interview teacher about results (after grades are submitted post-semester)
   

At least, that's my plan…. Please feel free to critique or post your own plans as you develop them.

4. Review pilot study

I hope several of you will administer the pilot at your own institutions (or perhaps some of you have graduate students who will do this). Then we can review our results and see what refinements we need to make before we

5. Design/plan larger study

6. Report results

We can, of course, report as we proceed. For instance, Rebecca Moore Howard, Randall McClure, and Sandra Jamieson will be presenting at the Georgia Conference on Information Literacy (and, of course, others not yet involved will be presenting, too, so it's a good conference for those interested in this area! And Kathleen Blake Yancey is this year's keynote speaker, so it should be a great place to be).

Randall McClure, Rebecca Moore Howard, and I are also submitting a proposal for CCCC 2010 as well. I have already presented at the Georgia Conference on Information Literacy, CCCC, and Computers and Writing on the LILAC project, and I plan to continue to report on the project as it proceeds—hopefully with some of YOU.

I am also drafting an article for submission (somewhere). I plan to post my draft here to the blog for feedback. I think we could also propose an edited collection somewhere, with some of us serving as editors, and others contributing singly- or collaboratively-authored work.

Some of you have graduate students, too, who are already working in this area. I would love to hear if anyone is teaching or developing courses in teaching information literacy skills for graduate students in our field(s). At my institution, students take a sort of orientation course that supposedly includes "library instruction," then they take a two-course composition sequence, and many teachers repeat the same library instruction in these courses (and usually assign a "research paper" or "research project"). What I hope to do with this project is determine if this is working (my experience says it's not), so I hope to use the work and/or results of this study to determine what curricular/instructional changes we can or should make. So another "strand" here might be curriculum development at undergraduate and graduate levels, teacher training, librarianship, etc.

So, of course, I hope we reach across the "boundaries" of composition to include librarians, assessment experts, faculty from a wide variety of disciplines, K-12 teachers, and interested "others."

We can use the LILAC blog as a space for public conversation. We can also create a mailing list somewhere for more "private" conversation, and we can create public or private wiki-space to develop materials, or we can just email drafts between people who are working on various parts of this project together.

I'd love to hear what each of you is doing, what work you have already done, and what your plans are as we move forward.

Oh, yeah, and lest we forget, some (or all?) of us can either singly or as a group (or in small groups, or whatever) pursue various forms of grant opportunities. I know I would like funding for a research assistant, course release, printing costs (flyers, etc.), equipment costs, travel to conferences, possibly travel for LILAC participants to travel here to meet or, well, you get the idea. J

Other Information Literacy Research

Project Information Literacy (PIL) (http://projectinfolit.org/)

This research project investigates how college students conduct research. The original pilot project was conducted at St. Mary's College in California; the research is now being conducted by the iSchool at the Univ. of Washington with support from Proquest using samples from different college campuses from across the US. The website includes publications and a "public service" YouTube video based on results.

Some of the more interesting results from this project (beyond where students find information), I think, are the findings that students struggle with understanding what college research is, what faculty expect, and that faculty (in their samples) offer little guidance to students about expectations.

Information Search Process (ISP) (http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/~kuhlthau/information_search_process.htm)

Although not specifically information literacy, Carol Kuhlthau has been doing research on student information seeking behavior for over 20 years, resulting in the development of the information search process model. The model is a holistic view of information seeking (or the research process) with affective (feelings), cognitive (thoughts), and physical (actions) attributes for each stage. Kuhlthau's research is described in her book Seeking Meaning and applied in her text Guided Inquiry. Although the initial research was focused on middle and high school students, her studies were replicated with college students and information-intensive professions.

The last stage in the ISP is presentation, which is often (traditionally) where the writing process is identified so that information seeking and writing/communication are separated. But I think James Elmborg was right in his call for the research and writing processes to be taught holistically. Kuhlthau's emphasis on seeking meaning rather than simply finding information seems to support that and gives us a way to see how the 2 processes are intertwined and perhaps are really one more holistic process.

Kuhlthau's research, I think, represent the only studies that have attempted to understand the feelings and thoughts associated with each stage of the process so that we hopefully can identify strategies to help students along. Combined with the PIL findings about students confusion about what college research is and what faculty expectations are for research, there seems to be a lot for us to still understand and work on to improve IL pedagogy.