Who Fills the Seats?

 

By MGB [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Anticipating the audience for this class is daunting and could result in some logical fallacies about millennials. To avoid this, we will need to be cognizant of preconceived ideas that may crop up. As first year students at a private university, the students in this class will be very focused on their education. They have defined goals, whether completing their undergraduate degrees or tackling post-graduate education once they leave the university. Many will not need to hold a part-time job to make ends meet since a majority of the student population come from affluent families. In addition, many come to the university from high schools that pride themselves on their ability to prepare student for the rigors of college. Most will have had some experience with information fluency, whether using Google, Wikipedia, or library databases, and they will have had some opportunity to write a research paper. Because they will be skilled with performing internet searches, there may be some resistance to learning how to evaluate information that they would normally consider credible.

In terms of preferred learning styles, in my experience, many students prefer discussion. Breaking into groups is also a popular choice; however, many do not like to perform group work outside of the classroom. I would like to think that students enrolling in this course would have learning goals that coincide with the proposed catalog description:

The truth is out there. . .and so are the lies. Every day, we are bombarded with information. We follow blogs, watch the news, scan Twitter feeds, and read books, magazines, and journals. Who can we trust to tell the truth? This course will help you better understand your role and responsibility in creating new knowledge, in understanding the changing dynamics of the world of information, and in using information, data, and scholarship ethically. We will explore your role as a consumer as well as a producer of information, using the Association of College & Research Libraries’ new Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education as a conceptual basis to think about the information that swirls around us. We’ll use informed skepticism to view how authority is constructed, we’ll examine the iterative process of asking increasingly complex questions to find answers, and we’ll discover how our own voices fit into the ongoing scholarly conversation. In this course, we’ll use the library as starting point as we satisfy our curiosity about the information ecosystem and where we fit in. 3 credits.