Developing information literacy education for first-year students at two universities
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Date
2012
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Tampere University Press
Abstract
Information literacy (IL) is considered to be an important part of the skills acquired by university students during their studies, and university libraries have developed their instruction to help students achieve this.
Tampere University (UTA) Library follows the national IL recommendation (See Recommendation for Universities) in its teaching. In the recent curricula change of the University the Teaching council stipulated IL as a compulsory subject for all students of UTA. All UTA students now have equal opportunities for IL education during different phases of their studies. This has entailed modifying an existing
IL course into one more suitable for teaching larger numbers of students. Information specialists of the Library have also participated in university pedagogy
training, which has served to strengthen the theoretical basis of their own work and also occasioned substantial changes in the course.
The University of Namibia (UNAM) Library is in the process
of developing and harmonizing their IL education. Since Finland is regarded as one of the leading countries in IL matters (UNESCO 2005, cited in Walton & Hepworth 2011), we wanted to share our experiences of developing IL education and thus contribute to the knowledge base of academic libraries, and more specifically to see if there was something useful to be learned from the experiences of UTA Library’s development of an IL course for first-year students.
In this chapter we introduce the IL course for first-year students at UTA and the teamwork model we used to develop it. As a theoretical framework, we found it especially useful to apply the principles of constructive alignment in our pedagogical developments in IL education. We also discuss whether some of the content and teaching methods of this course could be applied to the present Namibian academic context.
Description
Keywords
Information literacy, Information literacy education, Academic libraries
Citation
Asplund, J., Mwiiyale, J., Karsten, S. & Tapio, S. (2012). Developing information literacy education for first-year students at two universities. In M. Iivonen, P. Helminen, J. Ndinoshiho & O Sisättö (Eds.), Empowering people : Collaboration between Finnish and Namibian University Librarie (216-234). Tampere : Tampere University Press