2. the students, mostly freshman, don’t really want to be there neither do they understand why they are there. Unfortunately, they really don’t have much heavy research in their course work until they are juniors and seniors. At the freshman level they have nothing to connect the course too, they don’t understand the need, and they generally forget the material by the time that they do need it.

We would like to kill the class and integrate IL throughout the curriculum for all levels of students — freshman and seniors alike. We would like to do this by having more workshops for the faculty, more in-class instruction with the classes and their instructors, seminars, roundtable IL discussions with grad students and seniors working on their senior thesis and through whatever we can think of.

The students tend to use IL more if they see it demonstrated by their instructors and if the instructors include IL in their assignments (something more than “find me two articles in the databases on subject xyz”).

One thing that I decided (after years ago teaching an entry level course of this type) is that I’d pitch this as an advanced course primarily for students planning on graduate study. They’re much more likely to be able to contextualize what they’re learning since they have some experience and a much richer knowledge base than first year students, and they have more sophisticated ways of applying it in their upper level courses.

We’re wrestling a bit with the disconnect between what we do with first year, first semester courses and upper level disciplinary courses. So often, there’s a gap between the first semester and junior year where they may not have all that many assignments that ask them to find and use information independently. Ideally, we want students to know how information in their major works, but also how to be ready to find out about anything so they’ll be prepared for engaged citizenship – but those aren’t necessarily the same thing.

1. Our institution did have a 3 credit information literacy course as an elective in the Communications Dept. (thus my reference to one student who took it and one who did not), but, as an elective, it died due to lack of enrollment. The Comm. Dept. came back with a plan to develop a writing course that would be part of the Communications core (required), and we info lit librarians were able to establish a significant information literacy component within the course while also getting Comm faculty exactly on the same page with us about its need and content. The course is due to run for the first time January-April 09.
2. The ideal would be to have info lit throughout the curriculum, making it foundational to all study (as in – What are the information sources for this discipline, how to we find relevant information, how do we evaluate it?, etc), but faculty have to understand information literacy in this way. Most do not. That is why I believe credit instruction in some form (stand alone or integrated) is the path to showing the viability of info lit and also helping faculty to understand it. But I do believe this credit instruction needs to be done within subject disciplines.