What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy

Self-Directed Learning, A Guide for Learners and Teachers

Seeking meaning: A process approach to library and information services

新書介紹－－Learning as Transformation: Critical Perspectives on a Theory in Progress

Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts Graeme Sullivan (2005). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. 265 pages. ISBN 1-4129-0536-2Reviewed by Charles GaroianThe Pennsylvania State UniversityFor over four decades, art education scholars have been advocating for the visual arts within the context of K-12 education by arguing their cognitive and affective significance as a discipline-specific area of inquiry and across school curricula. Beginning with the establishment of the professional field of art education in the mid-1960s to the development of Discipline-Based Art Education, to Visual Culture studies in art education, and most recently, the growing literature on Art-Based Research, the field has reinvented itself in order to clarify its positioning and to gain agency and credibility within the larger context of educational research and practice in the U.S. and internationally. Depending on the political climate surrounding schooling, these efforts at bringing the visual arts to the center of curricular and pedagogical concerns have, for the most part, fallen on deaf ears.While there is little disagreement about the importance of visual arts education among the populace, when push comes to shove within the political economy of schooling, art is the first area of content to be questioned, then reduced, if not eliminated, from the curriculum. As post-Sputnik education and now No Child Left Behind has shown us, the visual arts are the first to suffer when politics enters the picture of what constitutes basic education in the U.S. If the larger role that the visual arts can play in the education of children is going to be taken seriously, then it is arguments like those found in Graeme Sullivan's recent book, Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Ans (2005), that can ensure a broader appreciation and understanding of how the visual arts constitute significant research and contribute in significant ways to children's creative and intellectual development.Given its research-on-art-as-research focus, Sullivan's book makes a significant contribution to the literature in the field of art education. His arguments place art-based research in the center of educational practice as they clearly establish the visual arts as a significant form of creative and intellectual inquiry. While creativity has long been touted as the major contribution of the visual arts to new knowledge, it has not been central to a pragmatic understanding of art's intellectual value in knowledge acquisition, as Sullivan clearly demonstrates.While in the past, research methodologies were borrowed from the hard sciences and social sciences to study and argue for the curricular and pedagogical relevance of art making in classrooms, Sullivan has mined existing methodologies and compared them with the ways in which the visual arts are constituted as research. What is unique about his approach is that he does not rely solely on external research methodologies to validate the importance of visual arts practice for creative and intellectual development.Instead, he provides an in-depth perspective on the inherent value of visual arts practice as research and the robust possibilities that it offers when interconnected with wider research systems and methodologies that are constituted by the other disciplines.In Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts, Sullivan begins with "Part 1: Contexts for Visual Arts Research," in which he establishes the conceptual, historical, and educational foundations of visual arts research, arguing that if it is to have any impact at all, it must be grounded in visual arts strategies, challenge existing paradigms of institutionalized knowledge, and adapted to other systems of research, theory, and practice. In "Part 2: Theorizing Visual Arts Practice," he develops and establishes the visual knowing of the artist-as-theorist, and the idea that complex systems of inquiry in art practice are robust and boundary-breaking in their methodologies, and proposes that their cognitive and transformative processes enable new insights, criticalities, and understandings to occur. …

Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts

Researchers increasingly need to integrate the disposition, management, and curation of their data into their current workflows. However, it is not yet clear to what extent faculty and students are sufficiently prepared to take on these responsibilities. This paper articulates the need for a data information literacy program (DIL) to prepare students to engage in such an "e-research" environment. Assessments of faculty interviews and student performance in a geoinformatics course provide complementary sources of information, which are then filtered through the perspective of ACRL's information literacy competency standards to produce a draft set of outcomes for a data information literacy program.

/pdf/determining-data-information-literacy-needs-a-study-of-3mcm13jgs7.pdf

Determining Data Information Literacy Needs: A Study of Students and Research Faculty

Background
Practicing engineers must continuously renew their knowledge and skills in order to remain competitive in the field. Yet, recent studies have found very little improvement in engineering graduates' lifelong learning skills. Research on information literacy, a critical component of lifelong learning, in technical fields is limited.

Purpose/Hypothesis
This study sought to evaluate the information skills of first-year engineering students. Specifically, it investigated the extent to which students gather information from a variety of sources and from high-quality sources, use gathered information to support an argument, and document information sources.

Design/Method
This study used content analysis of memos written by teams of engineering students. A random sample of 40 memos, selected from a pool of 263, was coded using InfoSEAD, a structured coding protocol developed for this study.

Results
Overall, 82% of the sources used were Web resources, of which 12% were of high quality. From the information threads that could be traced to the original source, 68% were relevant and used appropriately. Due to documentation errors in the memos, 28% of the sources cited could not be classified, and 57% of the information threads identified could not be traced to the original source.

Conclusions
Student teams mostly relied on Web resources, but their documentation skills were weak. When students did successfully document information, it was generally done appropriately.

Assessing Information Literacy Skills Demonstrated in an Engineering Design Task

Riding the Active Learning Wave: Problem-Based Learning as a Catalyst for Creating Faculty-Librarian Instructional Partnerships.

Engineering design is a fundamental problem-solving model used by the discipline. Effective problem-solving requires the ability to find and incorporate quality information sources. To teach courses in this area effectively, educators need to understand the information needs of engineers and engineering students and their information gathering habits. This book provides essential guidance for engineering faculty and librarians wishing to better integrate information competencies into their curricular offerings. The treatment of the subject matter is pragmatic, accessible, and engaging. Rather than focusing on specific resources or interfaces, the book adopts a process-driven approach that outlasts changing information technologies. After several chapters introducing the conceptual underpinnings of the book, a sequence of contributions go into detail about specific steps in the design process and the information needs for those steps.

https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1030&context=purduepress_ebooks

Integrating Information into the Engineering Design Process

Engineering education is moving increasingly toward an active-learning based pedagogy. Traditionally relegated to a final-year design project, more and more engineering design projects are appearing earlier, even in the first-year of undergraduate education. With the increased frequency of these projects that are problems without a single ‘right’ answer, engineering librarians are finding more opportunities to work with students throughout their educational careers instead of just in a capstone course. To fully take advantage of these opportunities, librarians need to translate their own knowledge of information literacy into the language of engineering educators, and indeed inform the pedagogy of those educators. This paper attempts to create just such a bridge, focusing on the information resources and processes needed by engineers engaged in the design process and bringing together the literature of both the engineering education and library science communities.

/pdf/information-literacy-and-engineering-design-developing-an-m4vrkvkf86.pdf

Michael Fosmire

Papers

Determining Data Information Literacy Needs: A Study of Students and Research Faculty

Assessing Information Literacy Skills Demonstrated in an Engineering Design Task

Riding the Active Learning Wave: Problem-Based Learning as a Catalyst for Creating Faculty-Librarian Instructional Partnerships.

Integrating Information into the Engineering Design Process

Information literacy and engineering design: Developing an integrated conceptual model