NUTSHELL NOTES "Teaching tips in a nutshell" - The University of Colorado at Denver's One-page Newsletter for Teaching Excellence

As faster computers provide convenient desktop access into a seemingly endless universe with galaxies of scholarly information, the choice of "what our students need to know" will change through selective distinction between essential information, which students must indeed know, and reference information, which students must be able to access when needed. While the reference information one can obtain depends on the quality of essential information one possesses to access the full capabilities of any information system, retaining vast knowledge truly becomes less important than using it.

Information literacy requires that students become judicious users of information. Critical thinking will be exercised every time a decision is made about what to choose from massive resources with accompanying agendas, value messages, sophistication, and intended purposes?none of which may be explicitly stated.

Faculty of higher education have made great use of their own information literacy in their research, but have only begun to recognize the implications for cataclysmic changes in undergraduate teaching. "Progressive" forms of education now practiced as classroom "active learning" are only pale shadows of the possibilities that are opened when a classroom has immediate global access to information. Even in active learning, we professors have taken primary responsibility for what is taught by our writing of the textbooks, the collaborative exercises, and even the cases for discussion teaching. Soon our students will be able to study the day's topic on-line from dozens of texts and films stored in electronic libraries; they won't be limited by what we teach, assign, or provide. Because our students can more freely explore a topic, ultimately we won't be able to depend on any two students having studied the topic from exactly the same materials. Information literacy will free students from their traditional information-dependency on us; as a result, responsibility for learning will fall more clearly upon them. As faculty, we should expect to become less prominent as experts who dispense information and answer questions, but we'll become more important as facilitators who help students to locate, critique, and synthesize. The lack of library usage decried by E. L. Boyer (1987) in The Undergraduate Experience won't even be an option; in many courses the amount of student time spent as "library time" (in electronic libraries rather than the traditional campus building) could routinely become equal to class time. "Library science-across-the-curriculum" may become the access ramp of choice to the "information highway."

What could we do now to enhance our ability to educate students in information literacy? A start can be a mere exercise of reflection?looking at our most recent exam in a course to see whether we are emphasizing essential information or reference information, or looking at our most recent syllabus, to see if we have included any unit that will help our students to become information literate.

(This issue of Nutshell Notes was inspired by Information Literacy, Undergraduate Improvement, and the Regional Accreditation Process, a workshop presented by P. S. Breivik, D. L. Parkyn, and R. A. Wolff at the Annual AAHE Meeting held March 23, 1994, in Chicago.)