Overview of the User Education Program
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The Challenge
The University of Minnesota has taken many steps to improve undergraduate education with our emphasis on smaller class sizes, through the writing intensive requirements, with the development of freshman seminars, by the increased number of senior faculty teaching freshmen, and planning for the Center for Freshman Studies. These improvements are significant, but will they ensure our graduates’ success in the 21st Century? Are they preparing students to thrive in the Information Age?
The explosive growth of the Internet combined with annual quadrupling of information will define and drive the first decades of the 21st Century. The Internet permeates every aspect of our lives and every profession and business. It has created a new frontier of immense opportunity as well as great risk. It has moved us from the dawn of the Information Age to the full-blown Information Society and Information Economy. The best and worst minds as well as most and least reputable organizations and business are now accessible to anyone with a computer and a modem.
By the time they graduate, our students have developed a well honed but finite set of information technology skills; they know how to use word processing programs, to communicate with e-mail and how to access the Internet. These skills alone are not enough. They do not equip students to use effectively the overwhelming amount of information now available. Increasingly faculty and instructors are limiting the number of Internet sources that can be used as sources for papers. In recent interviews and focus groups arranged by the University Libraries, faculty and teaching assistants complained of poor research papers and ill-prepared students. Students are taking most of their sources from the Internet and most are "not quality sources" or are "really questionable." One frustrated faculty admitted that he had no idea how to help his students sort out "the garbage" they find. Networked information and the Internet have fundamentally changed how information is found and used by University students. The traditional guarantors of information quality, such as faculty and librarians, are now easily by-passed, leaving the full responsibility of making quality information choices with the individual student.
Addressing this Challenge: Information Literacy
Information literacy is a concept that librarians and educators developed over the last decade. It refers to a set of competencies students need to be effective information consumers and creators in the information society. These information literacy competencies include understanding the structure of information and knowledge, creating and executing strategies for finding the needed information, analyzing and evaluating the information, and synthesizing and integrating information so it can be used to complete an assignment or solve a problem. These competencies are essential to becoming a master student as well as to working and living successfully in an information society. They are the very skills needed for life-long learning.
Information literacy depends on cooperation among classroom faculty, academic administrators, librarians and other information professionals. In order to effectively implement a program all parties must be involved. (from: "Information Literacy in a Nutshell: Basic Information for Academic Administrators and Faculty")
The University Libraries’ User Education Program
Between face-to-face contact with students, work on curriculum committees, consultation with classroom instructors, and the wide reach of many of our educational web tools, librarians reach tens of thousands of students a year.
The Libraries’ User Education Program is a multi-pronged, system-wide effort designed to reach out to students in multiple ways including:
- orientations to the services and resources we offer in the University Libraries,
- tours of many of our facilities,
- walk-in workshops on general topics (such as MNCAT or EndNote, a bibliographic citation database),
- a sequence of workshops designed to meet the needs of first year students (Unravel the Library workshop series)
- specific course-related instruction and consultation, and in some cases,
- credit-based courses designed to address information literacy.
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Questions, Comments, Suggestions?
Jerilyn Veldof
612-624-1529, jveldof@tc.umn.edu