New Metaliteracy Article Published in ACRL News

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Are you embracing and advocating for metaliteracy?

Read the new article by Valerie J. Hill and Thomas P. Mackey published in ACRL News entitled Embracing Metaliteracy: Metamodern libraries and virtual learning communities to explore the benefits of engaging with metaliteracy in today’s fractured information environment. This essay explores the theory of metamodernism and virtual library communities through the lens of metaliteracy. According to Hill and Mackey:

As educators strive to deal with this information flood in a world of partisan politics and questionable content, critical and reflective thinking are required to better understand this philosophical moment and one’s role in it. Metaliteracy promotes the development of metaliterate digital citizens who are civic-minded and effectively produce content in a participatory networked culture (Hill & Mackey, 2021, p. 220).

As part of this article, the Community Virtual Library (CVL) in Second Life is analyzed through the four primary goals of metaliteracy. Valerie J. Hill is the director of the CVL and provides insights about related programming in this virtual library community such as the annual Dickens Project that features a reading of A Christmas Carol and historical simulations.

Thanks to Trudi E. Jacobson for reading a draft of the article and providing feedback!

Hill, V., & Mackey, T. (2021). Embracing metaliteracy: Metamodern libraries and virtual learning communities. College & Research Libraries News, 82(5), 219.

Metaliteracy: Engaging Students Through Assessment as Learning

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Profs. Trudi Jacobson and Tom Mackey delivered the keynote address entitled Metaliteracy: Engaging Students through Assessment as Learning at the Second Virtual Training Session 4th National Meeting of Information Literacy Competencies. This virtual event was hosted by the University of Puerto Rico in February and the presentation is now available as a recording on YouTube.

This presentation explores both the theory and practice of metaliteracy with a particular emphasis on assessment as learning. The following topics are covered:

  • Engaging Students in Learning
    • Developing a Metaliterate Mindset
  • Metaliteracy and Open Learning
  • Metaliteracy and Assessment
  • Integrating Assessment through Metaliteracy in Your Setting

In addition to the recording, feel free to explore the slide deck for ideas about ways to apply metaliteracy to your own teaching strategies.

We welcome any feedback or ideas that you have and when you adapt one of these techniques to your own setting let us know!

Trudi and Tom

Help Needed to Publish a Metaliteracy Article in Wikipedia

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"Wikipedia" by giulia.forsythe is marked with CC0 1.0

Will you join in the effort to enhance a Wikipedia article about Metaliteracy?

(“Wikipedia” by giulia.forsythe, CC0 1.0)

Wikipedia is used by so many people to learn about topics they are interested in. But if they want to learn more about Metaliteracy, they won’t have much luck. A search on the word “metaliteracy” in Wikipedia yields two results, very brief mentions in the Information Literacy and Transliteracy articles. There have been efforts in the past to get an article included specifically on Metaliteracy. Now, once more, the draft Metaliteracy article that began with these earlier efforts has been restored for editing. This latest draft needs additional content before being considered for permanent status. It would be tremendous if the effort this time were successful.

Are you available to work on a new draft of a Wikipedia article about metaliteracy? An educator in Canada is analyzing how the article might be shaped to address the reasons earlier efforts were unsuccessful. Her analysis can be seen on the Talk page for the draft. She is continuing to work on the page, but is new to metaliteracy and would love to have assistance. Tom, Trudi, and Kelsey are unable to work on it, as per Wikipedia’s policies. While we post all of our open content via Metaliteracy.org, including a concise definition at our About page, our latest Publications, and Metaliteracy in Practice, it would be great to reach an even wider audience through Wikipedia. Types of additions that are particularly needed are information about metaliteracy applications by others, and connections between metaliteracy and other pedagogical frameworks.

If you have already edited Wikipedia, feel free to jump right in and join the conversation on the Talk page. If you’ve never edited Wikipedia, learning to do so is not hard, and it is actually quite fun and satisfying! There are numerous resources available to help you learn how to edit. Here are just a few of them:

The Wikipedia Adventure: Learn to edit Wikipedia in under an hour! Accomplish 7 missions and you are good to go! Unfortunately, the adventure doesn’t work on tablets and other mobile devices.

Student training modules: Trudi’s students learn quite quickly how to edit Wikipedia by working through some of these concise yet extraordinarily helpful modules. Ignore the mention of the student dashboard, and jump right in. If you’ve completed The Wikipedia Adventure and want a refresher on some topics, this would be a great way to access that information.

Contributing to Wikipedia: A one-page guide to get you started.

If you need help once you start editing, the best place to ask questions is the welcoming Teahouse.

We hope you can help us make the Metaliteracy Wikipedia article a reality!

Trudi, Tom, and Kelsey

New Metaliteracy Book to be Published in Summer 2021

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The new metaliteracy book written by Tom Mackey and Trudi Jacobson will be published by ALA/Neal Schuman in summer 2021!

The fourth metaliteracy book in a series is entitled Metaliteracy in a Connected World: Developing Learners as Producers and will focus specifically on the metaliterate learner as informed and ethical producer of information in collaborative social settings. The Foreword to this book will be written by Jako Olivier, UNESCO Chair on Multimodal Learning, and OER Professor in Multimodal Learning, North-West University, South Africa.

In this newest book in their series, the authors carefully examine the central role of learners as producers of information, a foundational idea for the metaliteracy framework and one that’s more important than ever in our current media and information environment. They emphasize the active role today’s learners play as individual and collaborative metaliterate producers of information in various forms, including writing, digital stories, digital artifacts, and multimedia productions. The authors explore a range of connected social settings from online courses to social media to open learning environments. 

(https://www.alastore.ala.org/mlitproducers)

We are excited to announce the forthcoming publication of our next book and will provide updates via Metaliteracy.org as we get closer to the publication date so stay tuned!

Best,

Tom and Trudi

Metaliteracy Presentation During SUNY Online’s Open Education Week, March 1-5

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SUNY Online has just published their schedule of events for 2021’s Open Education Week.There are a number of presentations from Monday, March 1 to Friday March 5, several of which fit in well with the very metaliterate idea of learner as producer.

On Tuesday, March 2 at 10:00 ET, Trudi will be presenting “Enhancing Student Engagement Through Scaffolded Non-Disposable Assignments,” in which metaliteracy will be playing a starring role! At least one of her current students plans to participate, providing his views as a counterpoint.

Perhaps you will be able to attend one or more of the sessions. The registration link is available on the schedule of events page.

New Metaliterate Learner Characteristics Video

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A new video illustrating the metaliterate learner characteristics has been added to the Metaliteracy YouTube channel. The video completes a series that introduces the core metaliteracy components, including the learning domains, learner roles and characteristics.

Metaliterate Learner Characteristics CC-BY The Metaliteracy Learning Collaborative

The videos depict metaliterate learning in action: a learner considers the impact of the affective domain when seeking information on a topic about which they are particularly passionate (and perhaps biased); a metaliterate author creates a digital story that ethically incorporates repurposed content; and civic-minded citizens work together to create trusting online spaces by developing and enacting community guidelines. The examples in the videos, by no means exhaustive, encourage self-reflection as viewers contemplate the roles, characteristics, and domains they employ as metaliterate learners. The videos also emphasize that metaliterate learning is a continual, reflective process and prompt learners to consider the aspects with which they identify as well as those toward which they aspire.

Do you have ideas for how you might incorporate these resources into your teaching? Please feel free to embed the videos into your lessons and tell us about it in the comments! We’d love to know more about your ideas and practices.

Metaliteracy Keynote at the University of Puerto Rico Virtual Event

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Profs. Trudi Jacobson and Tom Mackey have been invited to provide a keynote address on metaliteracy at a virtual event hosted by the University of Puerto Rico on February 11, 2021. This new presentation, entitled Metaliteracy: Engaging Students through Assessment as Learning, will occur during the Second Virtual Training Session 4th National Meeting of Information Literacy Competencies. Registration for this event is open at: https://lnkd.in/eeyEtjt. We look forward to seeing you virtually! – Trudi & Tom

Virtual Conference Features Metaliteracy Keynote

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A new metaliteracy keynote entitled The Role of Metaliteracy in Designing Open Learning Initiatives was presented by Profs. Tom Mackey and Trudi Jacobson at the virtual conference Intercultural Perspectives on Information Literacy on January 30, 2021. This international event is an outcome of the “Intercultural perspectives on Information Literacy” project led by Prof. Dr. Joachim Griesbaum from Hildesheim University, Germany. This international collaboration connects the Department for Information Science and Natural Language Processing, Hildesheim University Germany and Symbiosis College of Arts and Commerce, Pune, India. The conference YouTube Channel features recorded sessions, including the keynote.

This new presentation addresses today’s fractured information environment and how metaliteracy can be applied in these challenging times. Trudi and Tom talk about ways to rebuild trust in these environments through metaliteracy and to share ideas about how to design open learning initiatives with this model.

New Metaliteracy Resource with Reflective Guiding Questions

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With this post, Tom and Trudi would like to welcome Kelsey O’Brien, a key member of the Metaliteracy Learning Collaborative, as a regular contributor of blog posts with us. Kelsey’s contributions to metaliteracy have involved the creation of a number of videos, the enhancement of visual models as evidenced by the one featured in this post, participation in creating metaliteracy learning resources including the iSucceed module (#11) and collaborating with us on the MOOCs Metaliteracy: Empowering Yourself in a Connected World and Empowering Yourself in a Post-Truth World, and her expert oversight of the digital badging content. Kelsey is an Information Literacy Librarian at the University at Albany, SUNY.

A new integrated metaliteracy figure combines three core metaliteracy components: the four learning domains, the learner characteristics, and the learner roles. Each of the components in this interactive resource features a set of guiding questions that help learners reflect on their own developing characteristics and roles. The questions are designated with their associated learning domains, highlighting the multi-faceted nature of metaliterate learning and encouraging learners to consider how they embody the domains and characteristics in their roles as participants, producers, collaborators, and teachers.

Consider the rings of the diagram as able to spin, so that the combinations of domains, roles and characteristics are changeable, as they are in real life. These essential elements are reinforced by the goals and learning objectives that constitute the fourth component of the metaliteracy framework. Click on the elements in the figure for guiding questions connected to each learning domain, characteristic, and learner role (or download the Integrated Metaliterate Learner Figure with Guiding Questions as a PDF).

Integrated Metaliterate Learner Figure  (Mackey & Jacobson, Metaliteracy in a Connected World: Developing Learners as Producers, 2021) (Figure design by Kelsey O’Brien using Genially)

This figure will appear in the book, Metaliteracy in a Connected World: Developing Learners as Producers, co-authored by Tom and Trudi, due out from Neal-Schuman/ALA Editions in later 2021.

Metaliteracy Keynote to be Featured at International Online Conference

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Registration is now open for the online conference Intercultural Perspectives on Information Literacy that will feature a keynote presentation on metaliteracy by Profs. Tom Mackey and Trudi Jacobson on January 30, 2021. This first metaliteracy keynote of the new year will explore The Role of Metaliteracy in Designing Open Learning Initiatives.

This international conference is a part of the  “Intercultural perspectives on Information Literacy” project that “pursues the goal of establishing a common learning space in which students from different countries can learn together and thus fundamentally build up intercultural competence” (About the project). This project is a collaboration between the Department for Information Science and Natural Language Processing, Hildesheim University Germany and Symbiosis College of Arts and Commerce Pune, India. The project team is led by project manager Prof. Dr. Joachim Griesbaum, Hildesheim University.

As noted in the keynote description:

The metaliteracy model supports the design of open learning initiatives by reinforcing the value of ethical and responsible information production and sharing, and by scaffolding learners as they step into new roles that accompany open learning opportunities. These scenarios often include the opportunity to design and contribute to the communal learning environment. This presentation will describe the metaliteracy model and its intersections with open learning, and conclude by showcasing two initiatives that embody this approach.

As part of this presentation, Profs. Mackey and Jacobson will discuss the metaliteracy model within the context of today’s complex information environment. The presentation will reference the two recently published articles in Communications in Information Literacy, including Analyzing Information Sources Through the Lens of the ACRL Framework: A Case Study of Wikipedia by Prof. Jacobson and Embedding Metaliteracy in the Design of a Post-Truth MOOC: Building Communities of Trust by Prof. Mackey.

The full conference program is available here: https://ipil.blog.uni-hildesheim.de/conference-programme/.

We look forward to seeing you bright and early at 5:30am EST on January 30, 2021!

Tom and Trudi