Trudi Jacobson keynoting at ICIL in South Africa

Trudi Jacobson gave the last international keynote address at the International Conference on Information Literacy (ICIL) at North-West University (NWU) in Vanderbijlpark, South Africa on September 26. Her topic was Creating Shareable Knowledge: Exploring the Synergy between Metaliteracy and Open Pedagogy. She spoke about the components of open educational practices, including open educational resources, open pedagogies, open learning, open sharing of teaching ideas, and open technologies. She then asked participants to put themselves in the role of a student and to consider what might be different about their learning experience if open played a role. (Their responses are here, please feel free to consider the question and add your own ideas.)

Trudi delved into how metaliteracy can both scaffold and add to student learning in open pedagogical settings, using Caroline Sinkinson’s open pedagogy model to make connections. Trudi concluded by exploring the connections in two case studies. One, which was analyzed in-depth, is an information literacy/metaliteracy course in which students contribute to Wikipedia. The second, discussed more briefly, is a political science course in which metaliteracy OER play a large role and encourage elements of open pedagogy. If interested in this latter course, look for an article next year in the International Journal of Open Educational Resources that explores this professor/librarian collaboration in more depth.