Tag Archives: general education

Metaliteracy Examined in HigherEdJobs Leadership Publication

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HEJ_Logo_2cTrudi Jacobson and Tom Mackey co-authored a feature article entitled Why You Should Fight for Metaliteracy on Your Campus for the HigherEdJobs leadership newsletter. This publication is sent to approximately 40,000 subscribers at the executive level, including presidents, provosts, and deans. The article was written to support all educators interested in applying metaliteracy in a wide range of disciplines and institutional contexts to advance metaliterate learning. As Jacobson and Mackey (2018) argue in this new essay:

Metaliteracy provides a model for thinking and knowing in a social media age that is fraught with misleading and downright false information from a wide range of questionable sources. Metaliterate learners are developed across many academic disciplines through teaching and learning situations that promote self-direction, collaboration, participation, and metacognitive thinking. This approach requires us to work together and innovate, applying the metaliteracy goals and learning objectives, and supporting institutional partnerships among key stakeholders such as faculty, librarians, and instructional designers.

As noted in this essay, collaborative conversations among key stakeholders at the campus level are ideal to advance metaliteracy initiatives. If you have questions about how to get these conversations started or to share innovative programs already in place, feel free to reach out directly to Trudi Jacobson at tjacobson@albany.edu or Tom Mackey at Tom.Mackey@esc.edu.

Metaliteracy learning objectives inform UAlbany’s new general education learning objectives

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The University at Albany recently made the decision to include four general education competencies within each major. This change, which will take effect for the fall 2014 semester, moves information literacy, critical thinking, oral discourse, and upper level writing (now called advanced writing in the major), from a course-based model to infusion within the major.

As would be expected, many, many task force, committee, and council meetings were part of the process, both leading up to this change in how these competencies are taught, and then developing the supporting structure, including the learning objectives for each. Because departments are mandated to do this but don’t necessarily feel prepared to do so, it has provided an excellent opportunity for information literacy librarians and bibliographers to have meaningful conversations with faculty members about what information literacy really is. And it also provided an opportunity to include elements of metaliteracy into these new learning objectives.

To see the result, take a look at the Campus Initiatives section under the ML in Practice tab.  We hope that this will be just the first of many entries in this section. We would very much like to hear from you if you have something to report. Leave us a comment and we will be in touch.