Tag Archives: metaliteracy

Metaliteracy Discussed at Westchester Library Association Mid-Winter Conference 2014

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Tom Mackey presented on the topic Promoting Access for All with Open and Online Learning at the Westchester Library Association Mid-Winter Conference at The Gateway Center at Westchester Community College.  The theme of this year’s conference explored distance education and also featured Linda Braun, youth services Manager for Seattle Public Library, and keynote speaker Joe Nocera, Op-Ed columnist for the New York Times and commentator for NPR’s Weekend Edition.  The one-day conference featured Linda Braun’s use of Google Hangouts, Tom Mackey’s discussion about open and online learning, MOOCs, OERs, and Metaliteracy and Joe Nocera’s keynote about digital privacy.   This is the complete PowerPoint presentation by Tom Mackey:

Metaliteracy MOOC Talk Plenary

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We launched Metaliteracy MOOC on September 4 at the University at Albany with colleagues from SUNY Empire State College and the University Libraries. Our opening plenary was facilitated through Blackboard Collaborate and included Tom Mackey, Trudi Jacobson, Tor Loney, Jenna Hecker, Nicola Marae Allain, and our colleagues from the Metaliteracy Learning Collaborative Michele Forte, Kathleen Stone, Mike Daly, and Mark McBride. We were joined in person by three UAlbany students and online by one of our graduate students from Empire State College. The first MOOC Talk was developed in Prezi and provided an overview of key metaliteracy terms, updates on recent metaliteracy activity, and two figures from the Metaliteracy manuscript recently completed by Tom Mackey and Trudi Jacobson for ALA Books. A recording of our first interactive session via Blackboard Collaborate is available at our Topic 1 page at Metaliteracy MOOC. In the spirit of Open SUNY we coordinated shared press releases that have been published at the Empire State College web site and the UAlbany Web site. The live MOOC Talk session was fascinating for us as we facilitated the talk with several presenters, allowing us to look at metaliteracy from multiple perspectives. We were also inspired by the post-MOOC Talk (that we did not record) because it allowed us to talk through the MOOC format itself and it felt very much like a spontaneous seminar about MOOCs. We have also seen an asynchronous conversation unfold via Twitter at #metaliteracy in response to the talk. We look forward to our upcoming MOOC Talks. On September 18 Char Booth will examine “The Metacognitive Dimension of Metaliteracy,” a key aspect of the metaliteracy model.

Metaliteracy in the Disciplines

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Michele Forte, Trudi Jacobson, and Emer O’Keefe were successful in applying for a State University of New York (SUNY) Conversations in the Disciplines about metaliteracy.  This intercampus one-day conference entitled “Developing Metaliterate Learners: Transforming Literacy Across Disciplines” will take place at the Center for Distance Learning (CDL) at Empire State College on Friday, December 13, 2013.

Learners – students and educators alike – are no longer simply information consumers but information producers in a participatory social media environment. Learners increasingly work collaboratively, creating and sharing digital information. We need to be adaptable within an information landscape that is complex and ever-changing. The metaliteracy model emphasizes these evolving literacy concepts, as well as the critical role played by metacognitive components, but many disciplines still view information creation as something done solely through traditional means, and solely by scholars in the field. How might disciplines benefit from new and collaborative modes of information creation? Can traditional models resist the changes wrought by Web 2.0? How might a conversation about expanding these conceptions bring new and fruitful ideas to these fields of study?

Librarians have ample opportunities to learn new theories and methods connected to information literacy in all its guises, but rarely have the chance to engage in macro discussion with disciplinary faculty members about the changes to the intersections of their fields. Usually conversations center around a specific class period, and what the librarian will teach to the professor’s students.

This day of conversation will allow members of both groups to engage together in learning and discussion about cutting-edge topics surrounding metaliteracy, the information literacy of today’s information and technology environment.

Tom Mackey and Trudi Jacobson will provide the keynote presentation to launch the event. Randy Hensley, Head of Information Services at Newman Library, Baruch College, CUNY, will be the afternoon keynote speaker, focusing on the student perspective. There will also be morning and afternoon reactions panels, with librarians and faculty members from community colleges, 4-year schools, a university, and a BOCES participating.

Registration will open shortly, and preference will be given to pairs made up of a librarian and a faculty member in a discipline who plan to attend together.

Meta or MEGA literacy!

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Metaliteracy has been featured recently in two new publications.  A new UNESCO document entitled Media and Information Literacy for Knowledge Societies (2013) provides a brief definition of metaliteracy and makes it central to the conclusion.  According to this new publication:

As an umbrella term, it covers many of the other literacies. It also seems to overlap with new literacies such as multiliteracies and global literacy. It is a metaliteracy. It is transversal in its nature and can be seen as an iceberg concept which is much bigger than what it is seen at first sight. Information literacy can be easily called a megaliteracy which is composed of many other skills and literacies (p. 85).

As a comprehensive and unifying metaliteracy, the idea of a megaliteracy is not needed, since the the meta already encompasses this idea.  But this is an intriguing way to look at it and certainly addresses the interconnected nature of emerging literacies.  Great to see metaliteracy brought into the conversation.

We also note another new publication from Betty Hurley-Dasgupta, Carol Yeager, and Catherine Bliss from SUNY Empire State College about the first MOOC they offered in the SUNY System entitled Creativity and Multicultural Communication.  The authors make several references to metaliteracy in their article cMOOC and Global Learning: An Authentic Alternative in The Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks (JALN).  According to the authors,

Clearly, we need to scaffold the development of metaliteracy skills for learning through cMOOCs. Some scaffolding could be accomplished by incorporating more self-assessment into the MOOC. For future MOOCs, we plan to incorporate shared rubrics to help participants assess their own metaliteracy skills, (Yeager, et.al, 2013, p. 144).

This is an important point that demonstrates the potential impact of a metaliteracy perspective on the cMOOC learning experience, and how learners could gain new insights and knowledge in these open and collaborative spaces.  We definitely need metaliteracy rubrics for MOOCs to enhance the experience for independent and collaborative learners.

Metaliteracy Presentation at ACRL 2013

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Tom Mackey and Trudi Jacobson will present this week at ACRL 2013, the Association of College & Research Libraries Conference in Indianapolis, Indiana. The presentation entitled “What’s in a Name?: Information Literacy, Metaliteracy, or Transliteracy” will explore metaliteracy in relation to other emerging literacy frameworks as well as the metacognitive dimension of the term.  Trudi and Tom will also report out on the progress of the SUNY Innovative Instruction Technology Grant (IITG) that established a metaliteracy learning collaborative and developed new metaliteracy learning objectives (available at this blog) with SUNY colleagues.  Follow our Twitter feed during the conference at #acrlname

Metaliteracy Wordle

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Metaliteracy Wordle

This is a word cloud of the article “Reframing Information Literacy as a Metaliteracy” using Wordle.net. The site creates an image based on the words that are used most often in the text. In this example we can see that the term “information literacy” is used quite a bit as the article argues for a reframing and refers to other literacy types as well as trends in social media and online communities. We may use a word cloud as part of our presentation at ACRL in a few weeks.

UNESCO Papers Cite Metaliteracy

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Two new essays in a series of research papers published by UNESCO cite metaliteracy and promote the framework.  The series is entitled Conceptual Relationship of Information Literacy and Media Literacy in Knowledge Societies and includes an essay authored by Dr. Alice Y. L. Lee, Associate Professor at the Department of Journalism from the Hong Kong Baptist University in China entitled “Literacy and Competencies Required to Participate in Knowledge Societies: WSIS+10: Overview and Analysis of WSIS Action Lines C3 Access to Knowledge and C9 Media.”  Lee references our article “Reframing Information Literacy as a Metaliteracy” and summarizes several key points reinforcing that “metaliteracies are critical thinking and collaboration abilities in a digital age that provide a comprehensive framework from which to effectively participate in social media and online communities” (25).  In a second essay entitled “Conceptual Relationship of Information Literacy and Media Literacy: Consideration within the broader Mediacy and Metaliteracy Framework” Dr. Toni Carbo, Teaching Professor at Drexel University’s College of Information Science and Technology (The iSchool) states that “Metaliteracy comes full circle to the concepts introduced originally by Zurkowski and in ‘Mediacy’ in 1997 and expands the context into social media and the civil society” (99).  Carbo concludes her essay by stating: “This suggests an important role for UNESCO in bringing together both experts and other individuals from different cultures, age groups and disciplines to shape a true Metaliteracy program to improve the quality of life for all” (99).  We appreciate this recent attention to the metaliteracy framework and agree that it has broader implications for how we understand literacy in larger global contexts.  Perhaps our new learning objectives could advance this idea further.

The Latest Metaliteracy Scoop!

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Thanks to a recommendation from Sue Thomas we are exploring the social media site Scoop.it.  We now have a curated space on the topic of Metaliteracy.  This is a visually interesting and dynamic site that allows us to scoop postings related to metaliteracy, transliteracy, open learning, OERs, and MOOCs.  Feel free to follow the scoop.it page on metaliteracy and offer suggestions.

3T’s Presentation: Metaliteracy in Practice

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Last week’s 3T’s 2013 Conference at Empire State College was an inspiration for everyone who attended.  Sue Thomas was outstanding and provided us with an engaging and compelling keynote address.  In the afternoon session Trudi Jacobson, Tom Mackey, and Greg Bobish presented on metaliteracy with a presentation entitled “Metaliteracy in Practice: Metaliteracy sounds great but how do I teach it?”  This presentation includes reference to our article on this topic Reframing Information Literacy as a Metaliteracy as well as a preview of the book manuscript currently under development Metaliteracy for the Open Age of Social Media for ALA Books.