Digital Natives and Information Literacy

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Digital Natives, Digital Wills, Information Literacy, Passwords, Tech Tips

I recently gave my Digital Natives program at the Kirkwood Community Colleges Collaborative Learning Days. Here are the notes and links. Even if you haven’t heard the program I think they may prove useful.

You hear the term Digital Native tossed around a lot about young people today. A true digital native would be information literate. Information Literacy, making sure people can find, evaluate for quality, and use the information that they need and think critically about it, is a big part of any library. This presentation will point out practical points that you can help people learn to evaluate and secure information. Topics covered will include website evaluation, how the Internet becomes an echo chamber of your beliefs, how to build better passwords, and the importance of a digital will.

Below you will find the links that I used in the program. I think you will find them interesting. I’ve also included a few links that I didn’t use in the program, but I think would be of interest.

Find an early version of this program online courtesy of the State Library of Iowa.

Links from Presentation And More

Information Literacy –

making sure people can find, evaluate for quality and use the information that they need

Find the longer definition from Association for College and Research Libraries.

Four Generations

Kao, Grace, Elizabeth Vaquera, and Kimberly Goyette. Education and Immigration. Hoboken: Wiley, 2013.

What Students Know

 What Do They Know? Dismissing a Viral Presumption About Millennials
– Eszter Hargittai Delaney Family Professor, Communication Studies Department, Northwestern University (Quote in Program)

“Cybercrime: Hacking Goes Way Beyond Simple Identity Theft” Marc Goodman –

Do Students Know When News Is Fake?

Online Things You Should Know

Constantly Online – Pew Research

Control Key Commands List

Alt-Key Symbols List

PhotoPin to find Copyright Commons Photos

Gizmodo’s 25 Mostly Commonly Stolen Passwords from 2015

Human Memory Isn’t Good Unless It Has Been Trained
“we live in a world of misquotes.”

Password Hints from Kirkwood Community College

Echo Chamber article in Wired

Double Check sources

Echo Chamber of Belief  explained – Sometimes You’re Wrong

Echo Chamber of Beliefs example – Red and Blue Feeds Side by Side

Quote Investigator

Snopes Urban Legends

Charity Watch

Directory of Finding Out If People Truly Said It

Death Hoaxes and Like Farming

What You Leave Behind

Sad story of auto payments – woman found dead after 5 years

Digital Will Basics in Slate

Digital Will from DC Bar

Information Literacy Awareness

 

Celebrate National Information Literacy Awareness Month

From the Information Security Office:

Iowa Information Security Office provides the Information Security Awareness Training – Summary 2016 is available to public library staff at no charge.  Libraries that would like to add their staff may contact me. I need the following information for each account created:

• First name
• Last name
• Email address (Note: each user must have a separate email address. Shared accounts are not permitted)

The office also has security awareness handouts (bookmarks and brochures) available to libraries at no charge. Libraries that would like handouts may contact office.

Alison Radl, MPA, MS-InfAs
State of Iowa
Information Security Office
SecurityAwareness@iowa.gov
515-725-2019

Design Literacy

Do you use these design principles?

Sarah S. Uthoff is the main force behind Trundlebed Tales striving to bring the History, Mystery, Magic and Imagination of Laura Ingalls Wilder and other greats of children’s literature and history to life for a new generation. Uthoff is a nationally known Laura Ingalls Wilder authority and has presented at five of the Wilder homesites, many conferences and numerous libraries, museums, and events around the Midwest. Attend one of her programs, schedule one yourself, watch her videos, listen to her podcast, and find her onFacebook, Twitter,  Google+,  LinkedIn, and Academia.edu. Professionally she is a reference librarian at Kirkwood Community College and director of the Oxford (Iowa) Public Library.

Do You Know What Librarians Can Do to Help Your Classes?

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Information Literacy, Librarians, Mary Ann Cullen, Orientations

This time we have a special guest post republished with permission. We made a few small edits mostly in formatting. Enjoy these assignment suggestions from
Mary Ann Cullen
Library – Director for Alpharetta Center and GPC Online
Perimeter College in Georgia

1.     Help Your Students Find Appropriate Topics
Librarian can give suggestions, require or instruct students how to find a good topic. Many times students get discouraged if their topic is too broad, too narrow, or too difficult to research. Our experience can help steer students away from topics impossible to research with the resources available.

2.    Come to Your Classroom
Are you sure your students really know how to research? Invite a librarian to your class.  Instruction is most effective if the assignment has already been given and the students have started to realize that they don’t know how to complete the task.  By providing the librarian with the assignment, the librarian will be able to focus the instruction so it is most relevant and helpful to the students. There is no way we can cover everything there is to know about library research in a single 45 minute session! Feel free to ask us back!

3.      Test Your Assignment
Test your assignment yourself, especially if you’ve given the students a fairly focused topic.  Kirkwood Libraries have a terrific collection of print and electronic resources, but we do not have the same types of resources as a large research institution.  Sometimes needed materials don’t exist – period. You won’t find a research paper over a topic that’s local. Pick a sample topic the students are likely to choose and try using the library resources to complete the assignment. If you can’t do it, neither can they!

4.      Be Specific About What Resources They Can Use
Tell the students what kinds of resources are acceptable very specifically.   Will you allow documents from the open web?  What about if the students limit their web resources to .gov sites – especially if they need statistics?  Are you
counting information or article databases as web resources? What do you mean by scholarly article, anything from a scholarly publication or only research studies? Do you only want research studies or would qualitative or summative articles work?  Without such guidance, students are likely to do all their research on Wikipedia or go to the opposite extreme and refuse to use electronic resources at all.  With more and more scholarly sources and government statistics published in electronic-only format, it is no longer practical to limit students to print resources, but neither is Wikipedia an acceptable source in scholarly research.  Depending on the topic and the seriousness of the scholarship required, students need guidance understanding what sources are appropriate and why.

5.      Make Plagiarism Hard To Do
Make your assignment plagiarism-resistant by requiring a particular combination of resources or by asking “what if” questions that are not likely to be found written about elsewhere.

6.      Stress That Research Comes Before Writing Papers
Make sure students understand that research comes before writing the paper.  Many students come to the library reference desk and announce they’re done writing the paper, now they just need some resources.  While this may be better than the opposite extreme of just writing a report with no thoughts of their own, it defeats the point of doing research before reaching a
conclusion!

7.      Consider Grading the Process
Grading the process and not just the product.  Students are more likely to actively engage in the research process (and less likely to plagiarize!) if you require them to turn in intermediate steps, such as their topics, a preliminary list of resources (along with the first page or abstracts of the resources), a rough draft, etc.

Information Literacy Post Roundup 2015

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Information Literacy, National Information Literacy Awareness Month

We’ve wrapped up another National Information Literacy Awareness Month, but let’s take a minute and look back on our previous posts. It’s never too late to think about information literacy.

What is Information Literacy?

• Introduction to the Month
• What is Information Literacy?
• Iowa Official Proclamation of National Information Literacy Awareness Month
• President of United States proclaims NILAM
• New Books Related to Information Literacy

Things to Think and Know About

• Asking Good Questions
• Copyright
• Have a Plan for an Online Afterlife
• Online Activities and Job Hunting
• Passwords
• Privacy
• Social Media

Keep calm, think it through and we’ll be back with more helpful tips next year!

Sarah Uthoff is a reference library at Kirkwood Community College. LIKE the Kirkwood Community College Library on Facebook and find links to Sarah all over the web at her About Me Profile.

Do You Know About Lost Flashdrives?

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Flashdrives, Information Literacy, Lost and Found, National Information Literacy Awareness Month, Newsletter

By far the most common thing in our lost and found is lost flashdrives. It’s all too easy to be printing something out and then be so concentrated on the paper copy that you forget to grab your flashdrive and in some cases even to log off of the computer. We get roughly half a dozen flashdrives/memory sticks/thumb drives every day. Ninety percent of them are either Kirkwood designed or, more commonly, black.

We urge you to take a minute right now and create a word document called This Belongs To, put in your contact information, and save it to your flashdrive. In order to speed its return if someone finds it. Adding something unique like a wrist band also speeds identification.

If a flashdrive is turned into the library we turn it over to the library lost and found located at the Circulation Desk. Students return to the library asking for these more than any other lost item so we hold them here a week. After that we turn them over to the main campus lost and found located at 230 Iowa Hall, phone number 398-5578 (they answer as student life, just ask for lost and found).

Links to Some of The Books Recently Added to the Collection:

• Picture Books on Emotional Subjects
• Children’s Books
• Information Literacy

Our Special Display This Month

From last month Banned Books Month

• Banned Books Week – What Is Happening This Year
• Banned Books – The Bible?
• Updated Banned Books Lists 2015

Check out Halloween themed books until the end of the month.

Event – Exam Cram

Save the day for special events in the library to help you relax and blow off steam before Finals Week begins. Hold December 1st to come visit us at the Cedar Rapids campus.

EVENT – National Information Literacy Awareness Month

This month we urge people to stop and think about how they receive, use, evaluate, and apply information. Learn more from the national organization.

• Introduction to the Month
• New Books Related to Information Literacy
• Privacy
• Asking Good Questions
• Online Activities and Job Hunting

Event – Misc.

The Library also celebrated Back to the Future Day (the day when, according to the movies, Marty McFly came to the future).

Research Tips

Do you know you can check out books from the University of Iowa?

And remember you contact us at the library any time by phone, e-mail, chat, or stop on by! We’re always glad to see you!

Information Literacy: Online Privacy and Job Hunting

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Information Literacy, Job Hunting, National Information Literacy Awareness Month, Online Privacy, privacy

Here’s a little secret about the Internet, what you do online everybody can see.  That doesn’t sound like a secret, but you’d be surprised how many people act like it is. That everybody isn’t limited to your friends or  to your social group, it includes future potential employers, loan officers, etc.  It’s important to be aware of that when you’re posting online. Go through this presentation from SlideShare for a lot of good advice at your own pace. Highlights include have separate accounts for work and play and periodically check to see what you’ve put online because you might not remember and what other people have put online about you. Have you searched for yourself lately?

Jobhunting and the Absence of Online Privacy from Jim Stroud

Sarah Uthoff is a reference library at Kirkwood Community College. LIKE the Kirkwood Community College Library on Facebook and find links to Sarah all over the web at her About Me Profile.

Information Literacy Importance of Good Questions

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A More Beautiful Question, Information Literacy, National Information Literacy Awareness Month, Right Question, Walter Berger

Research shows that innovations and breakthroughs are often triggered by somebody asking the right question. Journalist Walter Berger puts it “you find at the root of it all is a great question; a beautiful question of someone asking why isn’t someone doing this or what if someone tried to do that?”

To ask the right question, the great question, the beautiful question you need to ask a lot of them. This is a problem because while little kids start out asking a ton of questions, school and society are set up to discourage question asking. K-12 schools especially tend to focus on the importance of memorizing answers rather than creating your own questions.

So start asking more questions. It will not only be good for you as you learn more, it will also be good for society. So ask questions whether in school, on the job or in life.

Berger’s book, A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas, is available here at Kirkwood Community College Library Services at call number 658.4 B496m at the Cedar Rapids campus.

Berger also recommends checking out the

Right Question Institute:
http://rightquestion.org/

Sarah Uthoff is a reference library at Kirkwood Community College. LIKE the Kirkwood Community College Library on Facebook and find links to Sarah all over the web at her About Me Profile.

Information Literacy: Privacy

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ACLU, Information Literacy, National Information Literacy Awareness Month, privacy

Today many people accept surveillance without a thought. They tell everyone where they are with GPS on their phones. They click all sorts of acceptances that mean companies can access your information for contacts, profiles, actions and interests and the same for as many of your friends that it can reach through your connection. They store things on Google Drive which Google mines for information and so on. Most of the time people don’t even think about it, but during Information Literacy Month, let’s take a moment to do exactly that.

The American Civil Liberties Union has produced a booklet detailing the chilling effect that this surveillance can have. So take a look and think about what give away about yourself and your actions even if you “have nothing to hide.”

https://www.aclu.org/technology-and-liberty/something-hide-writers-and-artists-against-surveillance-state

Sarah Uthoff is a reference library at Kirkwood Community College. LIKE the Kirkwood Community College Library on Facebook and find links to Sarah all over the web at her About Me Profile.

New Books: Information Literacy

Tags

Information Literacy, National Information Literacy Awareness Month, New Books

October is National Information Literacy Awareness Month. According to Wesleyan University information literacy is: “Information literacy is a crucial skill in the pursuit of knowledge. It involves recognizing when information is needed and being able to efficiently locate, accurately evaluate, effectively use, and clearly communicate information in various formats.” Read more about their discussion.

Call Number: 020.285 P159b Title: Biblio Tech:Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google Author: John Palfrey

Call Number: 153.15 C273h Title: How We Learn: The Surprising Truth About When, Where, and Why It Happens Author: Benedict Carey

Call Number: 153.42 L579o Title: The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload Author: Daniel J. Levitin

Call Number: 153.8 L653c Title: Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends On It Author: Ian Leslie

Call Number: 302.23 K264i Title: The Internet is NOT the Answer Author: Andrew Keen

Call Number: 303.48 P388s Title: Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread – The Lessons from a New Science Author: Alex Pentland

Call Number: 303.483 R953p Title: Present Shock: When Everything Happens NOW Author: Douglas Rushkoff

Call Number: 343.099 M657p Title: Privacy in the New Media Age Author: Jon L. Mills

Call Number: 346.73 S924c Title: The Copyright Book: A Practical Guide (5th ed.) Author: William S. Strong

Call Number: 364.16 L665f Title: Free Ride: How Digital Parasites are Destroying The Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back Author: Robert Levine

Call Number: 573.86 S972b Title: Brain Architecture: Understanding the Basic Plan (2nd ed) Author: Larry W. Swanson

Call Number: 616.042 M687i Title: Inheritance: How Our Genes Change Our Lives and Our Lives Change Our Genes Author: Sharon Moalem

Call Number: 658.4 B B496m Title: A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas Author: Warren Berger

Sarah Uthoff is a reference library at Kirkwood Community College. LIKE the Kirkwood Community College Library on Facebook and find links to Sarah all over the web at her About Me Profile.

Information Literacy Copyright

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Copyright, Creative Commons, Information Literacy, Information Literacy Awareness Month, National Information Awareness, National Information Literacy Awareness Month, User License Agreement

 During the month of October we have been doing posts relating to National Information Literacy Awareness Month and how you can increase your information literacy. This is our last Information Literacy post of this year. We hope you have enjoyed them. Leave a comment if you have a question or suggestion for a topic for next October. In today’s post, we’re taking a brief look at copyright.

Copyright is a complicated subject so this is just going to skim the surface, but I think the basic facts will be helpful. It’s such a complicated subject that most such summaries include a sentence like, this is NOT legal advice and I am NOT a lawyer, contact a lawyer for further information (so there’s mine). Copyright is, at its most basic, a right to copy. It was designed to encourage production of new ideas and writings by making sure people could make enough money off their work to keep them producing more. Copyright is also designed to expire (although laws keep pushing that date farther and farther away) so that the general population could build on and expand on those previously created works building new things and creations for the good of society. For example, Walt Disney Productions can take out of copyright fairytales like Snow White collected by the Brothers Grimm and make the movie Snow White or Seth Grahame-Smith can take the out of copyright novel Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen and make Pride and Prejudice with Zombies.

Anytime you make a copy of a work still under copyright protection, without permission or without falling within fair use guidelines, you have violated the laws governing copyright. Some things to keep in mind as a student:

• Not everything you copy or manipulate for a class is considered fair use (otherwise known as OK to do) because you are a student.
• That fact that it’s technically easy to use someone else’s work (to download, copy, manipulate, paste in a paper or a PowerPoint, etc.), doesn’t mean it’s legal to do so.
• There are places where people post stuff that they want you to copy, so you can use them without asking permission, for example Creative Commons. You can find creative commons photos by searching Photo Pin.
• Even when you are using something with permission, most people require a photo credit or a citation giving credit that you are using their work in your project.
• You may think it’s OK to do something because you get away with breaking copyright law once, but if you are caught the consequences can be a cease-and-desist order, a fine, or even a lawsuit. The fact that you had done it many times before without getting in trouble won’t help your case.
• When you sign up for some program or website (like Facebook or Pinterest) you are often asked to click agree on something called Terms and Conditions. When you click agree make sure you understand that you are agreeing to abide to stricter measures on copyright and giving up control of your work among other things. It’s a good idea to actually read them before clicking.
• When you buy a program, etc. it often comes with the license, and license restrictions are often much, much stricter than copyright. By agreeing to the license you are agreeing to follow these stricter rules, but again make sure you know what they are before you agree to them.

Learn more about copyright for students with this handout from Iowa Area Education Agencies:
http://www.iowaaeaonline.org/vnews/display.v/ART/48d13d04446d2

See past Kirkwood related blog posts on:

• Facebook and Copyright
  https://kirkwoodlibrary.wordpress.com/2012/11/27/facebook-and-copyright
• Copyright Tools (including those specifically for Kirkwood Students and Faculty)
  https://kirkwoodlibrary.wordpress.com/2012/09/12/copyright-tools-from-the-university-of-minnesota
• Not Everything is on the Internet
  https://kirkwoodlibrary.wordpress.com/2013/10/17/everything-is-not-on-the-internet

Also find books on copyright in the collection around 346 and many more are available as e-books through the catalog.

Sarah Uthoff is a reference library at Kirkwood Community College. LIKE the Kirkwood Community College Library on Facebook and find links to Sarah all over the web at her About Me Profile.

 

 

Information Literacy Older Americans Online

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Information Literacy, Information Literacy Awareness Month, Older Americans, Seniors

During the rest of October we will be doing posts relating to National Information Literacy Awareness Month and how you can increase your information literacy. In today’s post were looking at how to be smart about passwords.

There is a saying that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but the saying proves false when it comes to older Americans and Internet use. While they still lag behind the numbers of the general population, the percent of older Americans who reported they went online once a week jumped up 6% from last year to a new record of 59%. Once seniors start going online they tend to be very active. Smart phones hold the least interest from them, but cell phones are widely used. Social media doesn’t hold a big appeal, but reading devices like tablets and e-readers hold more interest (probably because they are light to hold and they can easily adjust text size).

There are two main groups of seniors, one who is more affluent and better educated and one less affluent and educated. The more affluent the more likely they are to go online regularly and use things like social media. Older adults who don’t get involved online tend to have three reasons; physical challenges to using technology, skeptical attitudes about the benefits of technology, and difficulties learning to use new technologies.

Read more about it in this report from the Pew Foundation:

http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/04/03/older-adults-and-technology-use/

Sarah Uthoff is a reference library at Kirkwood Community College. LIKE the Kirkwood Community College Library on Facebook and find links to Sarah all over the web at her About Me Profile.