Metro Net Information Literacy Conference

In June, 4 Rasmussen librarians attended a conference at the U of M St. Paul campus in MN. I was one of the 4. There were three main speakers along with break out sessions. Some interesting points were brought up. Such as students in high school will miss class and ask teachers for make up work and then that expectation is transferred over to college. Kent Pekel, executive director of the College Readiness Consortium, University of MN, recommended a resource from EPIConline.org by David Connelly titled Toward ....College Readiness. He also mentioned www.minnesotapromise.org having an article on the "Bridge to higher learning...". Kent wanted us to know how important it is that high school becomes a bridge to higher learning instead of a gap.

Larry Hardesty, a university librarian for over 30 years, handed out a two page bibliography that came from his talk on how a first year student is similiar to a canary in a coal mine. He talked about first year students information literacy needs and referred to the list of resources as a way to reach them.

The break out session I chose to go to was titled, "Writing Programs and Information Literacy". There was an English teacher and librarian from the U of M talking about how they worked together to create an orientation of the library services using a website as game. The hope is that it will be intergrated into the beginning writing courses online. It is about 45 minutes long. Students are forced to do something on every page so that they have to read the material that is in front of them. This project was still in the beginning stages but they had tested the website last semester in the English teachers' class. The students loved it and said that they liked the hands on experience. The surprising thing to me was that the librarian presenting was telling us how she could not believe that it worked because she did not believe, at first, that students could learn this way. One of the reasons the library team decided to try this way of teaching was because they were being stretched thin for presenting in classrooms.

A high school panel was there and they talked about how the Metronet Intiative helped them move into this century of teaching. These teachers, mostly middle school and high school had never used the Elm databases with their students and were not using computers to teach. They were pretty excited about their achievements and were able to tell us that the students scores were changing and for the better.

Think about it if high school students are not using databases, and I know from my own teaching experience that they aren't, then we are the first person who shows them how to use them. They may have used the internet and other programs but have they been using it reliably before they get to us?

There was a lot more covered at this conference I hope that my collegues who went will fill in the huge blanks I have left.