Small and Rural Libraries Leading via TV Whitespace Networking Technology

This article describes TV Whitespace (TVWS) technology and the role it can play in addressing access and inclusion, developing distributed programming, and supporting crisis response. Focus is placed on the Pa-cific Northwest as a context for TVWS and the ways in which small and rural communities are uniquely suited to implement TVWS networks. A series of steps are provided for libraries interested in exploring the design and implementation of a new network. Finally, a preview of expected costs and anticipated per-formance is discussed

Designing rich information experiences to shape learning outcomes

Students in higher education typically learn to use information as part of their course of study, which is intended to support ongoing academic, personal and professional growth. Informing the development of effective information literacy education, this research uses a phenomenographic approach to investigate the experiences of a teacher and students engaged in lessons focused on exploring language and gender topics by tracing and analyzing their evolution through scholarly discourse. The findings suggest that the way learners use information influences content-focused learning outcomes, and reveal how teachers may enact lessons that enable students to learn to use information in ways that foster a specific understanding of the topic they are investigating

Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Climate Assessment Activities: Development and Strategic Use in Diversity Action Plans

This project report describes climate assessment activities in support of the development of a college-level diversity, equity, and inclusion (EDI) action plan. Elements of the climate assessment activities are described along with their purpose and rationale for inclusion. Recommendations are made for libraries to design and deploy their own EDI assessment activities with the goal of developing robust action plans supportive of inclusive excellence

Situated practices of information use and representation: an ethnographic study of a web design project for boys

This article explores the production practices employed by children building personal webpages in a semi-structured afterschool program: the Fifth Dimension (5D). Following a critical Multiliteracies (CritMLs) approach to learning design, this ethnographic study introduced web-building practices to the children of the 5D and followed their production of personal webpages over a 9 month period. By structuring the intervention this way, it was possible to simultaneously observe the development of both the webpage as artifact as well as the child-participant. Along these lines, the study describes the unique and particular social contexts from which personal webpages emerge and develop over time. Through ethnographic observations, child interviews and surveys, and the personal webpages themselves, project findings suggest that the children engaged in practices of bricolage made possible via web-based informal information seeking practices. This reliance on web-based information seeking as a method for collecting representations to populate personal webpages made visible important relationships between children\u27s production practices, meaning-making, and the electronic articulation of situated identity/membership and the sharing of expertise and interests

Supporting open information literacy via hybridised design experiments

This report discusses a project that forms connections between design experiment and informed learning approaches to designing learning activities supportive of open information literacy and scholarly communication among library and information science graduate students. Open information literacy is defined as information literacy relating specifically toward leveraging open access and open educational resources. Focus is placed on implications for research and practice by exploring one example of a hybridised, informed learning design experiment that fused subject content and open information practice. This project report represents an early step in thinking about the possibilities of infusing informed learning research structures and strategies with design experiments

Supporting youth boundary crossing: Intertextuality as a component of design for information and visual literacy

This article charts attempts to derive a theoretically guided approach to engaging children in boundary crossing toward literacies and practices associated with the Age of Information. Using Fifth Dimension (5D) afterschool programs as laboratories for informal learning design, interventions were designed to explore the extent to which youth cultures and literacies can be used as intertextual gateways to more educative practices associated with visual and information literacy. Intertextuality is introduced as a concept to consider the relevance of using semantic relationships between popular and educative texts to inform learning design for afterschool programming

Equity-focused Data Analytics for Libraries

Libraries exist as important community anchor institutions (CAIs), defined by the FCC “as schools, libraries, hospitals and other medical providers, public safety entities, institutions of higher education, and community support organizations that facilitate greater use of broadband by vulnerable populations, including low-income, the unemployed, and the aged” (FCC, 2011, p. 38). TV Whitespace (TVWS)-enabled cognitive radios can help libraries propagate robust, (backhaul) internet connections to new community spaces with the goal of keeping citizens connected in everyday and crisis situations. To leverage TVWS successfully, however, libraries, researchers, and information technology professionals must understand the availability of frequency spectrum in their area to know whether TVWS is an appropriate technology for implementation in their community. This presentation will share equity-focused analyses of corporate and public datasets that can help us understand the potential impact of TVWS networking technology to support digital equity among America’s rural and underserved communities.https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/uss/1048/thumbnail.jp

Learning to use information: Informed learning in the undergraduate classroom

“Informed learning” is a pedagogy that focuses on learning subject content through engaging with academic or professional information practices. Adopting the position that more powerful learning is achieved where students are taught how to use information and subject content simultaneously, the research reported here investigated an informed learning lesson. Using phenomenographic methods, student’s experiences of the lesson were compared to what the teacher enacted in the classroom. Based on an analysis of student interviews using variation theory, three ways of experiencing the informed learning lesson emerged. Some students understood the lesson to be about learning to use information, i.e., researching and writing an academic paper, while others understood it as focusing on understanding both subject content and information use simultaneously. Although the results of this study are highly contextualized, the findings suggest criteria to consider when designing informed learning lessons

Open Access Research Via Collaborative Educational Blogging: A Case Study from Library & Information Science

This article charts the development of activities for online graduate students in library and information science. Project goals include helping students develop competencies in understanding open access publishing, synthesizing research in the field, and engaging in scholarly communication via collaborative educational blogging. Using a design experiment approach as a research strategy, focus is placed on the design of the collaborative blogging activity, open access research as a knowledge domain, and analyses of four iterations of the project. Findings from this iterative learning design suggest several benefits of implementing collaborative educational blogging activities in distance contexts