Engaging Students as Creators in a Credit-Bearing Global Information Literacy Course

Abstract

This poster highlights a librarian’s use of open pedagogy principles to teach a credit-bearing course on global information literacy. International Studies 4850: Understanding the Global Information Society is an undergraduate course taught by librarians. Students apply information literacy concepts to topics including open data, copyright, censorship, and free speech as they explore how information is produced, disseminated, and interpreted across the world. Because it had not been taught for several years before I taught it in Spring 2022, I decided to redesign course. I added topics of growing importance, including algorithms and artificial intelligence, the spread of misinformation, and the impact of the COVID pandemic on global information flows. I restructured the course using open pedagogy principles to engage students as creators of information. Students collaborated to create an open access e-book about global information issues; they discussed readings using the social annotation application Hypothes.is; and they used the tool Search Atlas to explore how search results diverge across geopolitical borders. I used various techniques to assess student learning. I will share these results, plans for future versions of the course, and recommendations for how librarians can use open pedagogy to engage students in learning about global information literacy.