Moodling with Information Literacy

I was checking out some of the papers at the ALIA Access 2010 conference and enjoyed reading a paper written by a couple of librarians from Sydney Institute, TAFE NSW. The paper is called "Moodling along with Libraries - supporting online flexible delivery in TAFE NSW". The paper discusses the way that Librarians are collaborating with Faculties to create content that assists students with Information Literacy. It is quite an exciting time to be working in the Education sector as there are many fantastic tools to assist with content creation - that look professional and are easy to use. Moodle and Equella are used by TAFE NSW, and a number of Institutes have recently invested in LibGuides to create subject guides. The hype about LibGuides is large, so I'm looking forward to experimenting with them sometime soon.

The Global Village

In 2009 the HSC English course will include Wikipedia as a text. I think that this is an interesting turn in education - particularly as many schools ban wikipedia as a reference for assignments, etc. This is the first time that wikipedia has formally been included in a syllabus in Australia. It's fascinating to see a collaborative site formalised in the education system.

Clay Shirky reckons that society wastes huge amounts of the 'cognitive surplus' watching television - passively consuming other people's collaborative works.

"And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television."

I wonder if studying wikipedia as a text will encourage students (and teachers!) to take online collaborative projects more seriously, and to spend some time participating in them.