The American Library Association’s much-anticipated annual conference ended last month. If you are one of the lucky librarians who traveled to sunny Anaheim, you might have taken a part of some of the programs that deal with information literacy. The ALA designated these sessions as “Transforming: Teaching & Learning” for librarians to explore the skills that need to be taught to folks in the years ahead.
While the author wouldn’t mind if people who did go were up for interviews, there is some help for those librarians who stayed home this year. The Powerpoint lectures and handouts of several lecturers have been made public on the ALA website, at http://ala12.scheduler.ala.org/sessions/handouts. You might not have been able to attend, but you can get some sense of what happened. We particularly recommend these sessions for materials on information literacy.
• Happy RAILS to You: Using Rubrics for Authentic, Reliable, and Convincing Learning Assessments
• Making a Good Thing Better: Increasing Demand for One-on-One Information Literacy Instruction at Grinnell College
• Research Forum (ACRL)
• Information Literacy: Working Outside the Curriculum to Work Your Way In
• Learning Styles: Fiction, Nonfiction, or Mystery?
• Let the Data Talk: Communicating Assessment Results to Stakeholders
• Academic Librarians as Faculty Members: A History and Guide toward the Future
That’s hardly all that’s available, but these are among the most relevant sessions for information literacy. If anyone attends and wants to report on their experience, please contact me at firstname.lastname@example.org. Mouseketeer hats or G.R.R. Martin autographs are also acceptable.