iPad course
It is very easy to say, here’s your book, here’s your answer. It is much harder, but vital to teach people how to use information. My undergraduate degree is in instructional design and technology. Being able to take the knowledge learned at that level and apply it to a potential career in helping people is one of my long term goals.
The projects I completed in 560 and 568 helped build on my undergraduate degree of instructional design. In one project I created an outline for a class on whether or not the iPad was useful for online students. This required analyzing and audience, researching material, designing the instruction, and creating a potential way of evaluating. The lesson I learned from this project is to stay focused. I tended to move back and forth between creating a lesson that explained how to determine if the iPad was right for an online student and how to use it. In recreating the lesson I would focus on one.
This is a lesson I did take to heart in LIS 568. When creating my final project, a computer literacy course for a fictional library, I stayed focused on a single goal, advancing the technological literacy of the patrons. In this project I created objectives and the lesson plans followed through with specific ideas to reach those objectives. In this manner I learned from the first project and was able to improve the second.
Information literacy requires adaptability. If the projects went through the testing phase and were found not to work, I would change them. In a professional environment I would look for someone who has successfully completed a similar project or contact a previous professor to find someone to honestly critique the project. Finding co-workers to work as a team can help limit mistakes and build a better project.
Thanks to the iSchool I have learned to find information efficiently. Delivering it and teaching others how to increase their own abilities is the next step in my learning process.