Information literacy and/or fluency

OK - so there has been a very, very strong library theme to a lot of the sessions I went to but a couple that make an interesting compare and contrast...
Tell us what you want: Lessons in Student-Centred Service Design (Bucknell)
and
Information fluency in the Digital Age (Central Florida and California State)

The Bucknell session sucked me in by the abstract, I was intrigued by the "if your organisation was run by students what would it look like?" statement, my mind was working overtime with what it might be about - but overall it was disappointing - it was library-focused not institution-focused (not in itself necessarily a bad thing) but Bucknell is small and new to some of this - so a lot of it was about "does anyone in the audience ask students for feedback?" "....include student government (like the union) in projects and plans?" "....employ students to support students?" What they said was fine but, really, nothing new and a lot of people in the audience felt the same. It is standard at US institutions for students to be employed to support other students in their use of learning technology - tech rangers, tech mentors, tech support etc. You hear a lot of "staff support staff, students support students" - the presenters asked the question - if it works for tech, could it work for information skills? which is an intriguing idea???

So anyway, that brings me to why I'm doing both sessions combined - Central Florida was the first to have tech rangers and also have recently introduced a very advanced information fluency initiative, including - yes, you've guessed it - information fluency support students!

There's a lot going on at ucf - beyond the standard "Gather, Evaluate, Use" of information literacy, they characterise information fluency as the nexus of information literacy, technological literacy and critical thinking. Lots more at www.if.ucf.edu

A couple of extra bits - they advertise their information fluency through the student newspaper and with the obligatory page on MySpace
- an emerging concern about laptops in classroom - staff are worried that the information they are providing in lectures is less current than the references the students are reviewing as they talk.