information literacy

AI and Language: Facilitating Emergent Participation in New Discourse Communities

Assignments, cultural awareness, digital literacy, genAI, genre and discourse community, identity, information literacy, language bias /

Kelsey Hawkins Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description Since the public release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022, instructors and scholars have grappled with the ways that AI technologies are transforming writing practices. In a world that increasingly relies on Generative AI (GenAI) technologies like text generators to produce content for public and professional contexts, […]

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Impersonation Podcast: Understanding Untruth in Uncertain Times

Assignments, collaboration and group work, digital literacy, information literacy, research, rhetoric, rhetorical appeals and argument, visual/multimodal rhetorics /

Joseph S. Vuletich Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description In today’s media ecosystem, politicians dismiss unflattering news stories as “hoaxes” and AI-generated deep-fakes concern us because of their increasingly realistic qualities. Scholars teaching information literacy have responded by developing sophisticated methods for sorting fact from fiction, promoting credibility, and dismissing falsehood. Yet falsehood is not

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“Are Cats Good? An Important Study”:Using a Meme Article for Teaching Writing of Analytic Summaries

Activities, annotated bibliography, information literacy, reading, reading strategies, research, secondary source research, summary /

Wei Xu and Hongni Gou Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description This activity is designed as part of the major project “Annotated Bibliography” in a first-year writing course. At the time the activity is implemented, students should have learned the purpose, context, and audience of an annotated bibliography and that both summaries and evaluations are

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Informative or Argumentative Infographic

Assignments, information literacy, research, visual/multimodal rhetorics /

Erin Breaux Assignments & Activities Archive Assignment Description This multimodal assignment challenges students to think in a different medium and consider the impact of visual rhetoric. While composing an infographic, they learn skills such as concision, design principles, organization of texts and images, and use of statistics, charts, and graphs. The infographic works well for

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Assessing Sources for Technical Communication Research

information literacy, secondary source research, technical writing, Volume 6 /

Therese I. Pennell Volume 6 Chapter Description As academic writers, your technical communication research papers will require that you use reliable sources to understand your topic and support your argument. This chapter provides you with tips on assessing sources to complete these types of papers. In high school you learned how to search for sources,

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A Full Class Annotated Bibliography: In-Class Community Building & Applied Social Composing Practice

Activities, collaboration and group work, information literacy, Process, reading, research, secondary source research /

Zoe McDonald Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description This activity transforms a familiar annotated bibliography into a full class activity to give students hands-on knowledge of two central components of composing: writing as a social process (Adler-Kassner and Wardle) and “authority is constructed and contextual” (ACRL). As Tressie McMillan Cottom observes , “writing is always

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Playing with Paywalls: Information Literacy in Theory and Practice

Accessibility, Activities, critical thought and analysis, information literacy, reading strategies, research, secondary source research /

Arielle Bernstein & Chelsea L. Horne Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description Increasingly, online publishers and distributors of information – news sites, popular magazines, professional blogs – have implemented paywalls to limit the number of articles to which the public has free access. This has traditionally been true for scholarly sources and databases, and prompts

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“Upstream” and “Lateral” Moves Through Information Networks

Activities, critical thought and analysis, information literacy, reading strategies, research, secondary source research /

Philip Longo Assignments & Activities Archive Activity Description Recent widespread concern over the spread of misinformation and disinformation has placed a renewed emphasis on information literacy skills in FYC courses. Traditional approaches often draw on student skepticism, asking them to analyze the credibility of a single source. But such skepticism-laden approaches risk adding to our

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