21st Century Literacy

The first track session of the symposium, moderated by Dr. Kevin Rioux, covered a range of topics related to digital literacy training and advocacy. Speakers Kathryn Shaughnessy, Gina Marandino and Christine Angel presented digital literacy training and advocacy tools to an eager audience.

Kathryn Shaughnessy,  Professor/Librarian for ICT Literacy Skills

KathryDSC_0018n presented basic digital literacy tools for librarians. These tools could be used, “as a way to enhance the lives of people in everyday life,” she said, “and it is an important element.” Kathy discussed two important online resources freely available to both librarians and the public. Diglitny.org is one website about a program that holds literacy training courses for librarians in Albany, NY. This program provides the very basic tools for teaching literacy in a public library. The second website is called digitallearn.org. Here, users will find valuable tutorial videos shared amongst librarians that have not yet been uploaded to YouTube.

Gina Marandino,  Educational Technology Specialist

DSC_0021Gina introduced some intermediate tools that can be used for literacy instruction. Some tools discussed included resources available to create tutorials for patrons, like Prezi, Glogster and Jing, which can engage the tutorial audience. Gina also talked about finding pictures to use in the public domain and creative commons, as well as ways to properly cite photographs taken from these hosting platforms. She stressed the need for collaboration among library staff in creating tutorials that cover a wide range of topics, saying, “You don’t need to know everything that’s out there, you just need to know how to find it.”

Christine Angel,  DLIS Assistant Professor

DSC_0022Dr. Angel addressed the audience about digital literacy in libraries, archives and museums. Running short on time she jumped through her presentation to the topic of information retrieval in a shared online environment. Topics included HTML, nesting and the organization of metadata. She stressed the need to, “increase better metadata to increase retrieval results.”

 

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