Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

Did you hear about these two University of Virginia grad students who rescued a long-standing academic relic from imminent destruction? Their institution’s expansive and outdated library card catalog -- which enjoyed a heyday as a bona fide workhorse before it was decommissioned 31 years ago -- grew to consume an unwieldy 68 cabinets’ worth of space. When it was determined that digital archiving would be too costly, Neal Curtis and Sam Lemley, both Ph.D. candidates in literature, devised a more economical storage option to allow future researchers and historians to access the rich low-tech data that otherwise would have been destroyed.

M.A.—$20,000 dollars of student debt, 14 months, one thesis, two internships, $1,500 dollars worth of textbooks, and countless sleepless nights later and I finally earned those two little letters following my name.

It wasn’t until three semesters into my degree, after spending $1,000 dollars merely renting my textbooks that I discovered my University’s ebook library. To be clear, I didn’t just stumble upon it either. After learning about open educational resources (OER) at the HEeD Think Tank last spring (now UPCEA’s eDesign Collaborative), I spent hours doing my own personal research on my university’s open access policy and scouring the library website. Eventually, I was able to find all but three of my 11 textbooks for my master’s degree in educational technology freely available on the library website, not to mention plenty of other materials (e.g., case studies and articles I had purchased over the years).