Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

Last week here on the ol’ blog, I presented a preface to a series of posts about designing and teaching intermediate and advanced philosophy courses using the ACRL’s Information Literacy Framework. In this week’s installment in the series, I’m going to take a little time to walk through the thought process behind my course-building work, in which I used a sort of backward design to grow the pedagogical skeleton for my PHIL 230 (Studies in Philosophy) classes. What I’m most interested in accomplishing with this post is a fairly rudimentary account of how the Framework can be used to generate and support course outcomes.

Once upon a time in my life as a philosophy-prof-on-the-way-to-librarianship, I decided that I was going to commit to using the ACRL’s Information Literacy Framework in my philosophy class designs. I created what I found to be a useful and engaging model for an intermediate or advanced philosophy class designed specifically to integrate the Framework into the course as a whole, one that I felt could easily be scaled down in principle for much shorter one-shot library instruction sessions or individual course units.