JoAnn M Burke ,
*Julie Long ,
Julie Storme ,
*Karen Chambers ,
Ted Billy ,
Dan Mandell ,
Doug Tyler ,
*Gerry Gingras ,
*Peter Smith ,
*Patrick White ,
*Georgeanna Rosenbush ,
*Mary Connolly ,
*Sue Wiegand
The group of faculty and SDPs asterisked above met to continue discussion
on the student IT fluency rubric and to review plans for the semester.
The meeting opened with a review of the Computer Literacy Minimum Skills Survey document forwarded to the TLTR by Charlie Peltier. We observed that most of the schools were not comparable to Saint Mary's and that the level of literacy proposed was much below what we are recommending. Julie Long was aware of schools with programs much more advanced that those in the survey schools. Perhaps we should select a group of schools comparable to SMC and ask them about their IT fluency assessment efforts.
We then moved on to setting an agenda for the semester. Peter wanted to complete work on the rubric and then focus on preparing a list of courses and extra curricular opportunities that students and advisors can use to help improve student placement on the rubric. He suggested we leave the recruitment of pilot departments and faculty advisors to the TLTR.
This triggered a discussion about the need for faculty to improve their IT fluency before they try to help students who may be at a higher fluency level than their faculty advisors. One department thought that each department should figure out what skills their students need and should take care of advising and providing opportunities for improving IT fluency for their own majors. It was pointed out that advisors often have little knowledge of the disciplines they advise students to take courses in, and the IT fluency advisor model we are advocating would incorporate the idea that departments would advise their own students. The problem seems to arise when we think about advising beginning students in their gen ed program. The long range plan is recommending significant advisor training. Incorporated in that training would be strategies for helping students self assess their IT fluency level and develop their own plan to reach a target level before graduation.
The efforts to improve faculty IT fluency must proceed apace with the effort to help students assess and improve their own fluency. We cannot afford to wait until faculty are fully prepared because the students we teach today must be prepared to enter a technological world.
The discussion ended with an agreement to prepare an IT resource list of courses and extra-curricular opportunities that students can use to improve their IT fluency. Each department liaison will be asked to prepare such a list. George and the residence hall staff hopefully will help with the co-curricular opportunities.
The rest of the meeting was dedicated to improving and finally approving the IT fluency rubric. We decided to change the name for the first level to "Beginning User." We decided to move the attitude column and an expanded description of the ACRL guidelines to a separate advisor's guide. We omitted "email" in the Passive user Skill Level entry and spelled out the abbreviations. There was a discussion about the meaning of "setting up" a PC in that entry and Peter will try to find a better way to describe taking it out of the box, connecting the wires and installing needed software. We added a clause to the Active User Skill Level "acquired basic technology skills appropriate to one's discipline," and change the reference to departmental technology skills in the Expert User column to "advanced." We made a couple of word changes in the rest of the document and Julie Long is going to come up with an Expert User Information Literacy entry. I have posted the present version on the Web off of the /~psmith/fluency.html page.
We proposed a Tuesday noon meeting time in a couple of weeks to finalize the parameters of a request to liaisons to ask them for their part of an IT fluency resource list.
Peter