Information Literacy 2.0 -- Part 1: Annotation

In Bad Habits of Life Long Learning, I talked about an online course I had started called Learning 2.0 that introduces 23 web-based tools for sharing and collaboration. I’m up to lesson number 11, and look forward to little breaks during the week when I surf over to the course website and try out another one or two “things”. As I’ve worked through them, I’ve been thinking about new skills involved in using some of these new technologies, such as annotation, tagging and story boarding. Annotation skills are increasingly important due to the ease with which one can cut and paste or pop a hyperlink into a paper or webpage, ostensibly addressing the topic but potentially failing to provide information that adequately explains the context. I see this problem in a lot of websites, but also—perhaps increasingly--in student papers. If you look at Gene’s discussion of the Learning 2.0 program in Introducing Life-Long Learners to Web 2.0 and compare it to mine in Bad Habits, you’ll see he is kinder to his readers and explains his context and references more fully. I knew better, but was in a rush and didn’t bother explain that “learning 2.0” is a derivative of “Web 2.0” which refers collectively to emerging social and collaborative technologies. Nor did I bother to look up the acronym PLCM so I could explain that it stood for the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County in North Carolina. Annotation is a skill that seems especially important when a project integrates information, images, or other media from other sources, but it’s also important for successful collaboration, whether on-line or off. A faculty colleague, a graduate assistant and I are using a Google Notebook to collect benchmarking information from other program’s websites. Without effective annotation of the clippings we are gathering from other program’s websites, we are likely to have trouble coordinating our work and making good use of the data. I'll say more about tagging and storyboarding in upcoming posts.