VITL is an emerging trend in general academics that is intended to enhance student competencies in visual, information and technology literacies. The Eccles Library Education Team (ET) recognizes that many of our teaching efforts already incorporate these principles. The ET adopted this framework as an innovative way to promote library resources and services. The ET began looking for ways to integrate these concepts into existing teaching programs, as well as developing new courses.
As an example, during the School of Medicine third year clinical OB and Pediatric rotations library faculty facilitate the use mobile technologies, presentation skills and literature searching and evaluation techniques. Another example is library faculty teach pharmacy students to create their own graphical representation of a disease model that is then integrated it into a paper that the students publish on the Web.
The library’s ET focuses on VITLprinciples when developing new teaching and training sessions. We are identifying examples that can be easily integrated into the various health sciences curriculums and we are actively promoting this model to the curriculum committees and faculty.
The value of VITL is that students gain skills in critical thinking and thoughtful engagement with knowledge that will prepare them to be “smart for life.” VITL provides a fresh prospective and vocabulary related to library instruction services that lends authority to the VITL framework.
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VITL sounds very interesting. What sort of programs do you specifically focus on? What do the pharmacy students use to create these "graphical representation of a disease?"
ReplyDeleteThe College of Pharmacy students generally use PowerPoint to create their visual representation of a disease. It is easy and familiar to them; they use the draw tools to great advantage. The students are free to use other kinds of draw tools - so for example Illustrator or Photoshop - these software programs have a steeper learning curve but a way more sophisticated.
ReplyDeletePowerPoint is the easiest software program to focus on with the students. But we do offer Photoshop and design classes.
Visual Literacy skills relate to finding and creating images; evaluating images; telling a story with charts and graphs; incorporating images, sound, video to appropriately present the information.
ReplyDeleteInformation Literacy (which we librarians are very familiar with) relates to determining an information need; accessing and evaluating information (using appropriate databases and sources); organizing and managing information and formatting and publishing research
ReplyDeleteTechnology Literacy relates to acquiring computer skills, using hardware and software, using technology to create and manipulate digital media, date and information and using wired, wireless, eresources, email, texting, mobile phones, wikis, blogs, social networking, etc.
ReplyDelete