LIS 391/COM 391:
Literacy in the Information Age

Instructor: Bertram C. Bruce Prerequisites: ITS minor Credit: 3 hours Time: Tu/Th, 2:00-3:20 pm Place: 126/131 LIS

Syllabus Assignments, readings, & activities Major project Inquiry Page LEEP bulletin board Assignments and grading C-Base

Schedule of Assignments, Readings, & Activities

Week	Assignments	Activities/Readings
Literacy as Situated Activity
(1) Jan 15		Introductions Computer help Class notes Course goals and structure Possible course units. Also, search on the Inquiry Page. Major project Collaboration Grading Discoveries: Powers of 10 Brainstorm issues relevant to literacy in the information age
Jan 17	Explore the course site and think about possible course topics Begin thinking about your course project Read: Eco, Umberto (1996, November 12). "From Internet to Gutenberg". Lecture at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America.	Discoveries: steganography
(2) Jan 22	Login to the LEEP server. In the board for Jan. 22, post a greeting to the class introducing yourself. Briefly describe your goals for the course. Copy the URL for that message. Login to C-Base and post that URL for activity 1. Each week you'll have some message to post to the LEEP board and you'll need to post the URL for that message in C-Base just as you've done here. Explore the Prairienet site.	Paul Adams, Prairienet
Jan 24		Discoveries: Hole in the Wall Computer Project ideas: "Rain Is Not My Indian Name" spin-off a course unit Game studies TappedIn Display wall CAVE demos: Mondays, 1-2; Thursdays, 11-12 Choose projects and project teams Inquiry Page as medium for the project Groups discussion: Are there stages of literacy?
History of Literacy
(3) Jan 29	Read: Bruce, B. C. (1998, September). New literacies. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy, 42(1), 46-49.	Discoveries: viruses virus hoaxes Jan Brunvand Antonella Longo Projects
Jan 31	Post your project proposal: (or a URL for it) in LEEP. Post the URL for that message in C-Base. Use the Inquiry format if you'd like; project keyword: "liasp2".	Discoveries: Googlewhacking What is writing?
(4) Feb 5	Presentation: Twenty-first century literacy Read: Baron, Dennis. Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technology National Public Radio's Morning Edition (2001, March 19). Literacy in the 21st Century.	What are the new literacies? Are we at a turning point in the history of literacy?
Feb 7	Do one of the three options in: What role have technologies played in learning throughout history?
(5) Feb 12
Feb 14	Annotated bibliography Read: Rheingold, Howard (1999, January). Look who's talking. Wired, 7.01.	Discoveries: Wireless Internet for All Changes in access (jigsaw)
(6) Feb 19		Discoveries: Google language preferences 8:02 pm, February 20, 2002 is 20:02, 20/02, 2002
Feb 21	Locate a webcam and describe how it's used Find an image of your home at the Terraserver	Research in the information age (Karen Lunsford)
Access to Literacy
(7) Feb 26	Read/listen: Bruce, Bertram C. (1999, February). How worldwide is the web?. Reading Online. Bruce, Bertram C., & Hogan, Maureen. (1998). The disappearance of technology: Toward an ecological model of literacy Judge, Paul (Ed.) (2000, March 2). A lesson in computer literacy from India's poorest kids. Business Week	Discoveries: Is Microsoft watching what you're watching? Presentation:Access to and through information technologies HTML clinic
Feb 28	Locate the "Bobby Site" and evaluate its criteria for accessible web pages. What assumptions does it make about access? Discuss in the web board.	Discoveries: Nobel prize stamps
(8) Mar 5	Read/Listen: Coyle, Karen (1994, October 8). Access: Not just wires. Paper presented at the CPSR Annual Meeting, San Diego. Gunderson, Jon (1999). (interview - 19 mins.) (text translation) Shade, Leslie Regan. Gender issues in computer networking	Discoveries: Six degrees of instant messaging. by Jessica White Happiness on the Chinese Internet, by Ying Ma The Worldwide Computer: An operating system spanning the Internet would bring the power of millions of the world's Internet-connected PCs to everyone's fingertips, by David P. Anderson & John Kubiatowicz
Mar 7	Post your outline. Note that this "outline" is a several-page draft of your project. It may include parts in a rough form, such as lists of key phrases, but it's not simply a hierarchical structure of the parts (intro, background, method, results, etc.)
(9) Mar 12		Plan for project presentations: Mar 27, 29, Apr 2, 4 How can we learn to read critically?
Mar 14	Project responses Read: Bruce, Bertram C. (2000). Credibility of the web: Why we need dialectical reading. Journal of Philosophy of Education (special issue), 34(1), 97-109. Floridi, Luciano. Rheingold's brainstorms: Disinformation superhighway? Postman, Neil (1990, October 11). Informing ourselves to death.
-- Mar 20, 22 -- Spring Break
Project Presentations
(10) Mar 27	in-class presentations	Westley Field: design and development of online communities
Mar 29	in-class presentations
(11) Apr 2	in-class presentations
Apr 4	in-class presentations
(12) Apr 9		What is a collaboratory? How can it function as a boundary object for different communities?
Apr 11	Choose a commonly taught idea. Use the web to see what you can learn about why it may be limited or false in some interesting way. Ideally, if you already know a lot about the domain, keep searching until you come up with something you didn't already know. Can you trust what you've found on the web?	Discoveries: A Paternity Dispute Divides Net Pioneers
(13) Apr 16	Read: David Noble, Digital diploma mills: The automation of higher education John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, Universities in the digital age Langdon Winner on the automatic professor
Apr 18	final report
(14) Apr 23
Apr 25	Reflection paper	discoveries Where do we go next? What did we learn? What new questions? Publication of projects: Kairos CPSR essay contest Other courses, listservs, organizations Focus group Instructor and Course Evaluation Survey
(15) Apr 30

Possibilities

• What does the future hold for literacy and learning in the information society?
• How are people differentially enabled or disabled by new information technologies?
• How are access possibilites changing as new affordances and constraints arise with the adoption of new technologies?
• What can be done to improve access conditions?
• John Dewey's chapter "3. Criteria of Experience" in Experience and Education
• constructivism
• Society for Women in Philosophy
• How are new media and communication tools changing the practices of making, understanding, and responding to art?
• McEneaney, John E. (2000, November). A hypertext history in 36 nodes.