Hashtag Truth, New Freshman Foundation Course Promotes Information Literacy
August 10, 2016
Each new freshman at Chapman University completes their Freshman Foundations Course during their first year on campus. Choosing from a large range of topics, these courses are meant to introduce new students into university workload and practice “critical analyzation and communication.” The Leatherby Libraries is proud of librarians Lugene Rosen and Carolyn Radcliff, two of our very own librarians who will be joint-teaching one of this fall’s FFC courses. Titled “Hashtag Truth: Skepticism and Skills for Exploring the Information Ecosystem,” the course will focus on information literacy, constructing authority and detecting the validity of sources.
For all incoming freshmen, this inquisitive 3 credits course is now full. But you can be the first to wait list using section number FFC 100-34. Congratulations again to Carolyn and Lugene on their new freshman class!
The truth is out there. . .and so are the lies. Every day, we are bombarded with information. We follow blogs, watch the news, scan Twitter feeds, and read books, magazines, and journals. Who can we trust to tell the truth? This course will help you better understand your role and responsibility in creating new knowledge, in understanding the changing dynamics of the world of information, and in using information, data, and scholarship ethically. We will explore your role as a consumer as well as a producer of information, using the Association of College & Research Libraries’ new Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education as a conceptual basis to think about the information that swirls around us. We’ll use informed skepticism to view how authority is constructed, we’ll examine the iterative process of asking increasingly complex questions to find answers, and we’ll discover how our own voices fit into the ongoing scholarly conversation. In this course, we’ll use the library as starting point as we satisfy our curiosity about the information ecosystem and where we fit in.