Each first-year student at Chapman University completes their First-Year Focus Course during their first year on campus. Offered in a large range of topics, these courses are meant to introduce new students into university workload and practice “critical engagement, exploration and communication related to complex issues rather than on mastering a body of material.” The Leatherby Libraries is proud of librarian and Chair of Instructional Services Taylor Greene, who will be teaching one of this fall’s FFC courses. Titled “Information Overload: Seeking Truth and Authority in the Information Landscape,” the course will focus on information literacy, constructing authority, and detecting the validity of sources.

Headshot of a white man in a blue striped polo shirt

Taylor Greene. Photo credit Bao Ngo

Take a peek at the exciting course description for this FFC: “The truth is out there…and so are the lies. Every day, we are bombarded with information. We follow YouTubers, click news headlines, scan Twitter feeds, and maybe even books. Who can we trust to tell us 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 amidst 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 a starting point as we satisfy our curiosity about the information ecosystem and where we fit in.”

For all incoming first-year students, this inquisitive 3 credits course is now full, as is the waitlist. But if you are interested, you can reach out to librarian and instructor Taylor Greene. Congratulations again to Taylor on his new FFC class!