FIU's Information Literacy Initiative invites academic departments and other groups of faculty to participate in a Faculty Workshop Series. These workshops, developed by the Library and the Academy for the Art of Teaching, are designed to engage participants in a discussion about using information literacy to meet teaching objectives. Please contact the Academy for the Art of Teaching (305-348-3907) or the Library (305-348-3423) for further information or to schedule a workshop for your department.

1 Motivating Students: Using Information Technology and Critical Thinking Strategies to Engage Students in Course Content

This workshop is for faculty members who feel as though they need to stand on their head to get students interested. Maybe it's the structure of our courses and assignments that needs to be turned "up-side-down." We will explore how information literacy and critical thinking exercises can help engage students in course content.

2 Power Assignments: Using Information Literacy Based Assignments to Enhance Student Learning

This workshop is for any faculty member who ever spent hours designing an assignment only to get back lackluster results from students. We will explore how information technology, critical thinking and collaborative learning principles can motivate students to spend even more time and thought on your assignments than you spend designing them.

3 Information Literacy: The Doorway to the Disciplines

In this workshop we will explore how you can design assignments and in-class tasks to introduce students to dialogues and debates that define your discipline and make it intellectually engaging.

4 Teaching for Transfer: Reflection on Learning as the Key to Long-term Retention

In this workshop we explore ways to help students transfer the skills they demonstrate in your class to other classes and out-of-school settings. We will focus on how you can help students retain and transfer critical learning strategies related to information literacy, using methods that can be used in any discipline and with nearly any topic.

5 Assessing Information Literacy

In this workshop we will introduce strategies for assessing just how information literate your students are, both at the beginning of your class or curriculum and at the end. This workshop is ideal for individual faculty members or for departments who are introducing an IL curriculum and who want to document changes in students.

6 ILI and Intellectual Development

In this workshop we will introduce a number of theories of student intellectual development and explore the ways in which information literacy strategies in the classroom support that development. In particular we will look at the ways in which the critical thinking goals of an information literacy curriculum promote higher-order thinking and such developmental goals as the ability to see multiple perspectives, the ability to assess the value of an argument, and the ability to look at assumptions, assertions, truth claims and probable consequences.

7 Information Literacy and Active Learning

In this workshop we will explore the many ways that an information literacy focus can be used to increase students' active learning in and out of the classroom. We will look at actual tasks and assignments that require students to be active explorers, critics and decision makers rather than passive recipients and regurgitators .

8 Plagiarism, Cheating and Information Literacy

In this workshop we will explore the relationship between academic dishonesty and the structure and format of classroom learning. We will look at the ways that a course or curriculum informed by the principles of information literacy reduces the opportunity and motivation for cheating.

9 ILI and the Academy Culture