Building a campus culture of Information Fluency

This is based at University of Central Florida, and boasts an excellent web site at:

http://www.if.ucf.edu/

the website is interesting as the IF initiative is a bit like their TALI, and we could learn a lot from their marketing and dissemination of their initiative.

As is typical of a preconference seminar, they gave out tons of stuff, and unusually, I will be bringing it back with me.

Headlines:

All that stuff about the net generation isn’t quite working out as we thought – information fluency isn’t the given we thought it was

But the old folks are still having problems with the whole concept:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fm3Icamb6yM

but there is maybe an explanation of this, first put together by Wired’s Chris Anderson

http://www.thelongtail.com/about.html

the top Google searches from last year:

• bebo; MySpace; World Cup; metacafe; radioblog

the top news search on Google was for Natalee Holloway (?!?!)

user generated content? Different ways of publishing? One of the speakers has his stuff at:

http://www.lulu.com/

and if you really want to understand how to find the really good stuff out there, George Seimans is your man:

http://www.knowingknowledge.com/

UCF run a student competition with nice prizes – they have to find the answer to a question that is going to take more than 3 seconds on Google. An example was, identify the author of this quote; what day did the author say it; on what day of the week did he die?

A couple of Chuck-isms (for it was he who ran the show):

• We are drowning in the same water that they are swimming in (a mashed up version of something Carl Jung once said to James Joyce)
• Apparently, UCF students think UCF stands for U Cant Finish – what do we think SHU students think SHU stands for?