Summaries

The summaries of the readings below are in order of my personal preference:

Lopez, A. 2008. Circling the Cross: Bridging Native America, Education, and Digital Media. Learning Race and Ethnicity: Youth and Digital Media. 109-129

Antonio Lopez is a teacher of digital literacy in a boarding school on a reservation in New Mexico for Native Americans (Primarily Dine (Navajo) and Pueblo people). He is also an advocate for Native American populations and incorporating education, culture and community. In this particular piece, he describes what digital literacy should look like for Native Americans and how it can empower the whole community if it is used in a manner that uses their culture and reaches the community's needs. He speaks a lot of how digital literacy education should not be "linear" but rather, it should be more circular because this is closer to the teachings and traditions of these cultures. He goes on further discussing the detrimental effects of government programs such as No Child Left Behind on not only the students, but also the overall community. He proposes that digital literacy is important not just for the individual students, but more so for their community and being able to promote their culture and history in a constructive way.  (I highly recommend this reading for its interesting perspective and take on digital literacy).

Hedreen, R. 2012. Time Zones, Screencasts, and Becoming Real: One Distant Librarian's Experiences and Lessons Learned. 18(1).

Rebecca Hedreen is the Coordinator for Distance Learning and Reference Librarian at Suthern Connecticut State University. In this article, Hedreen explains the implications that comes with being a librarian to a distant learning community and the techniques that worked well or failed when it came to information literacy/instruction. She touches on "Time Zones", not just it literally being the same time, but also schedules i.e. when people are working on their homework and are more likely to be in need of a librarian. She then moves to the idea of Screencasts. One qualm she found with using screencasts for instruction was the fact that they are usually fast tutorials. Where in usual instruction, the librarian could take time to show an example, and then go back through with the people they were teaching. That way they could resolve problems as they came up (synchronously). She also notes that most screencasts can be difficult to help visually impaired persons, or even different types of learners. However, she does note that screencasts are a major help, especially for serving a distant learning community. Lastly, she discusses aspects about making herself seem real and approachable to her community of faculty, staff and students. (I recommend reading over the Screencasts part, other than that I felt the article lacked anything really pertaining to information literacy. But if you have time, reading the whole thing wouldn't hurt).

Adetoro, N. 2012. Alternative format preferences among secondary school visually impaired students in Nigeria. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science. 44(2): 90-96

Niran Adetoro is a faculty member in Library and Information Science at Tai Solarin University of Education, Ijagun, Ijebu-Ode, Ogun-State, Nigeria. His research is primarily in information technology and management, information psychology and information services for visually impaired persons. The article, as the title states, was a study done on 123 visually impaired secondary school students in Nigeria on their preference of format for learning. After conducting surveys and interviews, Adetoro found that the majority of students prefer audio/books on tapes to learn from. Large print books for partially-impaired were second choice, and Braille was the last choice. The students preferred the audio/books on tape due to the ability to pause, or rewind. They disliked Braille because it was cumbersome, not many teachers were well versed in Braille, and it also made them dependent on others. He concludes that there should be a stronger push to make more things available in an audio format. He also urges to increase Braille literacy among students and teachers along with better training, and formats of Braille. (While I found the topic to be interesting,  I thought the research was a little bit lacking. But definitely a good read to get another perspective on all the learners out there).



*These were obviously brief summaries. For more detail and insights you should feel free to go ahead and read them too!