21st Century Fluencies

At the May Inforum Terry Schenold, instructor in the English Dept talked about the Critical Gaming Project, a community of UW grad & undergrad students who discuss research and create classes on the study of gaming. The CGP website is here: http://depts.washington.edu/critgame/. Terry talked about the use of gaming in teaching and instruction and gaming literacy as an emerging concept.

Terry's talk made me think about a program that I saw at ACRL and mentioned at the TLG retreat last month. This program was called Improving on Excellence: Looking Beyond Information Literacy to 21st-Century Educational Paradigms and Virtual Worlds. You can see the overview of this program here: http://www.learningtimes.net/acrlconference/2009/improving-on-excellence-looking-beyond-information-literacy-to-21st-century-educational-paradigms-and-virtual-worlds/

The program discussed the concept of "information fluency" and how some K-12 and higher ed libraries are beginning to look beyond information literacy and towards the 21st Century Fluencies described in this paper by Henry Jenkins at MIT: http://www.newmedialiteracies.org/files/working/NMLWhitePaper.pdf. 21st Century Fluencies involve things like media literacy, digital literacy, gaming literacy, scientific and economic literacy. As an example, it involves transforming media literacy from teaching students how to critically evaluate media created by a small number of people (networks, artists, etc) to looking at students as both consumers and producers of media and teaching to this - what are the ramifications in understanding media that is created by your peers?

I'm new to this concept, but have been reading a little more about here: http://newmedialiteracies.org/ and here: http://www.library.ubc.ca/wilu2008/Nicholson%20PPT.pdf

Anyway, Terry's talk at Inforum made me think that we should listen for conversations about 21st Century literacies/fluencies that might come out of the New Center for Teaching & Learning, and keep these ideas in mind as we continue to shape the vision of our Teaching & Learning Group. Gaming literacy and new media literacies seem to be discussed more heavily in the K-12 library world, but this definitely seems on the horizon for academic libraries information literacy efforts.
-Lauren