Course Description and Objectives

"Information Society" and "knowledge worker" have become catchwords of our time, symbolizing the importance of information to our society, culture, and economy. Implicit in the idea of "knowledge worker" and "information society" is the individual's capacity to use information within a given context. This course is about information: how it is created, organized, disseminated, and used with an emphasis on the impact of technologies as well as surrounding economic, legal, and social issues.

This semester we will be using the Sakai course management system. Blackboard will serve as a backup in case of continual technical difficulties with Sakai.

Outcomes

Outcomes articulate the skills, abilities, and knowledge that students learn in the MWTC Program. In your capstone portfolio you will present examples of your work from the courses you have taken to demonstrate your learning based on these outcomes. As you are taking courses, an understanding of the outcomes will help you in two ways: 1) it will help you understand how the various courses tie together and integrate work and experiences and 2) it will help you think about your own work in each course as part of a larger context. In this course, the outcomes that are specifically addressed include:

• Rhetorical Knowledge
  • R1: Understand the role of a variety of technologies/media in accessing, retrieving, and communicating information
  • R2: Use appropriate technologies to organize, present, and communicate information to address a range of audiences, purposes, and genres
• Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing
  • C1: Use information, writing, and reading for inquiry, learning, thinking, and communicating
  • C2: Understand that research, like writing, is a series of tasks, including accessing, retrieving, evaluating, analzying, and synthesizing appropriate information from sources that vary in content, format, structure and scope
  • C3: Understand the relationships among language, knowledge, and power including social, cultural, historical, and economic issues related to information, writing, and technology
  • C4: Recognize, understand, and analyze the context within which language, information, and knowledge are produced, managed, organized, and disseminated
  • C5: Integrate previously held beliefs, assumptions, and knowledge with new information and the ideas of others to accomplish a specific purpose within a context
• Processes
  • P1: Develop research strategies appropriate to the context and situation
  • P2: Develop flexible strategies for generating, revising, editing, and proof-reading
  • P3: Understand the collaborative and social aspects of research and writing processes
• Knowledge of Conventions
  • K1: Learn standard tools for accessing and retrieving information
  • K2: Learn and apply appropriate standards, laws, policies, and accepted practices for the use of a variety of technologies
  • K3: Understand and apply legal and ethical uses of information and technology including copyright and intellectual property