Metaliteracy in a Connected World : Developing Learners As Producers

Foreword by Jako Olivier, UNESCO Chair on Multimodal Learning, and OER Professor in Multimodal Learning, North-West University, South Africa

In this newest book in their series, the authors carefully examine the central role of learners as producers of information, a foundational idea for the metaliteracy framework and one that’s more important than ever in our current media and information environment. They emphasize the active role today’s learners play as individual and collaborative metaliterate producers of information in various forms, including writing, digital stories, digital artifacts, and multimedia productions. The authors explore a range of connected social settings from online courses to social media to open learning environments. Featuring a new metaliteracy diagram that defines the core components of metaliteracy as well as several illustrative case studies, this book

• offers an overview of the development of the metaliterate producer through metaliteracy’s goals, learning objectives, learning domains, active learner roles, and associated characteristics;
• examines the ethical responsibilities of creating information and building connected communities of trust;
• explores the ways in which metaliteracy provides scaffolding for open pedagogical settings, encouraging students to understand and embrace their active roles;
• analyzes the conjunctions of metaliteracy and open pedagogy in courses with disparate permutations pertinent to the courses’ learning objectives;
• shows how to embed metaliteracy learning activities in blended and online learning environments, illustrated through descriptive examples from several courses; and
• provides customizable learning activities designed to advance dispositions important to metaliterate producers, such as an open mindset, critical thinking, and embracing digital citizenship.

Thomas P. Mackey, PhD, is Professor of Arts and Media in the School of Arts and Humanities at State University of New York (SUNY) Empire State College. He is the recipient of the 2021 Dr. Susan H. Turben Chair in Mentoring Foundation Award. He was appointed Extraordinary Professor in 2021 in the Self-Directed Learning Research Unit of the Faculty of Education, North-West University in Potchefstroom, South Africa. His research into metaliteracy, a pedagogical framework he originated with Prof. Trudi E. Jacobson develops learners as reflective, informed, and self-directed producers of information. They both lead the Metaliteracy Learning Collaborative to advance metaliteracy research, writing, teaching, grant projects, open educational resources (OER), and the design of innovative learning environments. He and Prof. Jacobson keynote on metaliteracy in the United States and internationally. They provide updates on their research through their collaborative blog Metaliteracy.org. Prof. Mackey served as Associate Dean and Dean of the Center for Distance Learning (CDL) and in senior management roles as Vice Provost for Academic Programs and Interim Provost at SUNY Empire State College. He teaches courses in History and Theory of New Media, Information Design, Digital Storytelling, and Ethics of Digital Art and Design and has developed several international massive open online courses (MOOCs) about metaliteracy. 

Trudi E. Jacobson, MLS, MA, Distinguished Librarian, was the Head of the Information Literacy Department at the University at Albany for many years, retiring in 2022. In 2021, she was appointed an Extraordinary Professor in the Self-Directed Learning Research Unit of the Faculty of Education, North-West University in Potchefstroom, South Africa. She has been deeply involved with teaching and information literacy throughout her career, and from 2013–2015 cochaired the Association of College and Research Libraries Task Force that created the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. With Prof. Thomas P. Mackey, she codevelopedmetaliteracy. Her most recent work focuses on open pedagogy and how the students’ learning experience can be enhanced in such settings by metaliteracy. She regularly teaches an information literacy course for upper-level undergraduates that uses editing in Wikipedia as a way to understand core concepts from metaliteracy and information literacy, as well as an information literacy instruction graduate course, and has taught a first-year experience course in which students created an OER for other first-year students (https://sites.google.com/view/ualbanyforfirstyearstudents/home). She is the coauthor or coeditor of fourteen books, including three about metaliteracy, and numerous scholarly articles and book chapters. Prof. Jacobson received the ACRL Miriam Dudley Instruction Librarian Award in 2009.