Skip to Main Content

KNOW and Information Literacy: Home

This guide offers ideas, suggestions, and above all else, an invitation to Puget Sound faculty to collaborate with librarians when designing student research assignments under the KNOW (Knowledge, Power, Identity) rubric.

Starting with Wikipedia

Wikipedia, due to its ubiquitous presence in students' lives, is an excellent place to start when asking the kinds of questions that the KNOW rubric invites:

  • Who writes Wikipedia entries?  Explore the implications of the results of several Wikimedia Foundation surveys. 
  • Who is excluded and how are they excluded?  Read, for example, James Gleick's 2013 article in The New York Review of Books; Olivia Biller's opinion piece in The Black Sheep Journal, a student-run publication based at Hampshire College; and the account by WAM (Women, Aging, and Media) of the repeated deletions of the entry on them based on Wikipedia's "notability" criteria.
  • Ask students to consult a specialized subject encyclopedia and compare entries in it with entries in Wikipedia.  What differences do they note?

Research and the KNOW Rubric

Most students understand research as a process of looking for information and sources, and then evaluating and using these sources as they construct arguments.  Assignments under the KNOW rubric suggest an expansion of the scope of the research process, one that includes close attention paid to:

  • Exploration of silences and absences in the research record
  • Access issues, including the digital divide
  • Questions of social inclusion
  • Cultural, historical and socioeconomic contexts
  • Mechanisms of establishing authority, including academic authority
  • Organization of information tools

This guide points to library and freely accessible resources and offers suggestions for research assignments that specifically target learning outcomes under the KNOW rubric. These suggestions are meant to complement faculty expertise and disciplinary perspectives.


 

Crowdsourced Syllabi and Reading Lists

"Social media and the blogosphere have emerged as vibrant spaces for both the production and dissemination of knowledge about African American history and its relation to our contemporary racial environment."  -- Prof. Chad Williams, Associate Professor of African and African-American studies at Brandeis University, on the origins and significance of #Charlestonsyllabus.

Contact Information

This guide was created and is maintained by Peggy Burge, Coordinator of Teaching, Learning and Digital Humanities at Collins Library.  Please feel free to send her suggestions for content!

Peggy Burge
Coordinator of Teaching, Learning and Digital Humanities
Collins Library 131
1500 N. Warner CMB #1021
Tacoma, WA 98416
253.879.3512
pburge@pugetsound.edu
 

SoundNet Site for Faculty