By R. Glass

As I mentioned in my other post, I was looking for a way to incorporate Information Literacy into courses that would not normally have a strong Information Literacy component. I chose three courses in the fall of 2006 where the use of a  blog would augment the syllabus.

The first course was the general liberal arts course, MAT 101: Logic, Sets and Numbers.   In that course, the students learn about Boolean operators, their relationships and properties in an abstract setting.  In Information Literacy, databases use the Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) as the tools used to generate effective and concise searches (queries in the database world).  My objective was to tie the abstract syntax and mathematical properties of the Boolean operators as taught in the  MAT 101 course to the real world application of the same operators as applied to various information databases.  The rationale for this can bee seen as a post under the contribute category on this blog application of this can be seen in the blog glassrmat101.wordpress.com.

The other two courses were second year computer science and mathematics degree courses.  These courses act as a gateway to upper level courses where often research of topics is required.  My goal here was to ease that transition to tough research by not just introducing the fundamental tools and concepts of Information Literacy but also providing the foundation of ethical.  The topics researched should be interesting, informative and readily available.  I wanted reinforce the process rather than the results but at the same time, introducing the student to the humanity of the discipline.  The motivation for these assignments can be found in my post If I Had Known Then … in this blog. 

In computer science, algorithms are sometimes attributed to a person, place or occurrence.  Myself, I wondered who was Eratosthenes in the Sieve of Eratosthenes algorithm for finding prime numbers, what exactly was the legend behind the Towers Of Hanoi, an algorithm exhibiting recursion.  I looked to topics that had such a duality to them.  One part was the actual algorithm and second required the student to research the legend, person or place that made up the name.  The results of these assignments can be viewed in the blog for the CMP 207: Computer Organization and Assembly Language Programming glassr.wordpress.com.

Calculus 3 is the first course where the student is asked to do mathematics beyond the blackboard.  Students are asked to visualize three dimensional surfaces, consider maps and the information contained within both explicitly and implicitly.  The formal proof of much of the mathematics in these topics within course is well beyond the capability of the student at that level but the understanding of the problem is not.  The goal here was to introduce the student to these classical problems and blog about what they were.  The results can be seen in the glassrcalc3.wordpress.com blog.

I cordially invite other members to not only suggest assignments but implement them and not only in mathematics or computer science but all disciplines.