Digital Detectives

Digital Detectives: Solving Information Dilemmas in an Online World helps students become independent and confident digital detectives, giving them the tools and tactics they need to critically scrutinize web-based digital information to ascertain its authenticity, veracity, and authority, and to use the information in a discerning way to successfully complete academic tasks. Enabling students to select and use information appropriately empowers them to function at a higher level of digital information fluency, acting as discerning consumers of, and effective contributors to, web-based information. - Offers a situated, problem-solving approach to deepen students' analytical and research skills - Explores a practical, real-life dilemma that is typically experienced by undergraduates in the course of their academic work, especially those transitioning from secondary to third-level education - Focuses on the authentic educational needs of undergraduates as expressed by educators, but also students themselves - Addresses a specific central dilemma which is identified at the outset, but also uses the opportunity to reveal to students the broader contextual issues which frame the problem they are exploring

Dr. Crystal Fulton is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Information and Library Studies, University College Dublin, Ireland, where she teaches in the areas of information literacy, information and public services, information behaviour, and social computing and media. Her teaching takes a collaborative, problem-solving approach, aimed at promoting self- constructed learning practices to help students become more independently analytic. She introduced the teaching of qualitative research in her school, as well as new and interesting classroom techniques and assessment to encourage student engagement in learning. She created and teaches a unique course, Learning to Teach, Teaching to Learn, to help doctoral level students across the university develop best teaching practices for the classroom as well as a teaching e-portfolio to document their progress. She has also taught in Germany under the ERASMUS programme. She has long used blended and fully online teaching and learning, pioneering her school's first course to be offered completely online.She was the co-Principal Investigator on Creating e-Practicums to Enhance Undergraduate Learning, a project funded by the university to introduce reusable digital learning objects in the school. She recently won the UCD President's Teaching Award (2010-2012) for excellence in contributions to teaching in the university. In 2011 she was one of only two members of UCD nominated for the prestigious National Awards for Excellence in Teaching (NAIRTL). As her school's Director for Teaching and Learning for five years, she has been responsible for managing and supporting the development of teaching policy and practice in the school. She has delivered papers at international conferences on teaching and learning, and she has published in this area. Her book, Information Pathways: A Problem-Solving Approach to Information Literacy, was published in 2010.