Integrate and Create

Dr Lana W. Jackman is an extremely capable warm generous charismatic and experienced activist. Since I participated in her keynote at the Life Long Learning conference she has been resonating in my reflections on many levels.
The main emphasis of her keynote was to encourage participants to engage in boundary crossing with other agents and organisations to also operate to promote the goals of Information Literacy. (I will post some of the strategies I’ve been developing to boundary cross later.) More to the point during her presentation she shared this slide.

Acknowledging the stages of integrate and create in the ICT literacy skills struck a resounding chord with me. I realised that these are two stages that need to considered in the Research cycle that I have been developing, see post 3rd April 2008. It is now so obvious to me that the information selected and located also needs to be integrated with existing knowledge to then create a new understanding that is then communicated.

This is particularly important as so many of the students I have been working with are required to utilise multimedia in their assessment (read: learning). In creating and contributing to new knowledge they are often looking for information, images and ideas that are not constrained by ownership and copyright. Content that holds Creative Commons licenses operate to offer a rich resource, particularly when their “re-creations” are to be re-compartmentalised, broadcasted, exhibited, or performed (read: integrated and created).

This has led me to share with them a feature of Google that is tucked away within the advanced search help feature under the unassuming and loaded heading Usage rights. This offers a search limit option across the range of Creative Commons licenses. From where they can then obtain resources to then ethically integrate, create and communicate new understandings.