Information Literacy and Social Media

Teaching our students how to become flexible and accurate evaluators of information requires teaching them adaptable processes and not static heuristics. Our conventional information literacy teaching and learning tools are simply not up to tackling the life-long, real-world challenges and transferable applications required by today's evolving information landscape. 

Information Literacy and Social Media: Empowered Student Engagement with the ACRL Framework (ACRL, 2024) by Michele Santamaria and A. Nicole Pfannenstiel (2024, ACRL) provides librarians and non-librarian practitioners with ways to teach and learn with social media. It addresses how to broadly conceptualize information literacy teaching with social media and allay any student reluctance to using social media for academic purposes. It proposes how to map some of the ACRL threshold concepts onto specific social media platforms, including Facebook, X, Instagram, and TikTok, while providing general guidance for if and when those platforms change. There are eight concrete, cross-disciplinary lesson plans that factor in design, assessment, and student engagement. Finally, the book considers how up-and-coming platforms might empower students to be critical content creators and encourage librarians and faculty to support and create new information literacy initiatives on their campuses. Information Literacy and Social Media demonstrates how to engage students with and through social media platforms and teach them to embrace their role as information creators through engagement with the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. This is the step that they must take to truly be metaliterate in the creative and ethical ways that make information literacy an essential college competency.

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Michele Santamaría is the Learning Design Librarian at Millersville University. As such, she investigates student habits of mind and dispositions around information literacy and infuses what she learns into her pedagogy. In keeping with her range of advanced degrees in librarianship, anthropology, and poetry, Michele’s research agenda is interdisciplinary and has included prior ACRL book chapters on metacognition, autoethnography, and mentoring. She has also had the pleasure and honor of co-writing three pieces of scholarship with former students: Denise Petrik, Caseem Luck, and Megan Donnelly. Michele’s publications also include her own poems, which in the past have drawn from archival research and are a scholarly contribution to one of her assigned liaison areas, English and World Languages. Regardless of genre or subject matter, Michele’s intellectual work prioritizes the role of emotion and wonder. Santamaría earned her MS in Library Science from Long Island University, her MLitt in Anthropology from St. Andrews University in Scotland, and her MFA in Poetry from University of Oregon.

Nicole Pfannenstiel, PhD., is a student-centered faculty member of the English & World Languages department at Millersville University. She is a digital rhetoric scholar who studies social media and writing, videogames and play, digital writing, content strategy, and the use of videogames in the classroom. Her work focuses on learning through and with technology, blending rhetorical theory, digital rhetoric, and multimedia learning theory. Her work centers human experiences with and through technology as we find enjoyment, learning, and community through technology tools. She has an avid interest in OER including research articles published through Open Praxis, an OER published undergraduate textbook Web Writing and Content Management, and an edited collection on inclusive teaching practices. Pfannenstiel earned her doctorate and master’s degrees from Arizona State University, and her bachelor’s degrees from Northern Arizona University.

Dr. Michael LaMagna is the Information Literacy Program & Library Services Coordinator and Professor of Library Services at Delaware County Community College.