Show & Tell

Online Instruction Show & Tell Series

Presenter Description:

Marian [like the librarian] Ekweogwu [Eh - kwaw - gū] is a 2nd year MLIS candidate at the University of Illinois Urbana - Champaign. She thinks that everyone should "Good God Girl Get a Grip!" because we are all in this thing together, whether we realise it or like it or not. Marian hopes to help us all do that with what she is learning and doing at school and in the world. One thing she'd like to do in the world is help people navigate the uncertain oceans of information. Information literacy broadens one's access to accurate and meaningful information. The digital divide is not solely an issue of resources, or the lack thereof, it is also the inability to parse the glut of information coming at us. Beyond connectivity, there are so many tools, like databases (for information) or design suites (for rendering information) or productivity suites (for generating and calculating)  that are required to make sense of the growing body of information before us. But of course, access to many of these tools is limited for those who are poor, without education, without community resources. Open-source resources, like LibreOffice*, can mitigate some of these issues of service and access. Institutions can run LibreOffice, thereby saving tons of money spent on proprietary software, money that can be put into the community by way of staffing, programming, and credentialing opportunities. This is not to say that LibreOffice, or open-source resources, will save us all, but it may help us to affirm our commitments to information literacy.

*Sure, there's Google and it's free (but is it?) suite, but I'd rather have a community program that leaves people's privacy in slightly less tatters

Feedback form participants:

"Software that needs to be downloaded, for me, doesn't lend itself for interactive engagement during an introductory session. The presenter was excellent and very enthusiastic about its usefulness and similarity to MicroSoft Office.