Ellysa Stern Cahoy, Assistant Head of Library Learning Services in the Penn State University Libraries

Faculty Fellow Ellysa Stern Cahoy will be exploring the topic of digital literacy acquisition in-depth and developing instructional solutions in collaboration with TLT/ETS staff expert in online content creation, including Digital Commons staff. Following this hands-on summer fellowship, she will continue to work with TLT/ETS, developing and finalizing project outcomes while simultaneously producing an article on the future of higher education information literacy standards and/or strategies for embedding digital literacy instruction within the online content creation process.

You can learn more about this project by visiting the ETS Wiki.

In recent weeks there has been a lot of discussion about how to create cross pollination among the faculty fellows. This week's big accomplishment for our groups has been to arrange a joint summit with Chris Long's group. The Fellows are also scheduled to be on a panel for the Summer Camp, but I hope there are more opportunities.

When we compared notes on projects, it definitely seemed like there was a lot of overlap. Allan asked what we thought the common theme was, and on further reflection, I think it's that we all are working towards a common vision of the Internet being a place where anyone, anywhere can contribute to the knowledge of the community (and I count brisk discussion as an important part of that).

Ellysa Cahoy has been focusing on new information literacy - which not only allow students to filter the enourmous amount of content out there but hopefully will allow them to make intelligent contributions. Carla Zembal-Saul has been focusing on student portfolios, which is an important skill to allow us to organize and share what we are learning with the world. Chris Long has been focusing on how the Internet can enable discussions of the type practiced by Socrates...but with a potentially much larger stage. And Stuart Selber has been focusing on how technical writers need to prepare for a world where users may be providing "official instruction" on a product.

I think there's been lots of interesting discussion going on and it's giving a lot of us a rare opportunity to think about how our jobs really can impact Penn State and the larger world. As I said, I hope there are more opportunities for cross pollination out there for us and the Learning Design community. These instructors have a lot to teach us.

If you want to sample what we are thinking, I would recommend Mary Janzen's last blog entry on technical writing. As always, I find it very interesting reading.

Each Faculty Fellow is assigned a group of interested staff from ETS. The team will meet weekly with the Fellow and work through ideas and activities. The team members assigned to Ellysa are:

• Chris Millet
• Hannah Inzko
• Kim Winck