The project “Intercultural perspectives on Information Literacy” aims to develop a transnational learning offer for the promotion of students’ information literacy. The project initially pursues the goal of establishing a common learning space in which students from different countries can learn together and build up intercultural competence.
An overview of IPILM is provided in the paper
Griesbaum, J., Dreisiebner, S., Mackey, T. P., Jacobson, T. E., Thadathil, T., Bhattacharya, S., & Adilović, E. (2023). Teaching Internationally, Learning Collaboratively: Intercultural Perspectives on Information Literacy and Metaliteracy (IPILM). Communications in Information Literacy, 17 (1), 260–278. Retrieved from https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/comminfolit/vol17/iss1/4
IPILM is a learning environment that promotes collaborative knowledge construction among students from diverse cultural backgrounds. It is kind of similar to Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) approaches. It aims to incorporate elements of open pedagogy, information literacy, and metaliteracy. Educators and learners from various countries take part in an intercultural learning endeavor that is well received by students.
The idea is to substantially expand one’s own image of the information environment through discourse and joint knowledge development with learners from other cultures. In this way, in addition to intercultural competence, information competence is to be qualitatively raised to a level that goes beyond the understanding of local conditions and contexts.
This project has evolved from a cooperation between Hildesheim University and Symbiosis International University Pune which has existed for 8 years. So far, they have worked together through student mobility and, on a smaller scale, faculty mobility. Dr. Tessy Thadathil is the head of this project in Pune. In the last few semesters, the first joint courses were held online.
“Intercultural perspectives on Information Literacy” is an already established learning format.
It is the project’s aim to expand, optimise and continue the format “Intercultural perspectives on Information Literacy”.
Funding
IPIL (“intercultural perspectives on Information Literacy”) was a funded project by the German Academic Exchange Service / Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) and the Federal Ministry of Education and Research / Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF) within the call “international Virtual Academic Collaboration (IVAC)” in the year 2020 to 2021.