In order to succeed as scholars in a world of fake news and information overload, it is more important than ever for our students to learn how to critically evaluate, analyze, and utilize the information they consume every day in their academic and personal lives. You’ve seen the need in your classroom and the University Libraries can help. In this free, one-day conference for instructors, you will learn innovative and creative strategies to leverage library resources and librarian expertise to teach students the information literacy skills they need to transform data into knowledge.

Friday, January 12, 2018 at 9:30am to 3:00pm

University of Iowa Main Library, Learning Commons
125 West Washington St. Iowa City, IA 52242-1420

We hope you can join us. You can register for all or just some of the sessions at https://uiowa.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_0MS7cNajPlmURDv.

Schedule of Events:
9:30 AM – Registration/ Breakfast
10:00 AM – Keynote: “Calling BS in an Age of Misinformation” by Dr. Jevin West 
11:00 AM – Break
11:15 AM – 1st Concurrent Sessions
12:00 PM – Lunch (provided)
1:00 PM – 2nd Concurrent Sessions
1:45 PM – Break
2:00 PM – Workshop: “Make Them Think: Library Research Assignment Design”

Full schedule with session descriptions is available here. 

Keynote Speaker: Jevin D. West is an Assistant Professor in the Information School at the University of Washington and co-founder of the DataLab. Broadly, he works in the area of data science and data reasoning. With his colleague, Carl Bergstrom, he developed a new course: Calling BS in the Age of Big Data. His core research asks questions about the origins of scientific disciplines, the biases within science that drive these disciplines, and the impact the current publication system has on the health of science. To explore these questions, he develops machine learning techniques for mining scientific text, citations and figures. Example projects include Eigenfactor.org and Viziometric.org. More details on his research and teaching can be found at: jevinwest.org.

Keynote Description: The digital revolution has democratized the consumption and production of news and information. This has created a platform for voices unheard, but among these benefits, there has been an increase in false news stories, memes and outright lies. This comes from all sides of the political spectrum, industry, society and even science. Democracy and collective decision making depends on an informed citizenry. This talk will explore some of the reasons behind this onslaught of misinformation and the ways to combat it. This includes a new-age kind of BS cloaked in the authority of data, statistics and algorithms.

Individuals with disabilities are encouraged to attend all University of Iowa-sponsored events. If you are a person with a disability who requires a reasonable accommodation in order to participate in this program, please contact Sara Scheib in advance at sara-scheib@uiowa.edu or (319) 335-3024.