Metaliterate Learning for the Post-Truth World

Thomas P. Mackey, Ph.D., is Professor of Arts and Media in the School of Arts and Humanities at State University of New York (SUNY) Empire State College. His research into metaliteracy, a pedagogical framework he originated with Prof. Trudi E. Jacobson develops learners as reflective, informed, and self-directed producers of information. They both lead the Metaliteracy Learning Collaborative to advance metaliteracy research, writing, teaching, grant projects, open educational resources (OER), and the design of innovative learning environments. He and Prof. Jacobson have both been invited to keynote on metaliteracy in the United States and internationally. They provide updates on their research through their collaborative blog at metaliteracy.org. Prof. Mackey served as Associate Dean and Dean of the Center for Distance Learning (CDL), and in senior management roles as Vice Provost for Academic Programs and Interim Provost. He teaches courses in History & Theory of New Media, Information Design, Digital Storytelling, and Ethics of Digital Art & Design and has developed several international Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) about metaliteracy. His faculty website is: https://www.tpmackey.com/.

Trudi E. Jacobson, MLS, MA, Distinguished Librarian, was the Head of the Information Literacy Department at the University at Albany for many years, retiring in 2022. In 2021, she was appointed an Extraordinary Professor in the Self-Directed Learning Research Unit of the Faculty of Education, North-West University in Potchefstroom, South Africa. She has been deeply involved with teaching and information literacy throughout her career, and from 2013–2015 cochaired the Association of College and Research Libraries Task Force that created the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. With Prof. Thomas P. Mackey, she codeveloped metaliteracy. Her most recent work focuses on open pedagogy and how the students’ learning experience can be enhanced in such settings by metaliteracy. She regularly teaches an information literacy course for upper-level undergraduates that uses editing in Wikipedia as a way to understand core concepts from metaliteracy and information literacy, as well as an information literacy instruction graduate course, and has taught a first-year experience course in which students created an OER for other first-year students (https://sites.google.com/view/ualbanyforfirstyearstudents/home). She is the coauthor or coeditor of fourteen books, including three about metaliteracy, and numerous scholarly articles and book chapters. Prof. Jacobson received the ACRL Miriam Dudley Instruction Librarian Award in 2009. Her website is http://www.trudijacobson.com.