When I started designing the Everyday Life Information Seeking (ELIS) model, I wasn’t thinking about the literature. The idea was to construct something intended solely to be fun and engaging with students. I drew on my experience as a master’s student at San Jose State University in a course called Information Communities. This foundational course examines information users and the social, cultural, economic, technological, and political forces that shape their information access and use. It was in this course that I was introduced to Reijo Savolenian’s 1995 article titled Everyday Life Information Seeking: Approaching Information Seeking in the Context of “Way of Life” which was revised in 2008 and 2021. Since then, I’ve developed this module for use in first-year information literacy sessions with the goal of engaging students with the information and information seeking behaviour they are already using in their everyday lives.
This post takes those modules out of our institution’s content management system, Brightspace, and makes them available here. All components of the Everyday Life Information Seeking module have been compiled in one convenient spot. No need to search high and low for the info you need – it’s all right here!
Each sub-module within Brightspace has been replicated here. The idea behind these posts are for you to see the content and test out the discussion board prompts, and you can do so within the comment section of the individual posts.
The links to the various components of the ELIS Series can be found below.
The series
- Introductory Video (2:00)
- Information Overload (4:16)
- Understanding Expertise (6:03)
- Currency (2:19)
- Reliability (5:09)
- Authority (7:21)
- Purpose (7:17)
- Conclusion (1:25)
I hope you enjoy this series and I hope you find some of it applicable to your own information literacy sessions!
Header photo by Andrea Cau on Unsplash