From Bucknell University's Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (ACRL).
Traditional Authority
A type of authority based on traditions, customs, and practices.
Charismatic Authority
The simplest and most primitive form of authority. Charismatic authority is power legitimized on the basis of a leader's exceptional personal qualities, or the demonstration of extraordinary insight and accomplishment, which inspire loyalty and obedience from followers.
Rational-Legal Authority
A hallmark of modern democracies, where power is given to people elected by voters, and the rules for wielding that power are usually set forth in a constitution, a charter, or another written document.
Information Creation as a Process refers to the understanding that the purpose, message, and delivery of information are intentional acts of creation.
Examples: Commercials on television, op-eds in newspapers, instagram photos online, research articles in databases, clickbait, twitter memes, etc. There is a spectrum of information creation, from trivial to serious, from informative to manipulative.
Activity
1. Assign students to identify several different applicable information sources that arise from different creation processes (in collaboration with instructor and course assignment) .
For example:
2. Ask students to identify the format of the sources they find for a given research project and articulate why the chosen formats are appropriate for the information need.
3. Ask students to find sources about the same topic in two divergent formats, e.g. newspaper movie review, scholarly article and a researcher’s blog. Have students compare and contrast the type of information found in each format, as well as explain the processes underlying the creation of each format.
4. Ask students to transform information they have created in one format to another format, and to write a reflection on what they needed to consider as they went through the process.
A 30-minute activity that gets students thinking and talking about the primary sources they create as they go about their daily lives, in order to prepare them to understand and contextualize the primary sources they encounter in historical research.
A classroom activity for first-year students. Students learn to differentiate between different categories of items -- such as Popular/Scholarly, or Primary/Secondary/Tertiary -- by playing a sorting game.
