Key skills & resources for first year students

I am at a CIT presentation called, "Introducing Key Skills and Resources to Freshmen Students", presented by Jackie Ritzko and Kathy Maxwell of Penn State Hazelton. 
One of the trends in higher education is to create one credit or three credit courses on information or technology literacy and either require everyone to take the course or designate it as an elective.  Do these work?  How effective are these courses at integrating technology or information resources into the content which students are learning?
This session goes a long way to developing a course where we are integrating technology and information literacy into a first year seminar.  The presenters developed a seminar around:

1. Introducing students to key campus personnel and resources (who is the registrar on campus? who takes care of financial aid?)
2. Divide students into teams.  Develops their group decision-making skills.
3. Integrate technology by requiring students to create a powerpoint (or some other technology creation program).
4. Use a communication format to interview key campus personnel for the content.
5. Used the Gary Smalley personality assessment (lion, beaver, otter, golden retriever) to assess students' leadership and team abilities.

Their integrated first year projects utilized technology and information resources,
Some things they learned:

1. Don't use the same "people" on campus, over and over again. Use a revolving set of campus personnel.
2. Don't assume your students KNOW the technology you are requiring them to use.