Chat Literacy Information Literacy discussion: day 1

Today was the first day of the information literacy discussion on Chat Literacy. It's been very interesting - 80 posts so far, from all around the world. This is the page for Day 1 http://community.eldis.org/.5b285b4d?128. You have to join up to Chat Literacy to contribute to the discussion. I thought I would post my own initial posting to today's discussion here, as well, so here it is:

"My own view of information literacy is that it is both a subject in its own right and contextual, and I don't think these two things are contradictory. By "subject in its own right" I Mean that it is already something that people can study in itself (there are journals, people get PhDs by studying it, there are conferences etc.; I argued this e.g. in this paper about IL as an international concept http://www.slideshare.net/sheilawebber/information-literacy-an-international-concept-presentation)

"I also think that learners need to be aware of information literacy as something each person has to develop for themselves through their lives, because information literacy will change for them through the course of their lives. In formal education, educators and librarians can support learners to develop the information literacy learners need to suceed in their studies and also to deal with the rest of their lives outside study. However, once they leave formal education, people tend to lack this support. They are lucky if they have a workplace that develops staff's information literacy. They are also lucky if they even have a public library system that helps them meet their changing information literacy needs. My information literacy/needs, at age 59, in 2012, are different from when I was (e.g.) 20, at university. I HAVE been lucky, because my jobs have given me the opportunity to develop my personal information literacy.

"Therefore I do not think it is a good idea ONLY to embed information literacy in another subject, in such a way that learners just tackle information literacy as part of the subject, without consciously developing their understanding of IL. I think that this is poor preparation for developing information literacy for the rest of your life. However, I'm not saying here that people shouldn't integrate IL into other subject teaching at all. This integration is sensible and useful, but I think that learners need to become aware of themselves as information literate people (indeed, take responsibility for themselves as information literate people)

"I said that I thought that information literacy was CONTEXTUAL, and part of what I meant was this need to look at your OWN context and diagnose how you need to develop new skills, knowledge and attitudes of information literacy. An important aspect is understanding how information itself is contextual (means different things to different people). One example is academic discipline e.g. "information" for a chemist is a different concept (e.g. molecular structures are very important) than "information" for a marketing person. Another difference is when looking at people of different cultures and nationalities.

"In the video http://youtu.be/hQn4OoSMF1M, which I prepared for the recent UNESCO meeting on media and information literacy, I quote from the work of one of my former PhD students, Dr Shahd Salha. She investigated conceptions of information literacy amongst school librarians in Syria. Some of their conceptions, for example with information literacy seen as illumination, and with a spiritual dimension, have not emerged in Western studies. Personally I do not think it is duplication for different countries and cultures to reflect on the meaning of information literacy for them, I think it is an important step in seeing how information literacy is relevant to you, in your own time and place and culture.

"To take that back to the "micro" level of what this means if you ARE teaching in formal education, with a bunch of students in front of you ... well, I do put forward IL as an exciting, international concept, as well as a very practical concept that they can use to get better marks! I have classes with an international mix (e.g. more Chinese than British students in my largest postgraduate class of 114 students last year).

"One exercise they did was to find material about information literacy in their own language and post a link to this in their team blogs that they were keeping. Then they had to explain what the material was to people who were from different countries/language. This exercise went well - it got students talking about what information literacy was (and so developing their own ideas), it got them talking to people with different first langauges, and it made them aware that IL was indeed international."
Photo by Sheila Webber: Wayside flower, Sweden, August 2012

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Information culture - different views on information literacy

An interesting new powerpoint from Thomas Hapke (University Library, Hamburg University of Technology, Germany) on the meaning of information literacy.

Information culture - different views on information literacy

View more presentations from Thomas Hapke

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Three articles and a dissertation

I must confess that I found these when I was doing a vanity citation search on my publications:
- Kerr, P. (2010) Conceptions and practice of information literacy in academic libraries: espoused practice and theories-in-use. PhD dissertation, Rutgers University.
The complete dissertation is available from the pdf link at http://mss3.libraries.rutgers.edu/dlr/showfed.php?pid=rutgers-lib:27317
- Bruce, C., and Hughes, H. (2010) "Informed learning: a pedagogical construct attending simultaneously to information use and learning." Library and information science research, 32 (4), Special Issue SI A2-A8.
There is a copy of this in the QUT eprints archive: http://eprints.qut.edu.au/38705/
- Price, B. (2010) "Teaching Effective Literature Use Skills for Research Reports in Geography." Journal of geography in higher education. 34 (2), 247-264. "Results demonstrate that a relatively basic approach of explicitly teaching effective literature use can be effective and improve students' research report writing skills."
- Aharony, A. (2010) "Information literacy in the professional literature: an exploratory analysis." Aslib proceedings, 62 (3), 261-282.
Photo by Sheila Webber: a snowy campus today (former Jessop hospital, and the former church is a lecture hall and student accommodation).

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Perspective on Information Literacy

Dianne Mckenzie blogs about how Information literacy is the basis for all learning , mentioning the handbook Digital literacies across the curriculum published by the UK's futurelab in March (as part of their Digital Participation initiative) , and presenting her own IL diagram (as a response to digital literacy diagram in the report). Blog post is at http://librarygrits.blogspot.com/2010/
05/information-literacy-is-basis-for-all.html
Thanks to the ALIA pathways discussion list, which referred to Steve Abrams' blog, which referred to Dianne's posting.

Photo by Sheila Webber: Cherry Blossom, Hailsham, April 2010

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Swedish book

I spent yesterday at the conference & writing to dissertation students and today I actually want to see a little of Milan, so I will wait til this evening to post some more conference entries - particularly one about the information literacy logo competition.
In the meantime, a new book has been published in Swedish.
Lindqvist, M. and Söderlind, P. (2009) Informationskompetens: En grundbok. Santerus Forlag. Price: 199 kr Swedish; ISBN: 978-91-7359-016-7: 244 pages.
More information in Swedish at http://www.santerus.se/1100/1100.asp?id=3624 and the authors' information literacy blog http://linux.glykol.com/infokomp/2009/08/13
/informationskompetens-en-grundbok/ and they also referred me to an English language interview about their ideas at http://www.findability.org/archives/000120.php
This last is worth reading even if you do not have good enough Swedish to read the book!
Photo by Sheila Webber: Working where you can at the conference centre (I sat on that bench to use my laptop too!)

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Metaphors

Theere was an interesting dicussion on the lis-infoliteracy list a week or so ago, about the metaphors that people used for information literacy. The discussion was started by Mark Hepworth, who had put a picture visualising a kayaking metaphor on his blog http://markhepworthsblog.blogspot.com/ He is interested in hearing about more metaphors and he has copied the posts at http://markhepworthsblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/metaphors-people-use-to-teach.html and his orinal post is here.Photo by Sheila Webber: Oak leaf, Hellingly, May 2009

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Pamplona: Information Commons; and Information Literacy in different disciplines

Continuing the report from Las VI Jornadas CRAI (held at teh University of Navarra in Pamplona), also yesterday I gave my own talk: What does Information Literacy mean? Some examples from different disciplines. It is embedded below from Slideshare. Before giving it, I inserted an advertisement for the Information Commons at the University of Sheffield, since people had talked about some other innovative British libraries the previous day. I said I’d put the links on my blog, so here they are: The Information commons web page at http://www.shef.ac.uk/infocommons/ ; the CILASS learning spaces webpages at http://www.shef.ac.uk/cilass/learning-spaces ; the video about CILASS learning spaces at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/avfiles/
programmes/elearning_innovation/cilass_qt.mov : the Youtube student video at http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=D08XykTvOIo : and I also mentioned Facebook groups, such as 101 things to do in the I.C. before you graduate.

To go back to my talk: I was including elements from previous talks (how obvious this becomes when you upload them to Slideshare ;-) However, I think that some lines of argument might emerge more clearly and I will elaborate below.

| View | Upload your own

At the start I was talking about how the question of “what is information literacy” can be answered in different ways. One can use definitions (I included the definition Bill Johnston and I developed). Our definition does take account of the “socio-political” element, and Bill and I have argued that information literacy is a discpline. One can look at Information Literacy in a pragmatic sort of way, using models and frameworks developed, mainly by librarians, with the aim of outlining areas of skill and knowledge that students ought to develop. I used the SCONUL 7 Pillars model as an example. You can also position information literacy as one amongst many desired attributes for a graduate (I quoted the relevant section from my own university’s learning, teaching and assessment strategy).

Another perspective is that of the individual within their own area of expertise: how they experience and conceive of informatio n literacy. This led me into a summary of some of the discoveries from our research into UK academics’ conceptions of, and pedagogy for, information literacy. I talked about the different meanings of “information” in different disciplines, outlined the conceptions of information literacy discovered in the four disciplinary areas, and talked about the implications for motivating and working with academics.
Something which I realised I had not emphasised enough in the slides was the impact of an academic's approach to teaching. From the outcomes of the research that was investigating academics’ approach to teaching information literacy, and from my own experience/observation, I would say that if you want to change the way an academic teaches information literacy than what you most want to change is their approach to teaching (rather than – their skills in information literacy). That is, this would have the most impact, if you want to have impact on student learning.
An academic might learn to search a database better, but this might not translate to any improvement in his/her students’ information literacy if the way the lecturer is teaching is still through lectures and exams. However, if the lecturer, through persuasive discussion with a librarian, is enthused to introduce a more constructivist approach to teaching, the students’ information literacy has more chance of developing. Our hope is that our research helps to reveal some ways in which people may be thinking about information literacy in their discipline, opening up more lines of communication and stimulating ideas.

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Pamplona report: 2

This is the second report the Las VI Jornadas CRAI in Pamplona, Spain. Yesterday at the Pamplona conference there were two sessions: mine and one from Carla Basili (Ceris-CNR, Rome). Carla’s talk was titled Information literacy policies in European universities. It was given in Italian, so again I am relying on my minimal skills in that language, with my understanding mostly derived from her powerpoint.
She started by explaining the background of ENIL (http://www.ceris.cnr.it/Basili/
EnIL/index.html ), the group she started with the aim of providing a focus for some European activities. In particular she mentioned the ENIL observatory (http://www.ceris.cnr.it/Basili/EnIL/
gateway/gatewayhome.htm and a diagnostic questionnaire (http://www.ceris.cnr.it/Basili/EnIL/questionnaire.html) translated into 12 languages.
She spent some time on reflecting on the different discourses about information literacy. She put forward two different Italian phrases, one of which puts more emphasis on the “process” of becoming an information literately aware person “Alfabetizzazione all’informazione processo di emananzione politica…” (may be spelt incorrectly), the other of which conveys more the state of being information literate.

I’ll observe that this issue of how you describe the concept – which words you use – is a very interesting one. In the English language the is the information skills vs. i-skills (etc.) vs information literacy debate. In some countries, France and Spain I believe, there have been debates about which words to use to translate information literacy: some using “literacy” words and some “competencies” words. In Spain the “literacy” phrase (i.e. alfabetización informacional) seems to be dominant now. I think that the phrase you choose does have implications for how you will conceive of the subject and go about teaching it.

Carla Basili identified three perspectives: a disciplinary approach (seeing the discipline as being “La cultura dell’informazione”; a socio-political approach (focused, as already indicated, on becoming information literate) and a cognitive approach (focused on individual competencies). If I understood correctly, towards the end of her talk she was advocating an approach to information literacy that took account of these three approaches: education about the value of information, as well as some theoretical understanding (e.g. of information retrieval) and practical skills. She proposed three levels of education.

One thing she wants to develop as a base level is a European Driving License for Information. This is a place where I disagree, as outlined in the talk I did at the IFLA conference a few years ago (see An International Information Literacy Certificate: opportunity or dead-end? at http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla69/papers/199e-Webber.pdf). However, I do agree about seeing information literacy as a disciplinary area, and it is interesting to debate where it fits and what it means for educating European citizens. Carla raised some important issues. Obviously I won’t have done her speech justice so (as with the talks in Spanish) I welcome any contributions from other people at the conference who will have understood better than me.

Photos by Sheila Webber: Yamaguchi Park, Pamplona, May 2008.

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