Rebecca Davis's List: Information Literacy

• Our library of fifteen years hence would contain language and multimedia labs, group work spaces, quiet places for study, data analysis and geo-spatial mapping, live and recorded video feeds from around the world, professional staff and faculty offices, academic centers, a state-of-the-art classroom and, of course, a coffee shop on the first floor. 
• • floating sticky note
• academic books to be distributed and used primarily in digital form

  • we are seeing this ebooks, kindles, etc. and also see the new BookServer
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• In The Future of the Book, the historian James J. O’Donnell

  • cf. Penn colloquium on history of the book
• something

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• add page comments here - Rebecca Davis on 2009-10-28

• It’s like everything I do when I read on paper

  • This is why diigo was easy for me to pick up; I love highlighting.
• The clear antecedent for website annotation in paper-based research practices makes it an easy sell for me and those older than me, especially those in academia.
• Simply put, it’s work–critical reading and analysis, one of the core skills of a liberal education.

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• fundamental
• What does a person need to know today to be a full-fledged, competent and literate member of the information society?

  • use this question as a prompt for the digital teaching workshop to answer--inquiry based learning
• creating a Web page, computer programming, TCP/IP protocols or multimedia authoring?

  • the mechanical skills have changed and become easier, but skills are not the answer, but rather critical thinking
• something that enables individuals not only to use information and information technology effectively and adapt to their constant changes but also to think critically about the entire information enterprise and information society?
• Something more akin to a "liberal art" - knowledge that is part of what it means to be a free person in the present historical context of the dawn of the information age?

  • liberal arts--education fitting for a free man
• development of graphical representations of logical and scientific ideas and theories

  • importance of visual literacy
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• Who owns information? What's the difference between a piece of information and a copy of it? Who should have access to it? Is the Internet a public good or a private one? Should anyone regulate Internet content, and if so who? What are the responsibilities of an institution toward one of its telecommuters in another country? What should the property regime of the information economy be? How can we reconcile the international character of the Internet and the emerging global information society with the laws of individual nations and the moral standards of individual communities? What are the bounds of privacy in information? Could the government fiscal crises be alleviated by a "bit tax"? Is the vision of a wired, networked cyberspace perhaps nothing more than (in the words of some recent social critics) a "cryptoreligious ideal of our society," an ideological front for a new social class, the "virtual class" that is constructing a world of "data trash"?
• But information literacy should in fact be conceived more broadly as a new liberal art that extends from knowing how to use computers and access information to critical reflection on the nature of information itself, its technical infrastructure, and its social, cultural and even philosophical context and impact - as essential to the mental framework of the educated information-age citizen as the trivium of basic liberal arts (grammar, logic and rhetoric) was to the educated person in medieval society.

  • thesis
• fundamental
• grammar, logic and rhetoric were part of it originally:

  • understanding of liberal arts as a curriculum (the traditional liberal arts)
• As more and more information is in computerized form, even elementary general literacy will be partially defined by an information-technology component
• This prototype curriculum attempts to encompass the old concept of "computer literacy" (remember "everyone should learn to program in BASIC"?), the librarians' notion of information literacy and a broader, critical conception of a more humanistic sort.
• Tool literacy,

  • tool literacy has changed quite a bit in the past 13 years!
• Resource literacy

  • these ideas are more enduring although we have new ways of marking that classification, e.g., tagging rather than cataloging
• concepts of the classification and organization of such resources.
• Social-structural literacy

  • virtual organizations, communities of practice, crowd-sourcing--these are some of the new ways that knowledge is being generated, or rather that we overtly know and see that knowledge generation
• about the institutions and social networks
• IT-based tools relevant to the work of today's researcher and scholar.

  • these tools have changed radically; there are still discipline specific tools, but general tools are more available and even discipline specific tools are more widely available, which is a problem because they may not be understood out of context
• Research literacy,
• Publishing literacy
• Emerging technology literacy

  • one of the biggest challenges!
• so as not to be a prisoner of prior tools and resources
• Critical literacy
• broad, integrated and critical perspective on the contemporary world of knowledge and information, including its origins and developmental trends, its redefinitions of experience and social life, its philosophical justification, biases and limits, its potential for human emancipation and human domination, and for growth and destruction.
• Isn't it time to rethink what this educational goal means at the present juncture of the information society?

  • How much do we update the curriculum? Is it really just changing the reading list? Can we keep up? risks of information overload

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• This describes several potential skills for the information literate, "creating a Web page, computer programming, TCP/IP protocols or multimedia authoring". Note that the mechanics of those skills have changed even since 1996. That is, creating a web page doesn't necessitate knowing html. Multimedia authoring can now be done in a web browser rather than in complicated video editing software. - Rebecca Davis on 2009-03-17
• I think that today it is even clearer that information literacy isn't replacing traditional literacies, but rather that traditional literacies are that much more important for building (digital) information literacy. The visual, the quantitative, the multimodal--these are all components of the current (digital) information literacy because of the increasingly wide availability of visual, quantitative and multimodal "texts". - Rebecca Davis on 2009-03-17

• when we know from research

  • what research?
• As Roy Tennant noted in the January 1, 2001, Library Journal, "only librarians like to search; everyone else likes to find." Any educational philosophy is doomed to failure if it views students as information seekers in need of information-seeking training
• Almost any student could suggest a better alternative: that the library create systems that eliminate the need for instruction.
• To do so would require enormous and coordinated shifts in curricular emphases and resource allocation, none of which is either practical or politically realistic.

  • but others are calling for a paradigm shift which would mean just what this sentence says is not practicle
• Dow casts students not as information seekers, but as apprentices engaged in a continuous cycle of reading and writing.
• How might the model of reading and writing work in practice at the reference desk?

  • The straw man in this article is pretty blatant. The author is describing a process that I think librarians probably already do.
• information literacy

  • I imagine that this author's definition of information literacy differs from that of most librarians.
• smart information-technology systems

  • this point is a good one--help information find you; make the technology transparent!

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• without their having to learn the dreaded alphabet soup of HTML, FTP, and CSS. As far as faculty were concerned, the only letters they needed to know were L-M-S.

  • I love the wordplay on the alphabet here--Nice witing, Gardner!
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• In short, students would build a personal cyberinfrastructure, one they would continue to modify and extend throughout their college career — and beyond.

  • the ultimate e-portfolio?
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• multimodal writing

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• One of my students put it this way: "It is imperative that someone studying this generation realize that we have the world at our fingertips — and the world has been at our fingertips for our entire lives. I think this access to information seriously undermines this generation's view of authority, especially traditional scholastic authority."
• Specifically, we must respect students as thinkers, even though their thinking skills may be undeveloped and their knowledge base shallow.
• So let me be perfectly clear: I am not asking for more entertainment and less substance in our classrooms. I am asking for a paradigm shift in how we approach our students that parallels the paradigm shift in the broader culture. I am asking instructors to see the two questions that the new epistemology emblazons across the front of every classroom — "So what?" and "Who cares?" — and then to adjust their teaching accordingly.
• Now that our students assign us no more authority than anyone else, show no patience for lectures, and decide what's worth knowing themselves, we need to reorganize our classes. We need to teach as if our students were colleagues from another department. That means determining what our colleagues may already know, building from that shared knowledge, adapting pre-existing analytic skills, then connecting those fledgling skills and knowledge to a deeper understanding of the discipline we love. In other words, we need to approach our classrooms as public intellectuals eager to share our insights graciously with a wide audience of fellow citizens.

  • an argument for teacher as facilitator rather than authority
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• Some would say this is simply good pedagogy — I wholeheartedly agree. Good pedagogy is the product of instructors who respect, understand, and creatively engage their students.
• The problem is that too many professors see good pedagogy as optional, as something only for teaching "superstars," rather than as a set of learnable techniques that critically support our wider purpose.
• It is time we disabuse ourselves of the view that obliging and dutiful students are engaged and transformed students.

  • student engagement
• A better and more widely achievable educational goal should therefore be to inculcate a respect for learning and the pursuit of knowledge.

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• What we want, I think, is our students to practice joining and contributing to the larger conversation.
• The idea that the new literacy involves writing for a Web audience is supported by a Stanford study by Professor Andrea Lunsford. (Thanks again Stephen Downes for the pointer).
• This research adds to a growing body of scholarship that supports the idea that new media and social learning are opportunities for learning rather then obstacles.
• How do we encourage our students to gain experience and develop expertise in engaging with the wider world on the subjects that we study and create knowledge around?

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