The (Second) Draft Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education: Survey Feedback

Today is the last day to give feedback, in survey form, on the revised draft Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, available here.

Here is how I filled out the survey. Note what they are asking for feedback on, and what they are not.

1. How satisfied are you with the overall Framework?

I remain concerned about the use of the term "metaliteracy," indistinguishable from "information literacy," as I see it, and the use of threshold concepts generated by a Delphi study (see Lane Wilkinson's excellent post on this), but otherwise I like the flexibility, the way it encourages collaboration with faculty and administration, and its potential to help make information literacy a more integrated part of academic communities. I like the definition of "information literacy."

2. If you have followed the development of the Framework through the previous draft, please tell us what changes you find most helpful.

The addition of an FAQ and supporting documents further flesh out the Framework. I also find the knowledge practices and dispositions useful.

3. Does the “Suggestions on How to Use the Information Literacy Framework” section, in conjunction with the Frames, help you to engage other campus stakeholders in conversation?

I hoped this part of the Framework would detail some strategies for engaging faculty and campus administration in a variety of college and university settings, but maybe that is better suited for a supporting document, which I look forward to reading. The more granular the task force gets with this, in more settings, the better implementations will be.

4. How might the Framework affect the way you work with students?

This depends in large part on how we in the library work with faculty. Will we be able to transition from one-shot library instruction sessions to something more expansive, across the curricula? That will be key. And because of how we're staffed, a lot of information literacy instruction will fall to faculty. Do they want to do that? Do we librarians and library staff want them to?

5. What one thing do you most want the Task Force members to know about the draft Framework?

Please keep being transparent and open-minded, please do listen to critiques of metaliteracy and the threshold concepts, which I believe make up a plurality of the criticism so far.

6. Please share any additional information that would help us in understanding your perspective on the proposed Framework.

My criticism is constructive, comes from a desire to make us all the best librarians, and educators, we can be.


My thoughts on the Framework thus far:

The (Second) Draft Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education: My Thoughts
Ethics, Copyright, and Information Literacy, Letters to a Young Librarian
The Draft Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education: Some Initial Thoughts
The Draft Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education: Survey Feedback 

The (Second) Draft Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education: My Thoughts

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) has released a revised draft of their Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education. What follows are my thoughts on this second draft. The full text of ACRL's hard work is available here, and I quote, cite, and excerpt it below.

The introduction has changed between drafts, as has the definition of information literacy.

First draft definition:

Information literacy combines a repertoire of abilities, practices, and dispositions focused on expanding one’s understanding of the information ecosystem, with the proficiencies of finding, using and analyzing information, scholarship, and data to answer questions, develop new ones, and create new knowledge, through ethical participation in communities of learning and scholarship. (bold is theirs, 4) 

New definition: lines 62-67

a repertoire of understandings, practices, and dispositions focused on flexible engagement with the information ecosystem, underpinned by critical self-reflection. The repertoire involves finding, evaluating, interpreting, managing, and using information to answer questions and develop new ones; and creating new knowledge through ethical participation in communities of learning, scholarship, and practice. (2)

Fair enough.




What I like:

I. Flexibility: Rather than a rigid set of standards that all ACRL member institutions should strive to meet, the framework allows for a variety of implementations, depending on the communities served and the resources at hand. Page two of the new draft Framework is particularly strong on this.

The authors of this Framework are not trying to build a monument, but rather a scaffolding. The line about the Framework as "a  set of living documents" is already more than words (page 3). A Frequently Asked Questions section was added earlier this month, which addresses the roles of critical theory and social justice, among others. It's this very flexibility that gives me the confidence to write posts like these, knowing that feedback will be heard.

II. The assault on the one-shot library instruction session.

Over the course of a student’s academic program, “one shot” sessions that address a particular need at a particular time, systematically integrated into the curriculum, can play a significant role in an information literacy program. It is important for practitioners to understand that the Framework is not designed to be implemented in one, sole information literacy session in a student’s academic career; it is intended to be developmentally and systematically integrated into the student’s academic program at a variety of levels. This may take considerable time to implement fully in many institutions. (pages 3-4)

While the one-shot has some value in terms of library instruction, "Hi, I'm Jake, this is our website, here's how to do some stuff, ask me questions, see me smiling, aren't I friendly...," it's inefficient at spreading information literacy (IL) when compared to the systematic integration laid out in the Framework. The more people on campus that know this, that care about it, and that do something about it, the better we'll all be.

Threshold concepts work better at a curricular level -- too much for one-shot instruction. Work in specific aspects in those one-shots.
— Daniel Ransom (@ThePinakes) June 29, 2014

Some of the sample assignments in the new Framework get at this, too. Many of them are hard to pull off in a one-shot. Libraries that are under-staffed and over-extended can and should initiate conversations on campuses regarding these assignments, but library staff might not be around to see those assignments carried out. Though learning and course management systems may present librarians with asynchronous opportunities, information literacy should be a community-wide responsibility that can happen with or without librarians. Indeed, librarians themselves may bear some responsibility for exiting information literacy, as Nicole Pagoswky and Erica DeFraini argue.

III. The inclusion of the word "Wikipedia" (page 7). There are faculty and administrators on every campus that don't want to hear or read that word. Well, here it is. Let's talk about it.

IV. The Information has Value frame (12). To me, this is the most interesting part of the revised draft, perhaps in large part because it has the ability to be the most contested.

as intellectual property, information sources are affected by economic, sociological, and political influences. The means of production may privilege some voices over others. Some search systems may privilege some sources over others due to economic incentive.

It's pretty cool to see that in writing, with the imprint of the ACRL. There's also some good stuff on paywalled scholarly communication, the digital divide, and online privacy and surveillance.




What I don't:

I. Staying with Information has value, I wrote a guest post for Jessica Olin's Letters to a Young Librarian on the tension between "ethical participation" as part of information literacy and the quote below from the draft Framework:

Experts understand that this value designates information as intellectual property, and therefore, recognizes three important dimensions of value. First, information can act as a commodity, and as such, creators can use their work for financial, reputational, social, or civic gains. These motivations may determine how information sources are shared whether given freely, offered for sale, or leased for temporary access. Information users have responsibilities as both consumers and creators of information based on the work of others. Academic and legal practices such as proper attribution of sources and complying with copyright are a result. (12)

As a response:

Putting information as a commodity front and center and tying it to various "gains?" Consumers listed before creators? Complying with a copyright regime that every information professional should know is broken, at odds with the common good and encouraging innovation? 

In the Knowledge Practices (Abilities) section of this frame, a threshold concept is to "Understand that intellectual property is a social construct that varies by culture," (12) but the above excerpt reifies much of what is wrong with the North American conception of intellectual property, and may be at odds with "ethical participation" mentioned elsewhere in the document. 

There's more, so please head over there, too. I'll wait. Thanks.

II. The Delphi Study (page 1, footnote 1). Though overall I'm impressed with the transparency of the Framework committee and how open they are to feedback, far too much of the heavy lifting of generating threshold concepts in information literacy comes from an ongoing research project that is a black box. There should be more transparency. People more eloquent than I feel similarly.

The threshold concepts put forth by the committee were decided upon by an anonymous group of librarians in a “Delphi study.” The task force was not privy to the names or affiliations of Delphi study participants, nor were we given any justification, evidence, research, or other reasons to accept the concepts we were given. The role of the task force was to rewrite and expand upon the concepts given by the Delphi study, not to ask for justification.

Trivia: the method used to create these concepts was developed by RAND during the Cold War to assess the effects of technology on warfare (Source).

III. Threshold Concepts (TCs). Over at Sense and Reference, Lane Wilkinson has an excellent critique of threshold concepts that every academic librarian, and maybe every educator, should read. He argues, convincingly, that

• TCs are based off of probable characteristics within disciplines, but probable is not the same as defining. 
• The authors of the Framework assume that students will be transformed and troubled by similar concepts in similar ways, but students are a diverse bunch.
• Knowledge of concepts does not imply ability(s).
• Disciplines are contested spaces, whereas TCs seek to cannonize.

Given these critiques, we could attempt to improve TCs by saying that they are like a family resemblance, per Wittgenstein. In this formulation a series over overlapping similarities could make up a group of threshold concepts for a discipline, but creating boundaries might prove difficult, as it was for Wittgenstein when he analyzed types of games. Or we could talk about a Latakosian "hard core" for each discipline and base TCs off of this, which is also problematic because of Wilkinson's fourth point above.

What if instead of threshold concepts, we used learning outcomes? For example, "An information literate learner should be able to...." or "A metaliterate learner..."? Learning outcomes are less flexible, and as the authors note in their FAQ, less focused on process, but

• there may be many roads to information literacy, some of which are under-explored and -theorized at present, and 
• if librarians, faculty, and other members of our communities can't agree on what a metaliterate or information literate learner looks like, then we need more robust definitions of those concepts.

IV. Atheory and Anti-Theory. So long as we're talking theory, there's a lot of un- and under-cited theory in these frames. Too many assumptions, some of them testable, go unexamined. In Scholarship is Conversation (page 5), there is no discussion of scientific progress, be it Kuhn, Popper, or someone else. This frame is a missed opportunity to discuss the role of blogs, zines, and other non-traditional forms of scholarship that are now easier than ever to create and disseminate, Wikipedia excepted. Moreover, that scholarship is a conversation is a tacit admission that threshold concepts are as well, meaning that they are mutable and malleable.

@librarianwilk there is a lot of scholarship that info lit isn't in conversation with. #SeeWhatIDidThere
— Lisa Hinchliffe (@lisalibrarian) June 20, 2014

Similarly, MacLuhan's "the medium is the message" is lacking in the Format as a Process frame on page 9, and the same lack of theory is true of the appendixes.

Rather than turn readers into Straussians, looking for hidden meanings in the Framework and related documents, why not show the theoretical work that goes into it?

V. Metaliteracy is back! All the baggage that term has still applies.

Metaliteracy expands the scope of traditional information skills (determine, access, locate, understand, produce, and use information) to include the collaborative production and sharing of information in participatory digital environments (collaborate, produce, and share). This approach requires an ongoing adaptation to emerging technologies and an understanding of the critical thinking and reflection required to engage in these spaces as producers, collaborators, and distributors. (Mackey and Jacobson, 2014) (pg 18)

Again, if there are differences between metaliteracy and information literacy, under the umbrella of critical thinking, they don't strike me as being major, so I find its inclusion puzzling.

Metaliteracy expands the scope of traditional information skills…to include the collaborative production and sharing of information in participatory digital environments... (slide 17 of this pdf, same original source as the above offset quote)

Yet adding knowledge creation to the definition of information literacy, above, negates any differences between these terms. One is left wondering about the motivations behind this move.

VI. Information literacy is not a discipline. At least, not in the way we tend to think of disciplines as discrete branches of knowledge in higher education. While one cannot major in it, and there's rarely more than one 3-credit semester-long course with "Information literacy" in the title, IL is an area of scholarship that is necessarily inter- and transdiscplinary.

Jan Meyer and Ray Land (2003, pdf) are explicit that threshold concepts take place within disciplines. It seems as if information literacy not a discipline, not bounded in the ways that other fields of study and programs are, thus there can be no information-literacy specific threshold concepts. Here is how the task force gets around this, emphasis mine:

Threshold concepts originated as faculty pedagogical research within disciplines; because information literacy is both a disciplinary and a transdisciplinary learning agenda, using a threshold concepts framework for information literacy program planning, librarian-faculty collaboration, and student co-curricular projects, should offer great potential for curricular transformation. (First draft Framework, page 6, pdf, second draft page 26, pdf)

In addition, committee member Troy Swanson has both anticipated and reacted to some of these arguments, calling information literacy a "conceptual terrain," noting that it, like other disciplines, is not as bounded as one might think (source). Yet terrains still have borders, and while he wants librarians to "own" information literacy, much of this draft Framework is about us giving it up, or at least sharing it. There is a fascinating discussion around IL as a discipline here.




What's next: 

At present, drafting the Framework is a conversation between and among librarians and information professionals, excepting the non-librarians on the task force. As such, we have seen one side of this document. I assume another side, aimed at how to best present this to faculty, will be a supporting document. I hope this part of the Framework will detail some strategies for engaging faculty and campus administration in a variety of college and university settings. For example,

• How much might a campus-wide information literacy initiative look like "writing across the curriculum,"  (WAC) and would it do for libraries and librarians what WAC did for composition and rhetoric?
• How might either phasing out, or re-thinking the role of, the one-shot library instruction session change the relationships between the library staff and faculty, and between library staff and administration? 
• Using threshold concepts, is there a role for librarians to play in fostering transdisciplinary, a term limited to two mentions in the appendixes of June's draft, connections between and among faculty via information literacy?

I'd also like the task force to address the tension between the stamp of authority and expertise that comes with the ACRL imprint and the flexibility of the Framework in terms of local implementations. Is there such a thing as too much leeway here?

Sources used, but not linked to above:
Mackey, T., and T. Jacobson. (2014). Metaliteracy: Redefining Information Literacies to Empower Learners. ALA Editions/Neal-Schuman.

See also, this interesting conversation on twitter.

Elsewhere on this site:
The Draft Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education: Some Initial Thoughts
The Draft Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education: Survey Feedback 

Elsewhere elsewhere:
Ethics, Copyright, and Information Literacy, Letters to a Young Librarian

The Draft Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education: Survey Feedback

The survey requesting feedback on the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Draft Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education contains a series of opened-ended comment boxes. Here are the questions posed by the survey, and how I answered them.

My thoughts on the Framework are here. Please take the survey to leave your thoughts here.


Q2. In what ways will the focus on threshold concepts help you to generate conversations with other campus stakeholders (such as disciplinary faculty partners, members of the general education curriculum committee, and academic support services staff)?

In the Feb draft, threshold concepts aren't really fleshed out. However, I already see a tension between these concepts, which are bounded in disciplines, and the Framework's discussion of transdisciplinarity. The role of discipline-specific faculty will be very important here. Please expand on the relationship between students who are metaliterate, who think critically across disciplines and boundaries, and threshold concepts that (and faculty who) reify those boundaries.*


Q3. How do the sections for knowledge practices and assignments/assessments provide helpful guidance when considering implementing the new Framework? What else would you want to see in these sections?

I thought the Feb draft of the Framework was strong here.


Q4. We plan to include additional materials in a subsequent phase (described in the welcome message). What other elements would you find helpful that aren’t mentioned in our plans?

As presently constructed, metaliteracy is both an "anchoring element" and a desired outcome, which makes it both an independent and dependent variable. This is a tautology. Metaliteracy cannot beget metaliterate students. Please elaborate on what metaliteracy is, how it differs from "critical thinking," or "transliteracy," or just "information literacy," and place the concept in a content that is bounded by the rules of logic.


Q5. Is there anything else you would like for us to know?

The phrase "ethical participation" comes up in the Framework's definition of information literacy. As you envision it, what is ethical participation, and why?


Q6. Please share any additional information about your work that would help us in understanding your perspective on the proposed Framework.

This draft places much emphasis on collaboration between the library and its staff and other academic units. I hope your experiences in outreach to these academic units is the norm, while my experiences are those of a minority.


* People who have more knowledge of threshold concepts than I should really take their time on this question. Who determines what is a threshold concept in a given discipline? How? Why?

The Draft Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education: Some Initial Thoughts

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) released a Draft Framework for Information Literacy* for Higher Education (henceforth Framework), superseding the Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education adopted in 2000 (henceforth Standards). Having read through the new document and attended an ACRL webinar, I have some initial thoughts on the draft, which you can view in full here.

Information Literacy Umbrella via Dana Longley on Flickr.

Welcome trends:

I. A focus on creation and collaboration that may move us away from the dominance of research papers towards something that resembles the type of work projects students may encounter in the wild. The best curricula will mix these assignments where and when appropriate, and the nod to digital humanities in the bottom two paragraphs of the first page is most welcome.

The downside of this is a focus on job training, employment, and the like. The skills outlined by this document equally apply to "knowledge for knowledge's sake," but the words "liberal arts" appear nowhere in the Framework.

II. Historicizing past information literacy efforts

The Standards... focus attention on the objects of scholarship as mostly textual ones, reflecting the time in which they were written. Although the Standards pay some regard to other modes of scholarship and learning (visual, data, multimedia), the explosion of these modes and the increasingly hybridized, multi-modal nature of learning and scholarship require an expanded conception of information literacy learning and pedagogy beyond the mostly text-based focus of the Standards. In the proposed Framework, we hope to provide spaces for creative, integrative, flexible thinking about the dynamic information ecosystem in which all students live, study, and work.
The Standards also valorize the “information literate student” as a construct of imagined accomplishment, at the endpoint of a set of learning experiences, without the involvement of peers, tutors, coaches, faculty advisors, or other collaborators. (Framework, 3)

and

Whatever form information takes, the experienced researcher looks to the underlying processes of creation in order to ask critical questions about how and why it was produced. (14)

It is impossible to write the excerpted sections above without some knowledge of critical theory. Someone has been doing their homework. Bravo to whomever wrote those sentences.

III. The new definition of information literacy from the Framework is:

Information literacy combines a repertoire of abilities, practices, and dispositions focused on expanding one’s understanding of the information ecosystem, with the proficiencies of finding, using and analyzing information, scholarship, and data to answer questions, develop new ones, and create new knowledge, through ethical participation in communities of learning and scholarship. (bold is theirs, 4)

That "ethical participation" was included here is a huge step forward. It creates a discursive space in which it is possible to turn the library into a site of resistance, a bulwark against government and corporate surveillance, as well as an entree into a discussion of the costs of knowledge that are a part of scholarly communication. I hope this section of the definition is our point of departure to tackle these and related issues.

(Then again, I'm also unclear as to how the above definition differs from that of "critical thinking.")

IV. The emphasis on student-centered outcomes is also welcome, and empowering to those we teach. Knowledge creation, the ability to generate new questions and research agendas,... these are good things.

V. Collaboration

The section titled "Stakeholders" that begins on page 8 provides librarians with a convincing argument to work with faculty and other academic units.

On the other hand, how many times must we prove ourselves? How many times must librarians attempt to partner with other academic units on campus, only to be rebuffed or ignored?

Hang on while I roll this boulder up this hill...

Is the Draft Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education the appropriate place to fight for greater recognition and collaboration between and among librarians and faculty? Is it the best available place? The only place? The give and take that this document will provoke may lead to...

VI. Information literacy as existential crisis

Who has responsibility for teaching information literacy? Just as war is too important to leave to the generals, is information literacy too important to leave to librarians?

Information literacy has been a tremendous “win” for academic librarians. But it risks becoming, looking back, also a symbol of a great loss. If we do not refocus our efforts on the educational, cultural, and technological shifts in which “information literacy" per se becomes a somewhat arbitrary label for the very stuff of learning and information discovery in today's academic (and larger) world, we will have won the battle but lost the campaign. In other words, our potential loss may come from the need to cling to the programmatic success of information literacy as a program run from within libraries by librarians (Cowan, 28).

There is much space to negotiate here, and it's incumbent on librarians and library staff to prove themselves up to the challenge. Do we love information literacy enough to set it free? Are we confident enough in the rest of our abilities?


Unwelcome trends:

I. Jargon

"Greater need for sense-making and metacognition in a fragmented, complex information environment requires the ability to understand and navigate this environment holistically, focusing upon intersections." (Framework, 2)

That's not part of an effective elevator speech.

II. "Metaliteracy."

It's unclear to me whether metaliteracy means "information literacy," or "critical thinking," or "transliteracy," or none, or some, of the above. I'd prefer that we librarians use "critical thinking," if this is the case. Regardless, I don't like the word and I'm not alone in that. Tellingly, at least one vocal proponent of the concept doesn't think the word is appropriate to use in the Framework.

More confusing is whether the concept of metaliteracy is one of the anchors of the new framework, or if it is a desired outcome. As presently envisioned, metaliteracy is both an independent and dependent variable, which runs the risk of making the framework a tautology. I would like to see this logic cleared up, and a robust definition of metaliteracy that treats the concept as discrete, if possible.

III. Assessment über alles?


The move from a "granular, outcomes-based approach" to an "integrative, collaborative, and metacognitive model based upon threshold concepts," (8) means more assessment. How we are able to integrate that into our daily workflows goes unsaid. Maybe--wishful thinking alert!--we'll need more staff in order to implement the Framework. Might the title of "Assessment Librarian," or "Assessment Coordinator," become popular? The more likely scenario, however, is that though the assessment regime becomes more interesting, we librarians will be "doing more with less," which is a phrase that makes me

Via Reaction Gifs. Guess the movie, win a prize.

If you have thoughts on the Framework, you are more than welcome to share them here, but a better place to do so would be via the Framework survey. Note that my comments will appear in some form using that survey.

UPDATE: My survey feedback is posted.

*The term "information literacy" itself is problematic, but is also a widely-used term, so it has some intersubjective value.

Cowan, Susanna M. (2014). Information literacy: The battle we won that we lost. portal 14.1 (January). 23-32. DOI. 10.1353/pla2013.0049.


Elsewhere on this site, related to information literacy:
From Here To Discovery
Orientation: Outreach Starts Here
Vine and Web-Based Library Instruction
Copyright for Educators
Chuck Brown and Information Literacy
On Digital and More Traditional Literacy
Transliteracy and Staying Positive in the Library

The "Digital Natives" Myth and Library Science Education

Repeat after me: There is no such thing as a "digital native."

Good.

Now that we all agree this group of people doesn't exist, let's define the term. Here I turned to ur-digital native text, Wikipedia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_native

Oh, the irony of the placement of that "citation needed."

Now let's stop using that term. It's ageist, classist, and it's flat out untrue, both as an abstract concept and as a term that purports to describe some aspect of reality.

One's proximity to technology does not make one a native. Nobody is born with the above skills, nor is anyone placed in a crib or bassinet next to a tablet, smartphone, or a copy of Python for Dummies.

I got this image from Amazon, but buy the book
from an independent bookseller, please. 

The term is sometimes used as a cudgel against librarians born before said "natives." It is a tool of marginalization and silencing, as if the year of one's birth confers some sort of technological expertise that others should defer or cater to.

Jenny Emanuel, Digital Services & Reference Librarian at the University of Illinois, Urbana, recently published an article that should put the use of this term to rest. She surveyed students at fifty American Library Association-accredited Masters of Library and Information Science programs, as well as newly minted librarians, by degree. Three hundred and fifteen survey responses and twenty in-depth interviews later (20) it is clear that at least among this sample, there is no such thing as a digital native.

Instead, there are a group of people that are, by dint of birth year, on average, slightly more comfortable using recent technological advances to communicate than people older than them, but the younger group of librarians and librarians-to-be is not comfortable using this technology to create, as evidenced by figure 2 on page 24, in which participants express a desire to learn to program.

That is to say, Millennials are using technology, and no doubt their communications create knowledge, but they are consumers of the technology, not creators of it.

Some of the interviewees raise issues of age, class, and geography.

not all considered themselves a digital native, very tech savvy, or able to pinpoint exactly what their tech skills are. Most, however, did believe that there were differences in technology use and attitudes between librarians who were younger versus older librarians. (26)

and

when pressed, not all considered themselves digital natives.... Rachel grew up in a poorer home that always got technology second-hand, and she always thought they were behind others. Although her family first had an Apple Computer in the 1980s, she did not recall using it, and just thought of it as a sort of “new appliance” in her house. Her family did not emphasize technology use and saw it as something not worth investing in until they had to, which gave her a different perspective of using technology only as necessary and as “one of those things that sometimes I just don’t want to deal with.” Samantha grew up in a rural area that only had dial-up Internet, which embarrassed her and did not work as well as she thought it should, so she did not use it, leading to a belief that she did not grow up on the Internet in the same way as her peers. Because of this, she did not consider herself a digital native. (27)

and

A few interview participants mentioned the tech skills of people even younger than they are, or current college students they work with. Betty did not see younger coworkers understanding what is needed to develop or understand the back end of technology and believed younger workers do not use technology to communicate as effectively as they could. Edward, who works at a for-profit career college that has many poorer and nontraditional students, stated, it is “not just the 50 year olds, but the 18 year olds who don’t know how to attach documents to an email.” (29)

Thus, a group of people, librarians and librarians-to-be, that one would think would express comfort with technology instead present a much more nuanced picture. The myth of the digital native has implications for library and information science programs as well.

Page 23

Perhaps there is room for Code Year, or Coders for Libraries to fill what is a clearly expressed knowledge vacuum in MLIS programs.

It's an interesting article and I encourage librarians of all stripes to read it. I also encourage librarians of all stripes to stop using the term "digital native," or its friend "born digital."

Emanuel, J. (2013) Digital native librarians, technology skills, and their relationship with technology. Technology and Libraries, 32(3) http://ejournals.bc.edu/ojs/index.php/ital/article/view/3811/pdf

New Year, New Library: Information Literacy Takeover

I began working here in 2007, four years after my place of work (MPOW) switched from a college to a university. In the time I've been here, the library has not controlled the information literacy program. I repeat: for whatever reason, the library was not in charge of information literacy. The previous director taught it on occasion, but command and control lay elsewhere. I have often said that this place is unique, both for better and for worse. I have now been director of library services for just over 14 months, during which I've attempted to project and restore some sense of normalcy to the library, and I'm pleased to announce that information literacy is back where it belongs, in the library.

One school here has an information literacy requirement, the other schools allow for one-shot classroom instruction, in which a librarian has between 45 and 75 minutes to educate students, and sometimes faculty, on library resources, using Google effectively, and the role(s) of Wikipedia, among other topics. This program has been expanded to our first-year experience, and overall we librarians are doing many more one-shots, but our School of Professional Studies has the big prize: a semester-long, 3-credit course. In short, a normal college course that all must take, and starting in the fall of 2012, half the sections will be taught by librarians, as it should be. The other half will be taught by faculty who will have gone through an information literacy boot camp, taught by me. No longer, one hopes, will I have to bang my head against a desk when a student tells me they can cite an abstract as if they've read the article, or have to correct faculty in front of students, which is always awkward and painful.

How'd I do it? I used a basic template of talking points from the ARCL. To me, information literacy means, in part, teaching people to think like librarians. Who better to do that than a librarian? It also helps that I'm here, on campus, full-time, unlike adjuncts. I know the lay of the land, which gives me a leg up on the particulars of MPOW. Beyond my presence on campus, I've been trying to leave the library more often, building good working relationships with the Dean and Associate Dean of this particular school. They trust me with these car keys because of that. 

Having an entire semester to play with means I can get into transliteracy, social media, and a host of other goodies as well. I haven't taught a class since 2006. If you do something that works in a classroom setting, or in a content/learning management system, like Moodle or Blackboard, with regards to information literacy, I want to hear it. This is going to be fun.


* For the record, Nas over Jay Z. Way over. This song works here, but Jay's twelve best songs aren't as good as Illmatic. 

On Digital and More Traditional Literacy

My 10th grade social studies teacher, Mr. Schweidel, is my favorite teacher ever. He mocked, prodded, and harassed us into learning in a variety of inventive ways, some of which I try to use when I'm in the classroom, though I doubt I have the same results. When I read this article, a takedown of digital literacy, I thought back to Mr. Schweidel's class. One day, in an attempt to get us to not be mindless drones writing down whatever he said, Mr. Schweidel told us a story about how Hannibal invaded Italy with elephants, using snow chutes to transport the elephants through the Alps. While he was telling this obviously tall tale, I looked left and right, watching dumbfounded while my classmates wrote it all down. At the end, Mr. Schweidel asked the class what was the most amazing thing about what he had just said. When he was greeted with blank stares, he began to yell. "The most amazing thing is that this never happened!," he roared, and then lit into us for being so gullible. The message was clear: I am an authority figure, but I am not perfect. There is truth out there. Seek it. Find it out. Don't believe everything you hear, no matter who it's from.

And that brings us to the internet.

Annie Murphy Paul, the author of the article that got me thinking, notes that the Internet, which is an authority in the eyes of many, allows people to manipulate and misrepresent. But as the above example from my youth shows, you don't need Internet access to do that. Is there a more permissive environment for such hijinks online? Perhaps. On a listserv I belong to that discusses information literacy, someone asked a question about using websites that are patently false to teach website evaluation. A lively discussion ensued; there are a lot of purposely inaccurate websites out there. But I'm not worried about those. Anyone can do a little digging and debunk those for themselves. I'm more concerned with innocuous websites that have bad information. Ones written by self-proclaimed experts that are anything but. Ones that a library patron might actually use.

Overall, Paul draws a false dichotomy between digital and more traditional literacies, when really they are mutually constitutive. You can't have one without the other in 2011. The Internet is not going away, and people need to know how to use it, how to evaluate online sources just as they would print or oral ones. Below is a brief discussion I had with the author via twitter. Here's a link to it, and here's a good blog post from 2009 that touches on some of the same things.

Transliteracy and Staying Positive in the Library

If pressed to choose a side in the debate over transliteracy, I think I ally myself with David Rothman, a medical librarian who’s done some very good work in pushing transliteracy proponents to define their terms. As a recovering social scientist, I recognize the need to flesh out what exactly transliteracy is, and proponents haven’t done that. I also think that the best teachers of information literacy were using some of the techniques of transliteracy, showing patrons how to search across multiple platforms and media, for example, long before this term was coined. And yet, as an information literacy practitioner, I think there is something to transliteracy. The debate over what it is and isn’t is often frustrating, but it’s also helped me accentuate the positive when I teach.

My university doesn’t have an information literacy requirement (well, one school does, but the librarians don’t teach it and we have to put out a lot of metaphorical fires caused by the faculty that do), so the best I can do is often a one-shot, one session (one hour) tutorial in which I discuss library resources and common search behaviors on Google (and how to improve those search behaviors). Over the past semester, the point at which I became aware of the transliteracy debate, I read something that resonated and I’ve taken it with me since: our students are really good at searching. Granted, they’re skilled at using Google, that’s the platform I’m talking about, but it’s something. It’s a start. And I’ve got help, because database vendors are increasingly making their interfaces and platforms look like Google, part of a broader point that Lane Wilkenson makes about “the Library” and “the Internet” blending together (for better and for worse, that’s another post for another time). This positivity is key for me in the classroom. The university draws the far majority of its students from dysfunctional schools and school systems, and the smarter students recognize structural impediments to their success long before they meet me. This makes focusing on what they already can do, what they’re already good at, very important. From there I can teach them a few Google tricks, like how to search just one website, or to search for something with limited copyright restrictions. From there I can show them Encyclopedia Britannica Online in place of Wikipedia. And from there I can show them that gathering information through the library website, databases, and other resources, isn’t that different than what they’re already good at: finding information on something they're interested in via Google.

And that’s not nothing. So beware of buzzwords, and of gurus and false prophets as well, but even then, in the discussion you might learn something useful.