Drew’s Media and IL blog

21st March 2012

The film about the Rylands library is now ready. Sorry that it took so long. It can be viewed on the university’s streaming server at http://stream.manchester.ac.uk/Play.aspx?VideoId=10307, or there is a version (in FLV format) in the course Dropbox, which hopefully you have all got access to by now. (You will need your university ID and password to view the streamed version.)

I have tried with the movie to emphasise the many ways in which a special collections library like the Rylands plays a vital role in the preservation of information in many different forms. In the film we see, or hear references to, all sorts of media, going well beyond just the bound book (that we probably associated most with ‘a library’), and incorporating loose-leaf papers; digital media; old photographs; carved pieces of bamboo; stuffed animals; and body parts! All are “information” – and in some cases, very valuable pieces of history. To say that information is intangible (which it is, a point I make in the early stages of Information Obesity) is correct, but the media in which it is encoded are very tangible, and if they are not looked after, they will deteriorate and disappear.

What is also significant about the Rylands is that, as both Julianne and Rebekah (the last two interviewees) say, the Rylands does not fulfil its mandate by preserving these media, but does so with a clear mandate to keep the information within them accessible. Sometimes this may mean keeping the original safe but digitising the information; but most of the time the actual books, sticks of bamboo, whatever, are able to be viewed and touched by the general public, as long as adequate precautions are taken. In this combination of accessibility and preservation expertise resides the curatorial role of the experts in the library. Thanks to them all – both generally, but also for their help making the movie. (Particularly James Peters, who was very generous with his time and knowledge before, during and after our visit on February 13th 2012.)

I finished the final edit while travelling back from a conference held at Birmingham City University on 19th March, entitled ‘The Missing Link: Making the connection between information literacy and an excellent student experience” (see the web site). I was interested to go to this because I wanted to collect more examples of Media & IL teaching in order that I could pass them on to students on the M&IL course, as exemplars, and material for analysis using the triadic model. In the end, though, I came away feeling disappointed. I was talking after one session to Katy Woolfenden, who works in the JRUL on the Manchester campus, and she said to me that she had gone to the conference as she had a renewed mandate in her job to address IL teaching and wanted to refresh her knowledge of the field. But she said – ‘What’s changed in the last few years?’.

I agree with her. We still seem to be – almost universally across the sector in the UK – stuck in a situation where ‘IL teaching’ still equates to ‘a short course in library skills to first year undergraduates’. The focus will be on using the library; citing sources; avoiding plagiarism (and Wikipedia…): in some cases there may be subject-specific information, e.g. in disciplines where certain types of information plays a specialist role such as archaeology, law, medicine. (Though actually I would argue, following the work of people like Annemaree Lloyd, that all disciplines require both generic and subject-specific understandings of the role of information within them.) In some cases, but only a very few, librarians have been able to work together with academics to embed IL into teaching and learning objectives throughout whole courses of study – but this has only happened where there is direct support from senior management (such as at the University of Salford, where Professor Huw Morris, the PVC for Teaching & Learning, is a strong supporter of their LEaRN initiative – see http://www.informationliteracy.salford.ac.uk/project/).

In other cases, however, it seems as if almost the entirety of students’ contact with IL, at least explicitly, is being crammed into an hour, or sometimes 30 minutes, in the first week of their studies! And there are no grounds for assuming that the role of IL educator is then being picked up by academics. The fact that I was the only – the only – person to be listed among the 100+ attendees at the BCU gig who had a clear academic role suggests this.

We have to move beyond delivering students basic training in certain IL competencies – the objective, functional domain – and work with them in a much more involved way to develop the skills they need to nurture their own informational environments, their ecologies of resources – information, technologies, people, skills – and keep them sustainable as they learn. To argue that it will take extra resources misses the point. Universities already have a mandate to create informed, self-aware citizens who can make a productive contribution to society after they graduate. If we are not developing these skills in our students, through a combination of library training, academic study and their own developing self-awareness, then we are failing in this respect. If the British government – as they are not – are no longer willing to fund higher education properly, then over time, our students and best teachers will begin to move abroad to countries which can offer them a better education, not just in IL, but generally.

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Earlier blog post

Dear all,

I have decided to add these posts to the blog if things come up in the f-2-f classes, or elsewhere, which I think the DL students may be interested in; f-2-f students could see them as a summary of a class.

It is also worth a quick reminder at this point that one of the foundations of this course is your independent reading. Have a look at the literature page, and don’t wait to be told to start reading. If you have trouble finding any particular papers or book chapters, ask me for help. I will make more of these blog posts but if you depend only on me to give you insights about Media & IL you will still get a quite limited view of the field. Read other papers, see what they think, and begin to build up your own ideas.

Anyway, in the discussion of PBL which we had in the class on 6/2/12, some useful things came up towards the end which link it clearly to the triadic model of informational relationships which is the core of this course. We looked first at the ‘Hebden Bridge car parking problem’ and decided it was a case study/systems analysis type of problem – this because it was not fully clear that it was a problem in the first place. The fact that I had presented a limited list of ‘solutions’ may have made it look like a decision-making problem but we decided that this was more the way it was presented. (This mirrors many real-life situations of course: often, problems are presented to us as if there are just two or three possible solutions (“Well, if you don’t want A, we’ll have to do B…”); often, however, deeper enquiry may reveal others. This is a form of filtering – returned to below.)

In the class we considered a few other problems suggested by class members:

• How do I get my learners to do their homework?
• Why are so few web sites properly accessible to visually-impaired users?
• How can we strengthen the public (state) school system in the face of challenges from the private sector?
• Why is internet access in my country so poor?

I won’t go through the detailed answers that were given to the questions posed on the PBL activity page; but you might have a think about them, as well as considering your own problem. What I want to highlight here are the different forms of knowledge which come into play, and the different sources of information which can be drawn upon.

The “Researching a Topic” activity, which we did on campus on 30th January, was a much more specific information search, and a somewhat artificial one, in that you knew there were definite answers to find and that they would be found online. But the problems given above are much more like they are in everyday life: ill-defined, requiring the use of a range of different sources of information, which may possibly include:

• Asking other people for help and advice
• Looking at web pages offering general guidance (e.g. to build accessible web pages, to find out what standards are, to check the law) as well as those which contain data that might be relevant
• Gathering primary data through surveys, interviews etc.
• Self-reflection (particularly with the first problem given above)
• Reading books, magazines or newspapers

Think, then, about how these different forms of information will be validated when it comes to using them to solve a problem. We start at the personal level, drawing on things like our own past experience, prior knowledge, preferences. We will have sources that we trust, that we have visited before and know to be useful or interesting. This is the first way in which the wide ecology of resources available to us is filtered.

But with all these problems – and most others (though not all) – we must also draw, at some point, on the expertise of other people either directly or indirectly. People may have specialist skills or knowledge which we need (e.g., in designing accessible web pages), or they may have insights on which our own inquiries clearly depend (e.g. because they are the students who have their own reasons for doing, or not doing, the homework we set). This knowledge may be set down somewhere on paper – this would be called explicit knowledge (as opposed to tacit knowledge) – and we might thereby be able to read up on what we need without the direct involvement of the knowledge-bearer. Here, though, we need to ask – how do we know it is useful or valid knowledge? What judgments do we make about its veracity? There are no uniform answers to the latter question: but, generally, we would look at things like how the information is published, how trustworthy it seems. We might ask other friends for advice (“is that book any good? Do you know this web design consultant?” etc.). Information of this kind may also be validated scientifically, having been developed through a process of research of some kind, and presented as such in a publication which has authority (like community and communication, look at the semantic link between the words author and authority).

Therefore, as well as our own subjective personal preferences and knowledge, we must inevitably draw on information from other people, which either resides in their own minds and skills, or has been written down somewhere and validated by a process of publication or scientific enquiry. These are the intersubjective and objective realms of validation. These three domains: subjective, objective, and intersubjective – are the starting point for the triadic model.

We must work at all three levels if we are to have a chance of solving complex problems; the three levels also interplay, with the moves we make between them being constantly shifting and evolving, often without our conscious awareness of how our sense of value changes. An information source we used one time and then return to may let us down the next, so we try somewhere or someone else. Our own learning may show us that what we thought was a trustworthy site is just a front, an advert for commercial services and so not objective. The ecology of resources evolves, as we change our filters.

The key question about filtering is always – who is doing it? We can’t draw only on our own expertise to filter information. We may make mistakes, need outside advice, have an outdated view of the situation, be unaware of recent publications, etc. So the role of some kind of ‘More Able Partner’ – perhaps a teacher in a formal sense, but often, more likely, a friend, colleague, blogger we follow, etc. – is essential. These authorities also work to filter the information we use in our enquiries.

The question is, if others are doing our filtering for us – “pre-filtering” if you like – what chances do we have to check and, if necessary, revise their filters? On what grounds are these external interests deciding what is ‘good for us’? If it turns out that they filtered information that might have been useful – what can we do about it? In questions like these reside the political dimensions of information literacy.

Have a think about these issues as you complete the PBL activity, and begin to consider the triadic model.

Drew