katep: June 2010 Archives

Journal of Information Literacy

Vol 4, No 1 (2010)

"The current issue, as the title of this editorial indicates, examines learner-centred information literacy initiatives within the HE context. The first three papers are concerned with information literacy education (ILE) associated with the development of problem-solving and research competences within specific discipline-based contexts, while the remaining two papers, from LILAC, reflect innovative ways of providing timely support to the learners by employing mobile and video technologies."

The following report, Future Thinking for Academic Librarians: Higher Education in 2025, spells out a variety of scenarios.

 "This document presents 26 possible scenarios based on an implications assessment of current trends, which may have an impact on all types of academic and research libraries over the next 15 years. The scenarios represent themes relating to academic culture, demographics, distance education, funding, globalization, infrastructure/facilities, libraries, political climate, publishing industry, societal values, students/learning, and technology. They are organized in a "scenario space" visualization tool, reflecting the expert judgment of ACRL members as to their expectations and perceptions about the probability, impact, speed of change, and threat/opportunity potential of each scenario. Finally, the study draws out implications for academic libraries."

1. A college degree for every citizen
2. Academic niche networking
3. Activist seniors keep on working
4. Archives on demand
5. Breaking the textbook monopoly
6. Bridging the scholar/practitioner divide
7. Community over consumerism
8. Creative conscription
9. Design for disability
10. Everyone is a "non-traditional" student
11. I see what you see
12. Increasing threat of cyberwar, cybercrime, and cyberterrorism
13. Kinesthetic fluency
14. Longevity is the new wealth
15. Meet the new freshman class
16. Money makes the world go around
17. No need to search
18. Out of business
19. Pop-up campus
20. Renaissance redux
21. Right here with me
22. Scholarhip stultifies
23. Sign on the dotted line
24. Think U
25. This class brought to you by...
26. Woven learning

The bold above were judged by survey participants to be both high impact and high probability. What do you think?

"Why would you want to generate a Twitter-based search of library materials through WorldCat?"

"Keep in mind that this first implementation is more suggestive than an end in itself.  We thought that as it stands, it could be useful in its current form.   Many people use Twitter for reminders or just simple notes to their peers. You may want to share a search with your social network and mark it with another hash tag. Or you might want to store the results in your tweet stream just like bookmarks. You might want save a thought for later work through a mobile device. The point is, people are using Twitter for all kinds of reasons. If libraries can get their data and services into that space, it will bring more users to the library."

#Ask4Stuff is a new, Twitter-based service that returns a WorldCat search when you send a tweet with the tag #Ask4Stuff.  So if you send the following tweet:

#Ask4Stuff lake erie shipwreck

You'll get a tweet back that says something like:

@YOURNAME A few things about lake erie shipwreck in #Ask4Stuff, check out http://is.gd/cY7gi

Where the link then takes you to the WorldCat.org search result for "lake erie shipwreck." You can even localize the result to a WorldCat Local instance by including the Local library name as another hash tag. Example:

#Ask4Stuff #OSU lake erie shipwreck

Read more: http://community.oclc.org/cooperative/2010/06/sometimes-the-internet-is-just-not-big-enough-for-me.html 

Interesting to see where stuff like this might go--continuation of many ways to do the same thing.  What do you think?

Did you see this?

"Consider this tally from Science two decades ago: Only 45 percent of the articles published in the 4,500 top scientific journals were cited within the first five years after publication. In recent years, the figure seems to have dropped further. In a 2009 article in Online Information Review, Péter Jacsó found that 40.6 percent of the articles published in the top science and social-science journals (the figures do not include the humanities) were cited in the period 2002 to 2006.

As a result, instead of contributing to knowledge in various disciplines, the increasing number of low-cited publications only adds to the bulk of words and numbers to be reviewed. Even if read, many articles that are not cited by anyone would seem to contain little useful information. The avalanche of ignored research has a profoundly damaging effect on the enterprise as a whole."

from We Must Stop the Avalanche of Low-Quality Research, June 13, 2010
Chronicle of Higher Education, by Mark Bauerlein, Mohamed Gad-el-Hak, Wayne Grody, Bill McKelvey, and Stanley W. Trimble

This article doesn't address the effect of this on students and their choice of research to use in assignments and papers but talk about challenging! Imagine trying to tell students that half of the articles are considered low quality--often students are new to the discipline area and wouldn't have the expertise to judge low quality to high quality. Is this distinction appropriate at the major level or is this really a graduate level skill? Does anyone try to teach this spectrum? It seems like there could be a role for a databases--instead of mega databases like Academic Search Premier that go for quantity instead of quality. Thoughts...

Overview of work at UNC Charlotte about some of their library space issues as Mike Olson (from UNCC) talked to Virginia Tech librarians about their spaces during an in-service day. A few ideas are:

-They have gone from 5 services desks to 2
-Quiet zones--well labeled
-Integrating majority of reference collection into stacks to make more room for students
-System to show where open computers are

Ran across this post by a British librarian that is causing my gears to move a little quicker today.

"Web 2.0 and social media has led to a more social and collaborative approach to information seeking and this is where we should look to reinvent our framing of information literacy (IL). Traditionally IL has been described as a set of skills or competencies that we can teach individuals regardless of context. However, we must consider information seeking as a social process based on the context of learners....Too often the tools are the focus of IL training when it should be on the symbiotic relationship between technology and changing social practices. By situating learning in context, we allow learners to construct and attach meaning to new skills rather than seeing them as apart from their everyday life information seeking.

...Social learning and collaborative construction of meaning in context is the crux of a 21stC model of information literacy....To sum up, I've been thinking about how information literacy came to be and where it's at now. Since developing out of a print paradigm (sorry another big word) IL has failed to naturally adapt, as it should have in response to constantly evolving technologies within a wide range of socio-cultural contexts. I believe we have an opportunity to revitalise IL by taking a more social approach to the way we consider learning, and situating it in socio-cultural context, rather than as a set of competencies or skills/tools that need to be mastered."

http://misssophiemac.blogspot.com/2010/06/my-information-literacy-manifesto.html

As we are beginning to work on revise and updating the Libraries Information Literacy mission, vision, goals it makes sense to frame it with today and tomorrow in mind--not so much of yesterday.

Seems a bit silly but I wanted to re-post some of the articles posted over the AP list--mostly to help me to read them when I get a chance and it seems there are many teaching and learning applications (but I think I see that in everything I read):

Chronicle of Higher Education

Crowd Science Reaches New Heights By Jeffrey R. Young
Alexander Szalay's career in astronomy took an unexpected turn when the Johns Hopkins U., where he is a professor, joined the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and he volunteered to help with data storage.

The Humanities Go Google By Marc Parry
Matthew L. Jockers may be the first English professor to assign 1,200 novels in one class. Lucky for the students, they don't have to read them. As grunts in Stanford University's new Literature Lab, these students investigate the evolution of literary style by teaming up like biologists and using computer programs to "read" an entire library.

U. of California Tries Just Saying No to Rising Journal Costs By Jennifer Howard
The University of California system has said "enough" to the Nature Publishing Group, one of the leading commercial scientific publishers, over a big proposed jump in the cost of the group's journals.

And from Inside Higher Ed

Embedded Librarians by Steve Kolowich
Two years from now, the medical library at Johns Hopkins, a world leader in medical research, will have realized a "distributed" library model -- one that nearly everyone else in higher education considers either a far-off goal or a theoretical guidepost. A library located everywhere, and nowhere.

It was interesting to hear the librarians from Harvard talk this week about using the Project Information Literacy data and the power of data from their own students. There is a new feature from this project called Smart talks:

"Smart Talks is an occasional series produced by Project Information Literacy (PIL). PIL hosts interviews with leading experts about PIL's findings and their thoughts about the challenges of finding information and conducting research in the digital age."

Their first interview is with Peter Morville entitled Search and the Paradox of Choice Project Information Literacy.

Read it at: http://projectinfolit.org/st/morville.asp

"PIL: Why is search so difficult for college students, especially the first few steps of search?"

"Peter: This finding is emblematic of the intimate relationship between search, learning, and decision making, and it brings to mind the paradox of choice. After all, the search box offers unrivaled selection. You can ask it any question. Or at least it often feels that way. For a student, this freedom can be simultaneously exhilarating and totally paralyzing. Also, most students lack a useful mental model of search."

---
I wonder if this could be used in an instruction session or by faculty as a "reading." I wonder what students reaction would be to this idea that "search" is difficult. Would there be nods of agreement or looks of disbelief?

The recording and PPT slides from the Assessment Workshop held on May 13, 2010 is posted on the Information Literacy wiki (https://wiki.lib.umn.edu/AP/InformationLiteracy). Here are some key take-aways:

• Take situational factors (environment, subject, learners, teacher) into account when selecting an assessment technique
• What do you want to assess? Major categories are 1.) knowledge, 2.) skills, 3.) values/feelings
• How are you going to use the data? It is useful to answer this question first.
• Techniques for assessing knowledge include: background knowledge probe, misconception check, memory matrix, focused listing, muddiest point/minute paper, test questions
• Techniques for assessing skill include: categorizing grid, defining feature matrix, WWW&H (When, where, why and how use?), concept map, term paper prospectus, self-assessment of skills
• Techniques for assessing values/feelings: confidence survey, reaction logs
• You may also want to assess the teaching process. A few techniques are: engagement survey, punctuated lectures, satisfaction surveys, learning analysis
• Two Resources: Fink, L. Dee. (2003).Creating Significant Learning Experiences. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass and Angelo, T. (1993). Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. 

The Science and Engineering Library and the Information Literacy Collaborative hosted a one and a half day seminar for instructors in the Institute of Technology on May 19 and 20, 2010.  The purpose was to create and support a community of faculty and instructors committed to developing student skills in finding, evaluating, and synthesizing information in their academic coursework and for lifelong learning.  The seminar introduced participants to a variety of Libraries services, tools, and skill sets to help support instructors and students in their teaching and learning.  The seminar included sessions on information literacy, library and Google research tools, copyright, scholarly communication, data management, and offered consultations with subject librarians for integrating these resources into current and future assignments.

Here are a few comments from faculty and instructors responding to questions on beneficial aspects and feedback overall:
    "Revelations about what the library can and does do to facilitate faculty and student productivity"
    "Learning about available resources, talking with fellow faculty about issues related to effective pedagogy"
    "Very informative.  I learned a lot.  It makes me think of new ideas and more effective teaching strategies."
    "Thank you all for a fun and informative workshop!"

Learn more at: http://sciweb.lib.umn.edu/facultyseminar2010/