locate, evaluate, and use effectively

I am pleased to resume regular posting to this weblog with the announcement that I will be launching, in conjunction with my University’s Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, a Faculty Learning Community on Improving Student Research Skills.

Over the previous academic year I was privileged to participate in a Faculty Learning Community on Teaching with Technology, and as previously mentioned here, I also participated in a workshop describing how the FLC model might be applied to improving information literacy and student research skills.

Essentially, the Faculty Learning Community gathers 8-10 faculty members from across disciplines around a common goal or issue of interest.  Members of the community agree to participate by attending sessions approximately every three weeks where readings or other materials related to the topic at hand are shared and discussed, and by completing a project related to the topic or goal.

For example, a typical project completed by participants in this Community might be to revise a syllabus or create a new assignment with their students’ attainment of better information literacy or research skills in mind.  Collaborative work and mutual feedback and support on projects is highly encouraged.

In future posts I will document the progress of the Community I will be convening as well as posting links to related materials and similar projects.

I have had several ideas percolating for new posts to this weblog since taking the online workshop mentioned in the previous post. However, I have also been dealing with a personal family crisis – namely, my father’s terminal illness and descent toward his final days. Thus, I have been away from work a lot and have left much undone.

I plan to resume regular posts to this blog as soon as possible.  In the meantime, please help me improve it by sending me an email.  If you are reading this post, please do this.  There is no need to include any comment – this will give me a record of your email address, so that when I am ready to resume, I can notify you and provide you with a new link for resubscribing through your RSS aggregator.

Thanks for your understanding.

Yesterday I attended the first of three online sessions offered by the Teaching, Learning and Technology Group in cooperation with ACRL on “Collaboration for Information Literacy: Faculty Learning Communities and other Collaborative Approaches to Support and Improve Undergraduate Information Literacy.”  This year, I am fortunate to have been a participant in OCU’s Faculty Learning Community on Teaching with Technology.  The workshop I am attending deals with applying the FLC model to collaboration between librarians and teaching faculty to improve student research skills.

By coincidence, ACRLog reported yesterday on Project Information Literacy, a national study of student research and information-seeking behavior.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, the survey revealed, among other things, that the majority of students put off work on research assignments until 2-3 days before it is due; find the variety and quantity of information sources available to them for their research overwhelming; and don’t hesitate to use Wikipedia, either as a tool for getting a handle on their topic or a source.

The main presenter of yesterday’s online workshop was Eric Resnis, a librarian at Miami University of Ohio who is the facilitator of his institution’s Faculty Learning Community for Improving Student Research Literacy.  Some examples of projects undertaken by community participants include the study of Information Literacy standards; citation analysis of student research papers comparing outcomes for students who received Information Literacy instruction in their courses with those who did not; the development and administration of a survey on student perceptions of the research process and information-seeking behavior; and a standard project that almost all of the participants now undertake is to revise a course syllabus to incorporate Information Literacy standards into the assignments.

I look forward to reporting on the remaining sessions.

I have previously mentioned my favorite personal bibliography/citation management tool, Zotero.  Of course, one of its main drawbacks is that its user interface is a Firefox Plugin, which means only those of us who have adopted the open source browser can make use of Zotero.

I recently became aware of some other useful tools that exist entirely on the web and/or have cross-platform bookmarklets making them useful no matter what your operating system or browser preferences:

Knight Cite, a tool developed for the Calvin College community but available to the public, is mainly a formatted citation generator.  There are other similar tools available, but this one is well done and has a lot of features.

Connotea formats citations and produces shareable html bibliographies from them.  I haven’t exxplored it well enough to know if it has export options as rich as Zotero’s.  It appears to focus mainly on citing web pages and other online resources.

EDUCAUSE has published its Top Teaching and Learning Challenges of 2009.

The EDUCAUSE site has a wiki devoted to each of the five challenges, which include “developing 21st-century literacies among students and faculty (information, digital, and visual).”

The January 2009 Issue of Filtered, the Academic Commons Magazine, is titled New Media Technologies and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and contains several articles on technology in liberal higher education.

I am particularly interested in the essay by Michael Wesch (recently named a U.S. Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching), From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments. He writes: “As we increasingly move toward an environment of instant and infinite information, it becomes less important for students to know, memorize, or recall information, and more important for them to be able to find, sort, analyze, share, discuss, critique, and create information. They need to move from being simply knowledgeable to being knowledge-able.”

Other articles in the issue include a report on the Visible Knowledge Project, which studied the impact of technology on learning in the humanities, and a discussion of electronic portfolios.

I am a big fan of the open source web browser Firefox, mainly because it is so highly customizable.

Following are some of my favorite add-ons for academics.  Some of these have been around for a while, but have recently introduced significant new features to beta or stable versions.

zotero – an open source citation manager created by scholars at George Mason University.  Any web page can be saved with notes and organized into folders you define.  If the page happens to contain bibliographic records – Amazon, most library catalogs, WorldCat, etc., you will see a small icon in your browser address bar that allows you to import the record with one click.  Records can be imported and exported to/from several formats including html pages and rtf documents formatted to any of several common citation styles.  I am currently using the latest experimental version, zotero sync preview, which allows me to save and sync work across multiple instances of Firefox – but it does only work where you have Firefox. 

foxmarks – sync and backup your bookmarks and passwords across multiple computers.  This one doesn’t require you to have Firefox installed on every computer you use, because you can log into the website and access your data from any browser.

Read it Later – provides a simple one-click method for saving web pages to read later.  How is this different from ordinary bookmarking?  The intent is that bookmarks are for sites that you want to return to again and again.  This extension simply creates a reading list for pages you don’t have time for now, but want to come back to.  One click to save, one click to mark as read, and it keeps your real bookmarks folders uncluttered. It also syncs across multiple machines and can cache pages for offline reading, for example on your laptop when you are away from a Wi-Fi hotspot.

WebNotes – allows you to highlight and annotate web pages and easily share the annotated version with others, which will make it useful for collaborative research and for Information Literacy instruction. 

Sage – this is an RSS feed reader built right into the browser.  It is perhaps not as functional as a Google Reader, but it stores your feeds with your bookmarks, so if you are also using foxmarks, you will always be able to find and check them.

Google Toolbar – This one has definitely been around a while and has its detractors as well as fans.  Some library colleages even think of Google and Google-style searching as the enemy of Information Literacy.  I don’t intend to get into that here; I just want to tell you about the latest beta version of the toolbar, which allows me to sync my search settings, notebook clippings, and (the most useful in my opinion) web history across all my machines.  That’s right – if I visit a site on one machine, all my other Firefox machines remember it, so I can easily search for and find that site I forgot to bookmark or mark with Read it Later.

Do you notice a theme here?  These tools are are each made all the more useful because they make it possible to sync my data across multiple computers where I use Firefox. That’s true even if I need to use a public machine with no admin privileges, because I keep a portable copy of Firefox on my usb stick as well.  No matter where I find myself, my bookmarks, RSS feeds, citations, and annotations go with me.  Recently this phenomenon has been called “cloud computing,” and I think this is just the beginning.   

It has occurred to me that, while most Information Literacy standards and assessment measures are aimed at improving student outcomes, they assume that the teachers and librarians who are called upon to impart information skills are themselves skilled information users.  Is this assumption valid? Studies have demonstrated the axiom that my degree of certainty in my own competence is inversely proportional to my actual competence. (See Kruger, J., & D. Dunning (1999) Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77 (6):
1121-1134.)

So how about a little survey?

For each statement, do you: Strongly agree, agree, disagree, or strongly disagree?

I know the key research databases in my discipline and how to access them.
I can use alerts or feeds to keep up to date with research in my discipline.
I know the meaning of plagiarism and how to detect it in student work.
I can freely use any information I find on the Internet without permission.
I know how to use “advanced search” techniques when conducting an electronic search.
I understand how search engines rank their results.

At this point, I’m not interested in collecting actual data, but to get you thinking.  How important are these skills?  Do you feel that developing them would help you to be a better teacher or scholar?

I will be attending a luncheon meeting tomorrow on the subject of liberal education.  The invitation caught my attention because it immediately brought to mind an article that has become a classic in my field, Information Literacy as a Liberal Art.  I also thought it might make a good starting point for my new blog.

The authors, Jeremy Shapiro and Shelly Hughes, point out the ambiguity in the concept of “information literacy” and attempt to add depth and substance to its meaning.   The concept surely includes the popular library-world definition, the “ability to recognize when information is needed” and to “locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information.” (Association of College & Research Libraries, Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education)  But just as surely it is something more.  Our time is often known as the Information Age; free citizens of this age must be equipped for critical reflection on the social, cultural and philosophical contexts of information, its production and dissemination.

Just about everyone has learned to execute a Google search, and millions do it daily.  But how many, upon following the first link to appear, ask Whose website is this, and what is their agenda?  Are they selling something?  A product? A worldview? What will it cost (in money or otherwise)? “An extended notion of information literacy is essential to the future of democracy, if citizens are to be intelligent shapers of the information society rather than its pawns.”

I have no doubt that many of the posts to follow will be of the “gee-whiz, I didn’t know that” sort, of the alarmist “statistics intended to elicit despair for the future” sort, of the mundane “here’s how to do such-and-such” sort; but I also sincerely hope that this blog will regularly revisit the “extended notion” territory that Shapiro and Hughes invite us to explore, and that you will join me in exploring it.

Welcome to locate, evaluate, and use effectively, which will address issues surrounding information literacy in higher education.  I am Information Literacy Librarian at Oklahoma City University’s Dulaney-Browne Library.  The aim of this blog is to bring news items, scholarly articles, research, etc. related to information literacy to your attention and to invite you, through your comments, to a conversation.  I look forward to hearing from you.