Exploring information literacy meaning

Thursday 4 September 2003

All,

I have been watching the discussions with much interest....and it lead me back to Annemaree's article again bcos bells were ringing...

Fiona mentioned - '(solving projects and ongoing problems)... and social cognition (solving problems in a team)

Carmel mentioned - Annemaree's references to 'tacit' and 'explicit' knowledge, people as sources of information, and the workplace as social space (aka knowledge management concepts) IL filling KM gaps...yet KM debates missing the conversation about how workers are equipped to deal with knowledge focussed workplaces.

And Annemaree uses the term that was ringing bells for me 'communities of practice'

Which brings me to Etienne Wenger and Jean Lave (and even Bonnie Nardi I guess with her wonderfully refreshing 'Information Ecologies: Using technology with heart' (1999)

The communities of practice stuff is the most interesting and heartening read I've had in a long while. I'm sure I'm singing to the choir but I'll quote a (rather long) basic definition from infed.org

A Community of Practice involves much more than the technical knowledge or skill associated with undertaking some task. Members are involved in a set of relationships over time and communities develop around things that matter to people.For a COP to function it needs to generate and appropriate a shared repertoire of ideas, commitments and memories. It needs to develop various resources such as tools, documents, routines, vocabulary and symbols that in some way carry the accumulated knowledge of the community (Lave and Wenger 1991)

Learning involves participation in a COP. Participation refers not just to local events of engagement in certain activities with certain people (Librarians?) but to a more encompassing process of being active participants in the practices of social communities and constructing identities. (Wenger:1999)

In short Wenger says: A COP defines itself along three dimensions:

what it is about - its joint enterprise as understood and continually renegotiated by its members
how it functions - mutual engagement that bind members together into a social entity
what capability it has produced - the shared repertoire of communal resources (routines, sensibilites, artifacts,vocabulary, styles etc) that members have developed over time

I like it...I love it! and we all have a place in it...

A COP can be a professional organisation as well as a group of students at school or in a university environment - they're just different COPs and as such have different focii, symbols, tools etc...

Librarians are information 'navigators', therapists' , 'facilitators' what ever you will...

This all touches on some of the points that have been raised:

where does the responsibility lie -- with both the individual and the Information specialist in the COP is my guess...although I am partial to theories that knock us off our information specialist pedestals :-)
are we academic librarians obliged to outfit graduates with the skills they'll need in their professional COP?

Personally i'm hard pressed to lead them to what they need to navigate their way around the University information topography.

One student did ask a great question in a class just lately 'What's in it for me to spend the next hour learning how to use our systems, the next four years honing my skills and then when I graduate not have access anymore to the databases and other tools i have learned so painstakingly to use? I have to start all over again with what's available in my job'... he was depressingly right
IL is an enabling and social process (I agree... I have 3 slides in my lecture Powerpoint called 'Why Bother' and they talk about better marks (better assignments--better resources) gaining a conceptual map (framework, orientation, shortcuts and work arounds) knowing the right tools (catalogue and databases) your time - your life. Each of these 3 slides have a picture of a egg timer on them bcos the biggest selling points of IL to students (especially UGrads) is TIME and MARKS. I try and tie it to the workplace as well, as we get graduates back IN the library using the databases bcos they have a research project to do in their new job and don't know how to begin (obviously haven't found a useful place in their new COP.

I am incredibly interested in interconnectivity in relationships so am interested in IL before and after University - High Schools and workplaces - I keep telling students IL isn't just for assignments it's for life (ho-hum most couldn't be less interested... which is fine)... I also tell them if what you're doing works for you (Grame's little Google darlings) then that's fine but there will come a time it will stop working... that's when you need to know the topographical layout of your info setting so you can do something else)

I'll shut up now...

lesley

Margie, I was interested in your roller coaster analogy. In the workplace where I am currently conducting my reserach, there does appear to be an 'stop' as you described in you posting. The emerging practictioners who enter the workplace seem to dip in and out of their information landscape, this gives them time to reflect on information, where it is located and how to access it. It also allows them to incorporate new information into their knowledge structures.

Experts in this workplace also act as an emergency brake for newcomers who are required to demonstrate their information competence to the team.

Annemaree

Have been listening in to this discussion from the outer fringes of secondary education.

I've just read Lesley's explanation of COPs with some interest as it is a different perspective to high schools where we believe our focus is on lifelong learning skills across all sectors of knowledge that follow through into life beyond secondary or tertiary education, regardless of industry, profession or COP.

We are constantly told, and Lesley refers to it, that job or industry specific skills are constantly changing; but surely learning how to use a variety of databases will make them familiar with the architecture that new databases will be built on - however that is computer literacy, not information literacy.

I am currently undertaking a course on SHIP (students with high intellectual potential) methodologies which is leading me to think (!) that we need to align our collaboration with teachers/lecturers/trainers with thinking skills that surely cross all boundaries - subjects, professions, trades; rather than narrow our efforts to dealing with rigidly defined and surely finite and subject-to-obsolescence COPs? Aren't information literacy skills, thinking plus communication skills?

Sue Spence
Teacher-librarian

A a