Exploring information literacy meaning

Saturday 13 September 2003

All,

Wow! I found Neil's contribution very thorough and precise...thanks Neil. There is much to respond to in it but the one thing that jumped out at me because of my own setting was:

People must understand the discourse community to be information literature. They need to know the language of the discipline, the theoretical tensions, and the history. Disputes are standard within almost all domains and people need to know what the current disputes are. You need to know the 'main players', mainstream thought, outdated modes and emergent themes.

For me this means they must know how to talk about information and all that means - from articulating their need [Standard 1]...whether it be for information, direction, clarification or just good old moral support but also [Standard 5] communicating newly created knowledge to others...which then leads to the creation of networks and the birth of other bits of information and on and on.

This is something I hammer home to my students in the Physical Sciences all the time...particularly engineering students. It's a popular misconception that Engineers can't communicate (either reading, writing or speaking) most depressingly this is a perception I hear most often repeated by the students themselves as a way around engaging in the more 'wussier' things you have to do at uni like use the library or heaven forbid write an essay *sigh* I tell my students it is to their detriment to indulge themselves in such outdated ideas. Engineers get things done....and this requires communication with all types of people and resource providers to do the things you need....from contract lawyers, to designers, architects, the local council or chamber of commerce....right down to the guy in a pair of stubbies on a building site...if you want to build your dream building city you have to communicate this dream to others...piece by piece.

Wenger has prompted me to include CoP messages in my information skills classes. I tell my students:

to think about the ways you find information for your assignments/projects etc...if you don't know how to use the online resources or the library's print collection and apart from Google where do you turn ......large pause......to each other. [I validate the peer CoP as mush as possible...but that it is only as good as the source you are using.
currently when you leave here you won't have access to the same online information you had for your degrees....when and wherever you come to rest professionally you will need to change tack....you will need to find out who knows what then work out the best strategies to get them to share it with you --it's about communities and frameworks and hierarchies...it's about communication, and politics ultimately it's about power. (some bright spark said last week 'and the ones who can't talk to people go into research and become academics)

I'll leave that one to your imaginations.

Lesley Ngatai
Librarian
Physical sciences library
University of New South Wales Library

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