Information Literacy and deciding what is “good”

This article in the Chronicle of Higher Education is the latest discussion of the woeful information literacy skills of contemporary undergraduates (a topic about which I have blogged already).  No fewer than six of my friends and colleagues sent me the link to this article, because it’s also an excellent presentation of the ERIAL library ethnography project.  My colleague Andrew Asher was one of the anthropologists participating in this large-scale study, which aimed to ground what we know about students and their interactions with libraries and library resources in their actual behavior, through open-ended interviews, participant observation, and other research instruments like photo diaries (all methods I engage in as a part of the Atkins Ethnography Project here at UNC Charlotte).

Particularly highlighted in the Chronicle’s coverage of the ERIAL project (and its upcoming publications via ALA) is the surprise that so-called “digital natives” could be so terribly unskilled at evaluating information.  I don’t think we need to be surprised by students capable of googling not being aware of how to pick which source to use, any more than we would be surprised by children kept away from books all of their lives being unable to figure out what to do with all of those large blocks-full-of-paper things in the library.  Digital literacy has never been the same as information literacy, and all of the digital toys in the world will not render our students (or anyone else’s students, for that matter) capable of distinguishing a reliable source from an unreliable source.

Persistent, consistent instruction in information literacy is what will give our students that skill set.  And it cannot begin at university–this skill should be taught and exercised throughout K-12 education (and beyond).  The testing culture of our current educational system makes critical thinking far less valued than retention and regurgitation of facts, and we are paying for that emphasis with the lack of preparation we see in our undergraduates.  The idea that an undergraduate degree is “to get a job,” rather than a basis for becoming a thinking and contributing (not just in economic terms) member of society, also gets in the way of educators advocating for critical thinking in the classrooms.  Some students get frustrated by it (being asked to think critically about class content, society, life in general) because they are not necessarily used to being asked to do it, and professors are frustrated by students’ frustration–why did they come to college if not to think?

I am collaborating on a project now that involves interviewing and observing high school seniors and college freshman as they look for information, academic and otherwise.  My research partners and I are beginning to analyze the interview data now, and among the many striking things is the standard by which students judge information to be “reliable:”  repetition.  Several students say things like, “if I find it more than once on the web, I know that it’s reliable information.”  Why do they think this?  Where are they getting this standard of reliability?  Is it possible that they’re not being told any other standards?  Or are they simply assuming that the most popular Google link is popular for a fact-based reason?

I think about how students evaluate information when I see their interest in the library website providing reviews of books, articles, and other materials that they can access in our collections.  They want an Amazon.com-style service whereby they can see what previous users of the materials have said about the materials, so that the students can make an informed decision about the utility of the materials for their purposes.  If you think about the Amazon-style reviews, (see, for instance, the reviews of this Economics textbook), you see that the reviewers writing the “most useful” reviews are explicit about what they wanted out of the book, how the book met their needs (or didn’t), and allow the reader of the reviews to evaluate the extent to which the reviewer’s standards are the reader’s own.  Something is given stars based on whether or not it met a particular user’s needs, therefore context is necessary in a review, for other users to be able to effectively evaluate the potential of an item.

What is “good,” therefore, is a subjective, shifting thing.  Students who are writing five-page essays might review books as “too long” for what they need to do, and articles as “just the thing.”  Graduate students working on dissertations might review books according to their theoretical perspectives.  Reviews on a library web site might give students the ability to get in virtual form the kind of feedback that they already ask their peers for in person (or on facebook, via text, or via emails) about the materials they need for papers, exams, and other coursework.

Students already evaluate information in non-academic settings.  They read (and act on) reviews of movies, cars, live music shows, and restaurants.  They take into account who is doing the reviewing, and whether that reviewer’s perspective is relevant and informed (or not).  It is not that they are utterly incapable of critical thinking.  It is that they are not doing it in academic settings.  They have not been trained to do it.  Neither have they been told by our educational institutions (writ large) that critical thinking is terribly important.

Beefing up information literacy programs at the university level, and at K-12, would be an important first step towards remedying the problem.  But the problem has other deep structural reasons for its existence, and those problems require fixes that come from outside of the educational system.

History’s Detectives and the Way the World Searches

I haven’t watched History’s Detectives (on PBS),  in a while, so when I caught up on an episode the other night, I was struck by something I hadn’t really noticed before.  For those of you who’ve not watched it (because you are not a history/anthropology geek like myself), History’s Detectives is a sort of spin-off of Antiques Roadshow.    But instead of people bringing their stuff to the Roadshow for experts to tell them about it, the experts  come to people’s houses to inspect the item, and take it away with them for a thorough investigation as to its history and meaning.

It’s fun, if you like that sort of thing (which clearly, I do).  This time around, I particularly noticed how the beginning of the process of investigation was represented.  After taking the object away with them to their study/office, the expert sits down with their laptop, and immediately fires up Google.  When Wes Cowan was beginning his investigation of a WWII propaganda leaflet, he typed almost those precise words into the Google search box, and worked his way through the links that came up.  He actually said for the benefit of the camera, “I don’t know anything about this,” before he started Googling.

It looked just like what any student does when they are asked to write a paper about a given topic.  Or what a faculty member does when they want to have a general sense of what’s being written about a topic before they teach a class on it, or write an article about it.

Here’s what marked Mr. Cowan as an expert:  he didn’t stop with the Google search.  He’s not on this show to do televised Google searches.  He moved away from the general overview that Google searching could give him, and started reaching out to professional contacts, snowballing his sources until he’d found the answers his client was looking for.   He moved from secondary sources to primary source documents in the process, spoke to people who knew the artist who produced that particular pamphlet, and was capable at the end of all of that work of crafting a finely detailed story of the artifact in question.

Students writing papers have different goals, and how far they go beyond the Google search (or, a browse-type search on an academic library web page) is very much up to the kind of assignment.  If they are writing a five page essay, the post-Google process will look different from that which goes into a 10 or 20 page paper. There is no one perfect search, because all searches happen in a given context.  What may be sufficient for one assignment is woefully inadequate for another (and will be reflected in one’s grade for that assignment!).

What does that mean for academic libraries, and those who work with students on their assignments?  It’s more important than ever to get a grounded sense of why students are looking for information, not just the fact that they need information on “X.”  The reference interview for a 5-page paper has compelling reasons to look different from one for the 10 page paper.

Demonstrating that we know the difference, and translating it into practice in the form of a reference interview gives us more credibility, and makes it more likely that students will come to us for help in the future.

Instruction at Point of Need

I get the impression that, within academia, there is a constant, low-level (and sometimes not-so-low-level) anxiety about whether or not students are learning what they need to about information, information literacy, and how to effectively use the information that they do find.    This essay is an example of some of the strategies academic libraries and librarians engage in to attempt to inform students in effective ways about their information possibilities. 

Instruction at the point of need is not a concept that is unique to academic libraries.  Faculty struggle with when is the best time to give students information about coursework, paper assignments, and exams.  Many go over their syllabi at the beginning of the semester, but then encounter students throughout the semester who were not in class that day, who got the syllabus but didn’t read it, or who have the syllabus but forgot what it said after they read it.  Having syllabi on course management systems such as Moodle or Blackboard Vista can help with this some, because you are not relying on student access to a paper copy, but can expect that students who need the information can go find it online.

Design specialists think about instruction at the point of need in all sorts of contexts.  The website of Edward Tufte contains an entire message board discussing examples of instruction, and whether or not those examples are effective (and why they might or might not be).  Signs that assist with urban wayfinding, package instructions, safety cautions are all examples of things that need clear and obvious design elements to catch attention as well as convey information.

People who need to find their way around a city, who need to open a newly purchased item, or who need to know how to be safe when their airplane is crashing are also highly motivated to receive the information contained in those instructions.  And that is where it can all get hung up in the academic context:  faculty and other instructors (including librarians) traditionally gave instruction when it worked for their own schedule, or for when they thought students *should* have the information (e.g., at the beginning of the semester).  That time is not necessarily when students are most receptive to that information.  Finding the intersection of student need and student receptivity is a tricky prospect, and requires flexibilty.

For instance, there are faculty members who have online office hours the night before homework assignments are due, because that is when students both need and are willing to listen to the relevant information.  Students who are writing papers often do so in the week (or day) before the assignment is due–that is when they are most receptive to information about how to structure their paper, how to find information to use in the body of their paper, how to configure their bibliography.  Short of reference librarians giving middle-of-the-night library instruction, how can we get that information into the hands of students when they both need it and are listening to what we have to say?

This is something we are actively thinking about in Atkins, and there are already a few possible solutions that we are working towards.  I’d be interested in hearing what you think are really effective ways of reaching people with the information they need to have to be successful.  What has worked for you?

New York Public Library and Thinking about Workspaces

I had the great good fortune to spend a few days in New York City this past week, and managed to stop in to the NY Public Library for a little while. 

My kids told me it felt like a museum, but to me it feels like a cathedral dedicated to books.  All that marble, all of that art, all of that lovely architecture, surrounding a collection and a space for accessing that collection.

And not just the collection, but also the internet (and the informative places therein)–so, it’s a cathedral to information, really.  A place for you to find what you need, and also to get help if you need it.  Heady stuff for academics.  And for non-academics who love information. (“Information:  it’s not just for books anymore.”)

Photos are only permitted in the Catalog section of the Reading Room.   The other half of the Reading Room looks very similar, except there are not desktop/catalog computers in that space.  People in that part of the reading room were working on laptops if they were working on computers.

The Catalog Reading Room looks like this:

It is a beautifully appointed room, with brass lamps at strategic places at the long wooden tables, so that when the natural light that streams through the windows is unavailable, people can still work. 

The lamps also delineate the tables as workspaces for multiple people.  
There were people working singly, but also in pairs:

  The walls are lined not just with marble, but also with books.  The further back you go into the room from the information desk, the less desktop computers/internet terminals there are.  People seemed fairly evenly distributed throughout the space until I got to this point:


The sign says this: 

I was particularly struck by the lack of people at these tables.  I wondered if it was because this was the catalog room, and people needed to be closer to the catalog computers.  But then I went into the other half of the Reading Room, and found the same situation:  a sparsely populated laptop free zone.

Further investigation in the building, not far away, revealed this:

  

This room is not as big as the Reading Room, but it’s pretty nice, for a room that’s not the Heart of the NYC Public Library. 

But I really can’t figure out the logic of separating out people who work on laptops from the rest of the people who are working in the Reading Room.  It feels archaic, like “no click zones” are now.  I didn’t have time to interview anyone who worked at the library about it, so they may well have their reasons, but it felt like an unnecessary segregation to me.

Of course, the NYC Public Library has lots of space, and clearly can provide lovely space that is separate for its laptop users (a luxury we, and many other public university libraries, simply do not now and never will have).  But check out the ceiling of the laptop room:

and contrast it with the one in the Reading Room. 

In a cathedral to books, I know which space I’d rather be working in, laptop or no.

New Places for you to Work (edited to give credit where due)

Joan Lippincott  and Sarah Watstein came to talk to us in the library this past semester about learning spaces.  We were shown photos of a variety of library spaces in a wide range of places.  I was particularly inspired by a picture of a picnic table tucked under a chalkboard in a friendly outdoor nook.  And I thought, “we can do that.”

Thanks to the quick work of our facilities staff, when you come back for the summer sessions, or even if you are not coming back until the Fall, there are new workspaces waiting for you!  There are now chalkboards in the outdoor area just outside of Peets.  We are lucky in Charlotte to have nearly year-round outside-friendly weather.  Enjoy!

Questions for you! Just in time for finals…

…but in this case, there’s no such thing as a wrong answer.
We’ll have easels up soon, so you can write your answer hard-copy if you like, but I thought I’d put the questions here in case someone (you, perhaps) might be inspired to answer them here.

We’re trying to get at what people think about the library, and have been presented with some questions that might help us do that.

Please answer in the comments:

1.      1.   If the library as it is now were a car, what car would it be? What car would the library be if the library were everything we wish it to be?
2.    2.   If the library were to be a song, which song?
3.    3.   If the library were an actor/actress, who would it be?

Mobile Devices and how people use them

This is a great snapshot of mobile devices usage at UW–I believe the stats are campus-wide, not just in the library.

If you go to the library.uncc.edu URL on your smartphone, you’ll see that we’ve got the beginnings of a mobile site.  In thinking about developing the new mobile site, we need to think about library things that people are likely to do on their phone (as opposed to on their laptop, in person, etc).  That means knowing the sorts of things that people already do on their phones (or tablets).

I see tablets and smartphones (as well as laptops and regular cell phones) as a part of student workspaces in the library all of the time.

Like this:


 

Do you use your smartphone to Google things?  What kinds of things?  What kinds of work do you do on your tablet (iPad, or other)?  Is it different from work you do on other kinds of computers (laptops, desktops)?  Are you Macs or PCs, and what difference does that make in the kinds of work you can do in the library and/or with library digital resources?

An Anthropologist in the Libraries of LA

No, not me.  No field trips for me, yet.

But I was sent this link to a great interview of the new head of the Library Foundation in LA–this gentleman is a trained anthropologist who did fieldwork in the Amazon, as well as many other non-library related jobs (among them, running the Sundance Institute, and while he did that, starting the documentary division of that film institute).

He clearly sees the LA libraries as community resources, not just (as if they ever were) dusty book repositories.  He describes libraries as “21st century spaces.”

So do we, here at Atkins.  More and more of our collections are digital, in part because that is one of the best and most effective ways we can increase our patron access to world-class collections.  In thinking about space, we are thinking about the work you need to do, which includes the need to use books but also includes computers, digital materials, and eventually, information formatted in ways we haven’t even imagined yet.

What does your library mean to you?  Is Atkins “your library?”  Or is it the public library back home?  Or in your neighborhood here in Charlotte?  Where are you when you are “in the library?”  Are you here in the building?  Or at home, “in” our website?