Wednesday, June 27, 2007

i3: Presentation and panel

On Monday Bill Johnston and I presented our paper on Chemistry academics’ conceptions of teaching information literacy. In it we described the research approach, and the nature of the sample (20 academics from 11 different universities were interviewed). After analysing the transcripts of the interviews we identified three conceptions of pedagogy for information literacy:
1. Implicit in teaching students to understand chemistry.
2. Designing a path for students through a chemistry course
3. Challenging students to respond independently, critically and creatively with information
This was different from the other three disciplines we studied in that in Chemistry the “teaching information literacy is someone else’s job” category we discovered in Marketing, Engineering and English was not present - information skills were seen as essential for learning chemistry. One thing we highlighted was the differences in the types of information, information behaviour between disciplines. We also felt that the third approach was rather more exciting and stimulating than some of the more pragmatic search-focused approaches to teaching students IL

In fact the tension between a search-focused view of IL and one which is more holistic emerged as one of the issues for me. In a plenary session yesterday some of the session chairs were asked to identify questions that emerged, and many of them were to do with information literacy. I did write down some of the questions, but in a rather scrawled way, so this is my impression of a few of the questions (I might come back to them when blogging other sessions).

There was one question concerning whether information literacy needs to be defined differently in different contexts, and with a different approach to education. In fact with this one it seemed to me that everyone that spoke agreed it was the case, but was arguing as if others might disagree. There seems to me to be an obvious point that all education is context specific - management education would be approached very differently in a company, or a first year class, or a masters class, for example, even leaving aside the “different kinds of information in different contexts” angle that you get with IL. There was a question about whether information literacy had an aesthetic dimension (this arose from a presentation earlier in the day that I hope to blog about).

The rather dry way in which it can be taught was mentioned, with an interesting question about whether a focus on things like controlled vocabularies meant it was bound to seem rigid and unexciting. Someone pointed out that information seeking tended to be associated with negative concepts - things you mustn’t do etc., search failure and so forth, and that the pleasure/passion dimension of information literacy could be explored more.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Reception at the Town House on Monday evening.

No comments: