Report from #ecil2014 - Ross Todd

Ross Todd, one of the invited speakers, is talking next at the European Conference on Information Literacy, held in Dubrovnik, on Collaborative Inquiry In Digital Information Environments: Expanding Perspectives on Information. He is Director of the Center for International Scholarship in School Libraries (CISSL) http://cissl.rutgers.edu/. He said he was troubled in "in-house territorial battleground for intellectual possession" and the multiplicity of models, which he felt was a "model media". Additionally he felt that information literacy needed better theoretical foundations and that there needed to be "deeper exploration of what constitutes meaningful pedagogy for information literacy intervention".
Todd referred to John Hattie's meta analysis of educational studies, and called for a similar meta analysis for the information literacy field, to identify a better theoretical base for information literacy. Todd put forward Carol Kuhlthau https://comminfo.rutgers.edu/~kuhlthau/ as a model of a researcher researching and working in the information literacy field (her work on the information search process and on guided inquiry will be familiar to many and there is a good deal of information about them on her website).
Todd made further points, based on his research with CISSL. This included moving from a "find" framework to "doing something with the found". Currently CISSL is looking at questions such as: team-based inquiry, collaborative learning, and (for example) investigating groups of school children engaged in tasks using a guided inquiry approach. Todd quickly presented some findings from the latter study to do with the dynamics of group works, one element of which was "social justice" (e.g. expecting equity of contribution), which "social justice" element was one he was particularly interested in pursuing ("information literacy through a social justice lens").
Photo by Sheila Webber: washing in the old town, Dubrovnik, October 2014