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Wednesday, September 26, 2018

Character building in children’s online information behaviours #ecil2018

David McMenemy and Steve Buchanan from Robert Gordon University reported on a project that brings together David’s interest in philosophy and Steve’s interest in information behaviour.  They aimed to explore concepts of character development in the IL context, including cyber-bullying, disinformation, hate speech, intellectual property. There is a lot of literature on this from an education perspective, but little from the information perspective. The presentation introduced the concept of “intellectual character”, which is the part of your character that relates to thinking and learning. 9 core intellectual virtues defined by Baehr (2015) were applied to 2 core Il Frameworks, the big 6 and the ACRL framework: curiosity, intellectual autonomy, intellectual humility, attentiveness, intellectual carefulness, intellectual thoroughness, open-mindedness, intellectual courage, intellectual tenacity.

The big 6 model was found to be overtly task focused, and had limited in relation to character development. None of the 9 virtues were manifest in the ACRL framework, however there was latent presence of some virtues, e.g. “research as inquiry” included notions of curiosity. Development of character is an incremental and iterative process, so the question was asked, is there space in IL teaching to take this approach. They suggest that there needs to be further refinement of IL education models to explicitly incorporate application of intellectual character virtues.
Pam McKinney

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