Jane Secker was introduced by Nigel Morgan with a revision of his "Cephalonian method" which involved seeding questions in the audience for Nigel to answer to provide a background to Jane's career and information literacy work, it was a a very funny introduction to Jane, that matches the word cloud that Nigel and colleagues created for Jane (see photo below), writes Pam McKinney from the LILAC conference.
Jane introduced us to a writer, Brene Brown, who writes about speaking truth to power and putting oneself out there to communicate important values. Jane spoke about the current "information wars" and that we have lost a battle with truth with the prevalence of mis and dis information. This is concerning to the UK government - only 45% of UK adults said they were confident in judging the truth of the information they encountered online. We assume that people use their information literacy for good, but actually, there are highly information-literate people who deliberately spread misinformation. Jane used Star Wars as an example - with librarians acting as the plucky Jedi with information literacy lightsabres. The film Dead Poets Society was another cultural reference. This movie illustrates the value of excellent teaching, and Jane reflected on her experience of being taught history as an inquiry in school, where she had to analyse evidence to try to determine the truth. Jane learnt about bias and propaganda and why these concepts mean that information literacy is so important. This led to Jane becoming a researcher, she was interested in how historians evaluated newspapers and whether it would be possible to digitise newspapers and make them keyword-searchable.
Jane reflected on the value of libraries as places where people can freely access information and knowledge and shared a picture of the band the Manic Street Preachers, who had a banner behind them that said, "Libraries gave us power". It became clear to Jane when she was working as a librarian that information literacy was a vital personal competence, it wasn't just about the preservation of material, it was about being able to access it. Jane spoke about her friendship with Debbi Boden-Angell and how meeting Debbi sparked the creation of the LILAC conference that brought the nascent Information Literacy community together. She spoke about how Paul Zurkowski's initial paper sparked an entire information literacy movement with huge amounts of activity, models, research, and frameworks. Zurkowsli assumed that information would be locked away and would be hard to access, but in reality, information has become over-abundant, and is pushed at us in so many ways.
Advocating for information literacy has been hard. The value of information literacy outside the library community is poorly recognised, and in a paper by William Badke about why information literacy is invisible - he concluded that it was because academic assumes students will just learn information literacy by osmosis. In the UK, there is a recent school curriculum review which summarises competencies that students need to work effectively with information. However there is a proliferation of terms to describe new "literacies", and this forces us to have to justify our conception of the critical value of information literacy.
Jane spoke about the value of the LILAC community for her, and her work to connect with information literacy researchers and practitioners all around the world. We need to go outside our community and connect with others such as the Media and Information Literacy Alliance to have an impact on these complex problems the world is facing.
Jane spoke about doing a Postgraduate Diploma in learning and teaching in Higher Education and how the experience of doing this qualification was important for her career. Jane now teaches academic practice to lecturers and educational developers. Jane thinks that information literacy teachers are some of the most innovative educators in universities and encourages librarians to get a teaching qualification. She spoke about some examples from this years' LILAC conference of the innovative teaching that librarians are doing.
Jane spoke about the importance of copyright in this AI environment where there is a perceived threat to artists from AI using their work without attribution or permission. There is a misconception about copyright law, and it is necessary for librarians to be informed about copyright law and to share this with library users. Jane encouraged us to share our information literacy teaching with each other, and ensure that it is available as Open Educational Resources for all to use.
Jane spoke about the need for us all to collect evidence of the impact of our information literacy work and how it supports learning. We need evidence that our teaching is making a difference to learners. In all the noise about critical AI literacy, it is important that Librarians are at the table where this is being discussed and that we have excellent teaching that encompasses AI literacy.
Jane's colleague Chris Morrison finished the keynote by playing a new song on his guitar that they wrote together to share the history and joy of information literacy. This was a great keynote that I thoroughly enjoyed and it brought a real energy to the conference - thanks Jane!
Jane has made her presentation available here https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1skEEswue-ctVdcSvkyaj-HTRp0BiJdum
1 comment:
Thanks for a lovely write up of my keynote Pam!
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