COLIS proceedings

The Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science, London 21-24 June, 2010 were published online in two parts as part of the open access journal Information Research. I blogged from this conference, you may recall.
Part 1: http://informationr.net/ir/15-3/colis7/colis7.html
Example papers: Annemaree Lloyd "Corporeality and practice theory: exploring emerging research agendas for information literacy"; Brendan Luyt and Intan Azura "The sigh of the information literate: an examination of the potential for oppression in information literacy"
Part 2: http://informationr.net/ir/15-4/colis7.html
Example papers: Jela Steinerová "Ecological dimensions of information literacy"; Anna Lundh "Studying information needs as question-negotiations in an educational context: a methodological comment"
Photo by Sheila Webber, January 2011

Library instruction assessment

In a special issue with some paper from the COLIS7 conference (it also includes Isto Huvila's paper on the information behaviour of wikipedia authors), is:
Staley, S.M., Branch, N.A. & Hewitt, T.L. (2010). "Standardised library instruction assessment: an institution-specific approach" Information Research, 15(3) paper 436.
http://informationr.net/ir/15-3/paper436.html "We explore the use of a psychometric model for locally-relevant, information literacy assessment, using an online tool for standardised assessment of student learning during discipline-based library instruction sessions." It takes as its starting point that "a uniform approach to assessment is critical to improving the instructional programme and providing a systematic basis for institutional support.", and I would argue with the first part of that premise (since that doesn't take account of issues such as the authenticity of assessment, and the learning context). However, it is an interesting article in approaching the investigation of this mode of assessment thoroughly, and they helpfully provide their survey instruments at the end.
Photo by Christopher Webber: me in Happy Valley, Llandudno, August 2010

IL research seminar papers online

Some of the short position papers presented at the Information Literacy Research Seminar 2010 at the CoLIS conference in London have put their papers online (I'm afraid I haven't put my position paper online yet).
- Francke, Helena, Credibility, Materiality, and Mediated Interaction
- Huvila, Isto, What about Creating and Organizing?
- Limberg, Louise, Information Literacies at the Intersection between Information Seeking and Learning: Contexts and Values
- Mackey, Thomas P. & Jacobson, Trudi E., Re-Conceptualizing Information Literacy as a Metaliteracy for Social Media
- Moring, Camilla, Learning Trajectories: Becoming Information Literate across Practices
Sormunen, Eero, Lehtiö, Leeni & Hongisto, Heidi, Collective Authoring of Wikipedia Articles as a Learning Task in Embedded Information Literacy Instruction
- Talja, Sanna, From Teaching Information Literacy to Teaching Information Management?: An Information Practice Model for Teaching and Learning Information Competences
They can all be found as links from the International information literacies research network site at http://iilresearch.wordpress.com/2010/08/
Photo by Sheila Webber: Trainers hanging on a telegraph wire, Bergen, Norway, Sept 2010. I posted a picture of trainers on a wire in Sheffield a little while ago. Is this an international trend?

COLIS 2010: Wikipedia studies

I'm giving brief reports from the COLIS 2010 conference in London, UK. I will cover a study of Wikipedia editors and then (more briefly) a study on using Wikipedia editing as a task in schools. Helena Francke (Boras University) and Olof Sundin (Lund University) presented on Credibility in Wikipedia from the perspective of editors. They looked at questions about how credibility was discussed, what types of criteria partcipants consider (as Wikipedia editors) and how the editors themselves use Wikpedia. It was a qualitative study, interviewing 11 people who were experienced editors of Swedish Wikipedia. Since "Wikipedians" share a set of tools, language etc. and have common goals, they could be said to form a network of practice.
In terms of assessing entries, the author was very important, tending to assume that experienced known authors would be more trustworthy than new or unknown authors. The Editors also looked at the history and talk pages to guauge the discussion, to see whether some element was being disputed or changed a lot, or identify controversial issues.Subject knowledge is used to judge which topics are more likely to be subject to bias or inaccuracy. The Editors might compare with other versions of Wikipedia (e.g. English or German) "if there are enoiugh versions that include the same facts, I think you can probably trust them". Unsurprisingly, given the Wikipedia guidelines, citing sources was important too.
In terms of using Wikipedia themselves, the editors used them in ways that are similar to previous studies. For example they used it to get an overview (so absolute accuracy was not necessary), they tend not to use it when they need to be certain abut something and they compare sources to verify information.
However, the editors also use their "inside knowledge" and so again consider the credibility of the author (since they will know the authors from their editing activities) and use all the pages and features of Wikipedia to make their assessments as readers.
One conclusion that could come out of that (I think) is that being Wikipedia editors could make people make more critical and confident Wikipedia users. There are already examples of lecturers and teachers using this approach to educate their students (e.g. as described in http://information-literacy.blogspot.com/
2009/01/wikipedia-original-research.html)
There was also a paper in the information literacy research seminar from Eoro Sormunen, Leeni Lehtio and Heidi Hongisto on Collective authoring of wikipedia articles as a learning task in embedded information literacy instruction (at a school in Finland) . I won't say too much as the paper can be seen at in this location. The authors observed activities in the classroom, where students were set the task of collaborating on the production of Wikipedia articles. They were interested in the information literacy and inquiry based learning aspects. Analysis showed that issues to do with information seeking and use, and discussion about the work process, were the most problems or explained or discussed by the students.
There is also a paper on a first study:
Hongisto, H. & Sormunen, E. (2010) "The challenges of the first research paper – observing students and the teacher in the secondary school classroom." In: Lloyd & Talja (Eds.) Practising Information Literacy: Bringing Theories of Learning, Practice and Information Literacy Together. Wagga Wagga: Centre for Information Studies, pp. 95-120
https://www12.uta.fi/blogs/know-id/
files/2010/05/Hongisto_Sormunen_PIL2010.pdf
Photos by Sheila Webber: University College London (the conference venue), June 2010

COLIS2010: Information behaviour in gourmet cooking

At the COLIS 2010 conference Jenna Hartel (University of Toronto, Canada) talked about Time as framework for information science: insights from the hobby of gourmet cooking. Since it is not so relevant to this blog, I will not cover the part about the framework for information science, but I will give a short glimpse into her research, since I think it is relevant in terms of thinking about the kinds of information activities that people engage with in such a commonplace activity as cooking. Hartel used an ethnographic approach to a study of the use of information in amateur gourmet cooking. She noticed that temporal issues were important and used this factor to identify three temporal arcs:
- lifetime of the cooking hobby (with a "career arc": beginning, development, establishment, maintenance, decline). Early on, there was a focus on learning, later on the focus was on collecting (recipes etc.)
- Subjects (types of cooking e.g. baking, barbecue, Chinese, "that summer I was really into French") The focus here is on classifying, defined as "meaningful clustering of experience".
- Episodes (Doing the cooking!) Hartel identified nine typical steps e.g. planning (which involves searching for recipes) - see the link at the end for her article that gives them all.
I may be misinterpreting, but I think this meant that (for example) someone still in the learning phase who was cooking a French meal would be engaged in slightly different information behaviour to someone who was an experienced cook (e.g. they maybe searching their own recipe collection rather outside sources at the planning stage).
This was a very interesting talk from a research perspective, but also in practical terms I think it could give more purpose to information literacy initaitives in public libraries who were thinking about targetting people interested in cookery (e.g. concentration on finding new recipes vs. organising all the recipes you've collected on scraps of paper, books and bookmarks).
There is an article about her research:
Hartel, J. (2006) "Information activities and resources in an episode of gourmet cooking" Information Research, 12(1). http://informationr.net/ir/12-1/paper282.html
One article that Hartel mentioned in particular was:
Savolainen, R. (2006) Time as a context of information. Library and Information Science Research, 28 (1) 110-127.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Cafe at University College London, June 2010.

COLIS 2010: Information literacy as oppression

Today at COLIS 2010 Brendan Luyt presented a paper coauthored with Intan Azura, The oppressed sigh of the information literate: an examination of the potential for the oppression in information literacy. The speaker started by referring to the paper by Matusov and St Julien (2004) which identifies how print literacy could be seen as a form of colonial oppression. Through the creation of texts, literacy enables bureaucracy. Luyt argued that nowadays colonial oppression tended to take place with mental ratherthan physical property, e.g. where intellectual property is taken from the intellectual commons, "at a time when new technologies are changing the contours of creativity" (e.g. someone can usually sell-on a book or copy bits of it or display it, which it might be illegal todo with an electronic verson).
He thought that, firstly, IL was involved in this through the "push of norms" to do with Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and this is leading to a redefinition of IL which has more emphasis on respecting IPR. He thought that learners should be encouraged to trouble the idea of IPR and reflect on what the implications of IPR were.
Secondly, there was the idea that a hierarchy of cultures had emerged, which again could be seen as oppressive. One aspect of this was media concentration (e.g. far fewer companies owning media channels), thus effectively reducing the knowledge pools, possibly replacing knowledge from less dominant cultures, leading to another form of mental colonisation. The implcations for IL education were making sure that we encouraged learners to see the social context of information production, engage critically with the media and so forth. He felt that at the moment there was not enough focus on the social and political aspect of information.
The speaker also mentioned students learning through textbooks, and thus absorbing traditional conceptions of knowledge.
Of course, my take on this would be that the kind of information literacy that I espouse, and aim to engage my students with, is a means of liberation rather than oppression. There were also questions after the talk pointing out that alternative sources of information proliferated (although people still get a lot of information via the "traditional" media), and that people were becoming more likely to be producers as well as consumers. However, I would agree that the kinds of critical and ethical engagement he was talking about is vitally important.
Reference: Matusov, E. and St Julien, J. (2004) "Print literacy as oppression: Cases of bureaucratic, colonial, and totalitarian literacies and their implications for schooling." Text, 24(2) 197-244
Photo by Sheila Webber: Peacock, Prague, May 2010

COLIS 2010

I am now attending the COLIS (International Conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science) conference in University College London, UK: http://colis.soi.city.ac.uk/. I will intersperse posts about COLIS and the AULIC seminar (also at some point I will catch up on the other events I attended last week!) So, as a first post from COLIS: Anna Lundh talked today about studying information needs as question negotiations in an educational context: a methodological comment. As you will see if you get to the end of this post, there are, in particular, implications for those who are supporting learners who have been told to think up a topic or question of their own.
Lundh identified that information needs have been traditionally seen as the factor that triggers someone into seeking information. Therefore information needs have been seen as important, but not investigated nearly as much as information seeking. Taylor (1962) identified levels of need: the visceral need (the actual unexpressed need), the conscious need, the formalised need and the compromised need (the latter is the one presented to the information system), and there has been more research on the last two levels. However this assumes the information need being isolated to the individual. Lundh was taking the starting point that information needs can be seen as question negotiation, emerging through "social interaction and language use". If you take that standpoint, then you have to think of an appropriate way to research it, and Lundh talked about the concept of language games and looking at use of language in social interaction. When looking at negotiations, you have to consider who is interacting, when and where.
Her own research has been in a primary school in Sweden. The children were told by their teacher to investigate a question about something they were interested in. Thus they had to think up their own questions. She observed how the questions did gradually emerge from interactions between the teacher or librarian and pupils. Lundh showed an example where a question posed by two young pupils started as vague ("drinks"). The interaction with the librarian was almost imposing a question on the girls, although that evidently was not the librarian's aim: she probably thought she was helping them to clarify their question into something achievable. Lundh presented this incident effectively, having converted (for confidentiality) some still video frames into comic strips, so you could see the body language of the participants as well as what they said. In this kind of situation, talking about negotiation does seem more meaningful than "identifying the information need", since the latter could imply that the "information need" is already decided, whereas in fact it will not just be articulated, but also determined, by the dialogue that takes place with others. This is a subtle shift, but it is (my interpretation) one from thinking you are neutrally trying to tease out the need that has been poorly articulated, to one where you are more openly acknowledging that you are influencing what the final need (and "solution") will be.
I think it is true, also, when students are developing research questions (whether at undergraduate or postgraduate level) that a process of negotiation goes on between the student, the supervisor (e.g. me), the literature (which, if it is engaged with well, can help spark new ideas and directions, and change the research question, and thus the information need), and anyone else involved in mediating the literature or the topic (e.g. librarians).
An article about a previous stage in the research is: Lundh, A. (2008). "Information practices in elementary school" Information Research, 13 4). http://InformationR.net/ir/13-4/wks10.html
Reference: Taylor, R.S. (1962) “Process of Asking Questions” American Documentation,13 (4), 391-396.
Photo by Sheila Webber: I didn't take any photos today, possibly because I'm suffering awfully from hay fever. This is a photo of Bath, June 2010.