i3 reports: Kendra Albright

Very belatedly I am catching up with the last two reports from the the i3 conference held in Aberdeen in June. Dr Kendra Albright (University of South Carolina) gave the last keynote speech Multidisciplinarity in Information Behaviour: Expanding Boundaries or Fragmentation of the Field? (that is a link to the presentation). I will pick out some points that I found particularly interesting.
Referring to the legal, emotional and safety needs of abused women, she talked about information seeking as a coping strategy; the process of answering their needs helping them to cope.
Kendra talked about the brain functions involved in decision making, or wrestling with emotional issues - and how most decisions get based on emotional elements. Thus she wondered whether some concepts from psychology can help us with understanding information behaviours (IB). Models of IB have tended to be limited, with a lack of focus on use, and looking at individuals rather than the socio-political context.
Kendra emphasised the interconnection between cognition and emotion, by referring to the physical construction of the brain. Turning to psychology, she characterised a cognitive science approach that focuses on language and thought as neglecting emotion. In contrast, pyschoanalysis aims to "bring about change in emotion and thought" and is interpretative (rather than focusing on explanatory theories). There is an move towards integrating these two views. This carries through to research methods: quantitative methods do not seem sufficient to investigate all these areas and interviews also may not be the only way to gather qualitative data. Kendra talked about Rorschach tests (ink blots), pointing out is is not a "quick reaction" method, but involves getting the patient to discuss their interpretation, and observe physical reactions etc.
She presented some research identfying that afective attitudes are stronger pedictors of decision making than cognitive issues: we might think we are making "logical" decisions but emotions may well be affect them. We should bear this in mind when approaching IB research, and she mentioned Diane Nahl's work which links IB and affect (Diane gave a talk about this as part of my Second Life discussion series).
Transferring to her own work, she talked about how information may contribute to the decline of HIV/AIDS, but "linking HIV information with mortality could deter people from either actively seeking or passively assimilating information that could save their lives". Focusing on death may not be the most productive thing: young people may feel this doesn't impact them, and it associates the information with negative emotions. Repackaging the information in an emotionally intelligent way is better.
As this discussion illustrates, we need to use knowledge from more than one discipline, also, to answer questions such as: How does, say, health information change human behaviour? Possibly fragmenting our field by looking across disciplines was a "risk worth taking" in her view: the "Neccessity of transdisciplinarity".
Photo by Sheila Webber: Sheffield bus station, July 2009

i3 report: Research Information Network

I'm afraid I am taking a while in finishing off my final few reports from the i3 conference that took place at Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, Scotland a few weeks ago. I've got another couple of half-finished reports, here's one I manged to tidy up!
Sharon Markless and David Streatfield talked about the findings from the Research Information Network report "Mind the skills gap". ("The report focuses on the nature, extent and organisation of the information-related training for researchers that is provided by universities and other higher education institutions. It looks at the roles that librarians and other information specialists play and how the training that they provide fits with the wider provision of generic training for researchers.")
The speakers' first point was about how the research evidence, as much of it as there is, indicates that transfer of skills from one context to another is difficult and certainly cannot be assumed. Therefore pushing "generic skills" courses (as has happened with Roberts money (i.e. money invested in the UK to support "employability" and research skills of research students) is problematic.
Markless and Streatfield saw a problem not so much in academics' view of the library, but rather the librarians' perception of the library and its role. In terms of events put on by librarians for researchers, they reported quite a "traditional" narrow range of activities, if you consider the full range of information literacy related support and education librarians could provide. The things which librarians most frequently mentioned (in the report) were doing literature searching, sessions on citing material, finding research material. There seemed to be more scope for them offering education to do with personal information management, evaluating information, development of metadata.
In terms of "how effective was the Roberts money" Markless and Streatfield felt it hadn't been very effective at all as regards involving/leveraging librarians. Academics also tended to talk about information skills rather than information literacy; librarians were talking about IL, but delivering information skills. In particular, Markless and Streatfield noted that people developing the Roberts programmes might well have been open to suggestions for IL. Another missed opportunity was the Vitae website: librarians were not contributing to "best practice" part of the website.
Another key message is/should be "it isn't all about training". The training offered did not sound appropriately constructivist. It could have been more successful if the "trainers" had got to know the researchers, and started to understand their needs.

Photo by Sheila Webber: Flag, Thessaloniki, June 2009

i3 reports: Twitter and facebook

I may not get my final set of blog postings about the i3 conference up til later today or tomorrow, as I am dashing off after the parallel session I'm in at the moment. Therefore I will alert you to some other impressions of the conference (though for some of them you may need to have signed up for the application). Firstly, Kornelia Sliwinska has been posting many photos to Facebook http://www.facebook.com/photo_search.php?oid=43169634350&view=all. There was some tweeting using the hashtah #i3 https://twitter.com/#search?q=%23i3
Actually I'm not able to find any more through quick searches .... interesting lack of bloggers. I'm pretty sure that Christine Irving will be blogging something here http://caledonianblogs.net/information-literacy/

Photo by Sheila Webber: Pigeon not twittering, Glasgow, June 2009

i3 reports: Information literacies beyond rhetoric

At the i3 conference that is taking place at Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, Scotland, Louise Limberg is today's keynote speaker. Her title was Information literacies beyond rhetoric: developing research and practice at the intersection between information seeking seeking and learning. Louise is Professor at the University of Boras, and co-director (with Roger Säljö) of the Linnaeus Centre for Research on Learning, Interaction and Mediated Communication in Contemporary Society.
Her central theme seemed to me to be contrasting two perspectives on information literacy: a political/professionalised one, and that which is based on theory and research. She then talked about some examples from her own research group. Apologies for this rather long post, but I thought she presented an interesting perspective.
At the start of her talk, Professor Limberg identified shifts in control and authority e.g. from professional expertise to empowered uses, from control of information to control of information behaviour, from physical space to virtual space. She went on to probe the two underlying concepts of literacy (which has been associated with reading, writing & arithmetic, connected with texts) and information (which was seen in the 90s as a thing, as a process and as knowledge, taking Michael Buckland's analysis). However the 21st century UNESCO definition of literacy is broader (see http://www.unesco.org/en/literacy), being defined in terms of capability for citizens' empowerment and development.
Professor Limberg identified stakeholders in information literacy as being: librarians, the library and information research community, education communities, and political actors/ agents. The political types tend to focus on other types of literacy, such as digital and media literacy. She noted the breadth of the Alexandria Proclamation on Information Literacy and compared this with the narrower and more traditional concept of information literacy identified in the UNESCO publication which proposes indicators for information literacy. She compared also a (Limberg and Folkesson) definition which emphasises the context-specific and varying experience of information literacy. She added socio-cultural perpectives from Sundin "IL is learning (appropriating) to communicate within a specific acitivity in order to be able to act in those practices that constitute the activity" and quoted AnneMaree Lloyd.
So, to summarise she compared the rhetorical view of IL (that IL is transferable, generic, measurable, cognitive, individual and normative (i.e. that you can say IL practices are right or wrong) and the view that emerges from research (IL as situated, varying according to situation and context, social and embedded in different practices and relative (i.e. there isn't a definite right/wrong for all situations).
Thus (she went on to argue) there are diverging interests: a professional, political and embracing view of information literacy (from the rhetorical and - I would say - more traditional library perspective) versus a critical, questioning and distanced view of information literacy. Obviously there is also common ground: e.g. that IL is an "interesting and possibly important concept", that related to learning, new media, LIS activities, librarians' expertise.
I found the above a useful summary which highlights the tensions you sometimes get in discussions about information literacy: with disagreement about what is important for this important subject.Professor Limberg went to talk further about her own perspective and that of her research community: they see information seeking IS) and learning as closely intertwined. She sees 5 relationships between the two things (learning and IS):
1. Information seeking for learning purposes
2. Learning information seeking
3. Teaching information seeking
4. Learning from information
5. Development of information technologies
She sees information literacy as a "hub" for making connections between information seeking and learning.
She finished by giving some examples of research projects. I must confess that at ths point I was getting a bit distracted, thinking about my own talk which was in the next session, so these are particularly brief notes. She stressed the sociocultural perspective they took to research, in the tradition of Vygotsky: this manifests as a focus on investigation of collective activities and tools & activities within communities. A couple of references related to this research are given below. I noted down that she emphasised the need to recognise that there are critical choices or assumptions in the ways systems are used, as well as in selecting of manipulating of data "recognising critical competencies that may emerge in the interaction between user and system" She briefly mentioned a current project EXpertise, Authority and Control on the InterneT (EXACT): A study of the formation of source credibility in Web 2.0 environments for learning, looking at what preconceptions and experiences teachers and schoolchildren have when approaching wikipedia and blogs. Librarian and teachers are viewed as authorities. Wikipedia is used as a background; books tend to be seen as more reliable than wikipedia. Louise felt it was not good to have these blanket views about media, as it did not encourage critical thinking. She saw this area of credibility and authority as an increasingly impotrtant part of practice."Physical and intellectual tools mediate world views and shape information and learning activities."
Sundin, O., Limberg, L. & Lundh, A. (2008). Constructing librarians' information literacy expertise in the domain of nursing. Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 40(1), 21-30.
Sundin, O. (2008). Negotiations on information seeking expertise: a study of web-based tutorials for information literacy. Journal of Documentation, 64(1), 24-44.

Photos by Sheila Webber: Display of winners of a design-a-mousemat competition and view of Department building as the mist rolls in... june 2009, Aberdeen

i3 reports: identifying email types

Another report from the i3 conference that is taking place at Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, Scotland. The second paper in the first session today was from Malcolm Clark, who reported on a part of his research, which is examining people's use of email. In particular he was looking at email structure and layout, looking for clues as to what features and forms in the emails were being used to make decisions about what to do with email. This is useful for studying how people filter and identify emails. I can imagine people producing emails can also earn from this (including spammers... but also library and information people: getting better attention for your emails)
He used the term genre to describe something which has a recognisable purpose (in terms of topics, arguments etc.) and form (which you can tell from readily observable features, such as language, communication medium or structural features).
He used eyetracking equipment to follow where eyes moved and how they behaved in reaction to what was on the screen. There were 24 participants. There were various kinds of email e.g. call for papers, library notice, information on a seminar, spam. Each item was presented 4 times, structured in different ways, including ones in which the structure was kept but the email text was replaced with XXs or 9s, one with the content and no structure, and one with all the structure & content removed. People were asked to identify what kind of email it was. He looked at various items such as genres correctly identified, amount of time spent on each. In terms of recognising what type of email itwas:
87% of the ones in their original form were correctly categorised, 77% of those with the original format by the content converted to X and 9s. If the structure (e.. coumns, paragraph sacing) was taken away, 68% of messages were recognised. 27% still recognised the type of email when it had no structure andwas all Xs and 9s - apparently certain types of email were recognised because they normally had lots of numbers (replaced by 9s). People skimmed the shape of the text: different areas were focused on depending on the structure. With emails with no structure there was a lot of scanning behaviour. Some useful features were identified for types of email: e.g. Calls for papers: dates, centred blocks, titles
Cinema listsings: blocks and numerical content
Library: people went straight to details of a book at the end of desciptive passage (perhaps flags up that if you currently circulate listings with abstracts, it may be that people don't want the abstracts!)
Spam - looking for keywords, address, emboldened text
One of the interesting methodological questions was whether you could use a constructivist concept like "genre" with a quantitative approach (observation in the lab).
Photo by Sheila Webber: Reception last night, with alumni of RGU, to celebrate 40 years of the Department

i3 reports: discussion fora use in teaching

Another report from the i3 conference that is taking place at Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, Scotland. The first paper in the first session today (or rather, the session I was at) was presented by James Herring on behalf of Lisa Soon, Maryam Sarrafzadeh and Kirsty Williamson on Reusing knowledge in online forums. For many years they have been using discussion forums at Charles Sturt University (Australia) to encourage students to discuss and to enable interaction with the tutors. However this potentially useful (for learners and tutors) . The authors undertook a focus group with subject coordinators from different disciplines. They found that academics were reusing discussion posts from their own classes in previous years, and sometimes from other classes. They were using them to identify problems & questions students had in previous years (to anticipate and improve), see issues raised by previous module coordinators and pull out good student recommendations for readings. Thus the posting were evidently useful, but this material is not used effectively between classes or over time: e.g. it is not searchable. This has led to discussions about making better use of this resource, and of sharing knowledge more generally.
Photo by Sheila Webber: people at the Grampian Information event yesterday.

i3 reports: emergent themes

This is another report from the i3 conference taking place in Aberdeen, Scotland at Robert Gordon University (the atrium is pictured here). I am just in a session in which chairs of previous sessions are drawing out some cross cutting themes. Dorothy Williams (the conference chair) was taking lots of notes, and if these get published they will be a fuller record than mine! So here are the themes.
Interdisciplinarity: this had emerged, for example, in terms of using methods, discoveries from other disciplines. One person talked about how she had worked with a group of people from different disciplines and the slow, but ultimately fruitful, process of getting to know each other and engage with the different conceptions, terminologies etc. There are different perspectives on this: people from different disciplines working together e.g. on a project, bringing their different perspectives, or people who have "grown up" multi- (or trans-)disciplinar, who may also be valuable in making connections between disciplines. I would observe that information science may have an advantage in being a social science.
Importance of context: need to understand the context in which information is used: personal, organisational and cultural contexts. This seems a bit of a no-brainer to me, as I feel it has got to the point where the importance of context, both in terms of information behaviour and in terms of pedagogy, has got to be acknowledged. However (when I said this) the point may be (essentially) "so what?": what can you learn and apply? (linking theory and practice - without falling into the trap of generalising into a meaningless rule or recipe).
Role of medical librarians, in being both involved in developing information services that are guided by the clinicians view of medicine, and having a role in supporting patients who need a different perspective on information (e.g. thinking of the needs of people who are receiving palliative care and who don't just want to look back at the causes of and prognosis for their illness). This can bring in a political as awell as an ethical dimension.
Serendipity: I was talking to Abigail McBirnie about this at the break, as she had presented a paper about her study of serendipity. I am very interested in information encountering, so we were talking about the differences between the two things. I found this article by her: McBirnie, A. (2008) "Seeking serendipity: the paradox of control." Aslib proceedings, 60 (6), 600-618.
Teachers' perceptions of information literacy: I already blogged about this, so won't say much more. James Herring (who was introducing this theme) had also given a paper this morning about the issue of transfer of learning, attitudes etc. This led to a discussion about engaging teachers in understanding information literacy: including teachers investigating it for themselves, IL coming into teacher education.

Information behaviours of information providers: how they operate with information, how they add value, and whether they understand the impact of what they do?

i3 reports: David Snowden

Still at the i3 conference in Aberdeen, I am listening to a keynote from David Snowden entitled Complexity, coherence, constraint cognition and context. He's intending to put the slides up as a podcast here. His theme is "Naturalising sense-making" (making sense of the world so we can act in it). He positioned himself as nearer Dervin's interpretation of sense-making than Weick's. He challenges "hard" systems thinking, which is interested in relationships rather than rigid categorisation. Thus for him a system is "any network that has coherence" which "may be fuzzy, it may or may or may not have a purpose". An agent "is anything whch acts within the system" (may be a person, an idea etc.) Thus he identifies 3 types of system: ordered (agents constrained); chaotic (agents all over the place); complex (interaction between the system and the agents).
I'll put in here, that in terms of, for example, planning for collaboration to education for information literacy, I would say that sometimes people talk about universities as if they were ordered (which is true only up to a point - but not necessarily in terms of nitty gritty curriculum development), or chaotic (with academics as erractic, but possible of being pinned down through individual study), but rather they should be treated as (at the curriculum development level) complex. At least, in some ways it may be most productive to treat the situation as complex, since then you would be looking at the whole situation, the "agents" and their academic context, and you would be thinking it as a situation that needs ongoing management and attention.
At the moment Snowden is talking about setting "flexible negotiable boundaries" in complex systems. You then set "attractors" (e.g. a video or game in terms of his actual example, a childen's party: in the curriculum this might be a particular educational or research activity perhaps), monitor and try different "attractors" and try and manage the system more organically. However he is also emphasising the need for constraints in systems, so his ideal system seems to be a "semi constrained" one.
Snowden has moved on to talk about the Cynefin framework (he's also referred to an article in the Harvard Business Review, the title of which is a "Leader's framework for decision making" (published November 2007). I don't want to jot down everything Snowden is saying, so I will skip over some of the next points (since I haven't processed them properly myself yet), but he has moved on now to the issue of distributed cognition (i.e. getting decision making from a wide number of people rather than centralised - this also implies distribution of other things such as raw information). He distinguishing this from just taking the pulse of "the crowd" (I think), looking rather to an informed or expert crowd. He has moved on to talk about the issue of only perceiving the patterns and data that you expect or are familiar: this can prevent us seeing new and unexpected things.

He has given a sort of slogan "Live with the way humans are" (rather than trying to force them into systems). Although there is certainly an educational element in information literacy (to go back to my own reflections), I think that that is a good way to start the approach - both in terms of identifying effective information literacy strategies that suit people's different information behaviours (so, information browsers as well as seekers) and in planning a pedagogically effective approach. He is also arguing against focus on "best practice" because you learn from your own mistakes, and also best practice in one context today, may not be best practice somewhere else tomorrow (or even today). I agree with that too.

He's finishing by talking about projects he's working on where people are enabled to tell their own stories, and doing their own tagging etc. of their stories and images. You may find relevant links at his website at http://www.cognitive-edge.com/index.php

Photos by Sheila Webber: view from plane to Athens, June 2009 & Hellingly woods, May 2009

i3 report: schools 2

Continuing reports from the i3 conference that is taking place at Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, Scotland: here are some notes from the second of the two studies concerning schools in Finland (from a session I attended yesterday).
Eoro Sormunsen (University of Tempere, Finland) presented a paper that he had co-authored with Heidi Hongisto, Students' requests for help and the teacher's strategies of support in a secondary school class working ona research assignment. This arose as a teacher was taking an inquiry approach to her teaching and wanted help in evaluating the impact of her approach. They adopted the research questions:
- firstly how do the students work on this, their first research paper,
- secondly, what kinds of problem do the students ask for help with (especially information seeking questions),
- thirdly, what strategies does the teacher use to support, or react to, problems that the students exerience,
- finally, what challenges are there for embedding information literacy within teaching.
The focus was a course on cultural geography, with 17 students aged 14 years. The teacher's learning goals for this project were to learn about the subject, to learn about planning, scheduling and carrying out work, seeking and using information, and using the computer for learning. The students were in fact researching a theme, rather than solving a problem scenario. It was an individual piece of work, although the students had sessions in class where they were working on the problem and had the chance to support each other.
There was an observation of weekly sessions, questionnaires (at different stages of the project) and interviews (one with the teacher and with a couple of students) and also reports (reflective and quantitative) of the coursework itself. In the end the researchers relied particularly on the observational data. For example they recorded problems that students had asked about (e.g. "Is this image good enough [for my coursework]") and any support offered by the teacher or peers (e.g. "Maybe you should look for another").
The researchers identified problem types which they clustered into problem categories, which were:
- information seeking and use (most frequent at 33% of the problems: roughly 40% of these were about searching; 40% on use (how to apply information); 20% on assessment of sources);
- the work process;
- the end product (the coursework);
- the subject itself;
- technical problems.
In terms of support strategies, they grouped 16 types of support into four categories:
- expert suppport (e.g. being directive about the correct solution; 39% of the total);
- ideas and encouragement (38% of the total support strategies, mostly not from peers);
- collaboration (e.g. person sitting next to you helping);
- controlling support (mostly teacher keeping students in the work process, checking that learners know what is required).
Collaborative strategies were used most in questions about the subject and technical projects. Expert was used least in technical problems.
(My observations) There are obvious uses into looking more closely, like this, at the kinds of problem that learners are asking about: you could use it to plan more effective support, and also use the "support strategy" analysis to reflect on whether you need to encourage peer collaboration more, whether you are giving too much (or too little) direction, whether the briefing for an assignment is unclear etc. This research also demonstrates that learners need support not just in searching but also in using information.
Photo by Sheila Webber: rose outside my hotel (and escaping bee), Aberdeen, June 2009

i3 report: school libraries studies

I am at the i3 conference that is taking place at Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, Scotland, for the next few days. This conference focuses on information literacy and information behaviour. Today included a parallel session with two studies concerning schools in Finland: I will blog them in 2 entries.
Eeva Kurttila-Matero talked about Teachers' conceptions of teaching and learning in teh context of a school library project. A follow up study in the City of Oulu, Finland.
She started by explaining that there is no obligation to provide school librraies in Finland. However the Finnish National Board of Education stipulated in 2004 that students should have the means of supporting their independent study. Her project is a follow up to one which aimed to develop a model and learning environment that supported independent study.
Eeva's study (which finishes in 2011) aims to increase understanding of teachers' conceptions of teaching and learning during a school library project. This project was to develop a school library in each school in the project (11 schools). The researcher was part of the small team that visited the schools to encourage the conversation to take place regularly, about the curriculum (in particular incorporating information skills) and how to meet the project goals. The teachers at the schools also visited each other to talk about the project. The schools did not have librarians on their staff.
Eeva's project investigates whether the school teachers' conceptions of teaching change, and in particular whether conceptions related to the pedagogical role of the school library change. She has used activity theory, and phenomenography.
What is most notable so far is that collaboration between teachers within and between schools has became more regular. There is more conversation about the curriculum and more exploitation of each other's expertise, including expertise in information seeking. There are examples of quotations from the teachers and the head teachers which show that their idea of the role of the school library is changing too: she quoted a remark on change from the perception of the school library project from being "a library furniture project" to a" pedagogically established way of working".
Photo by Sheila Webber: Laptop work in the cafe, Thessaloniki, Greece, June 2009 (last week)