The Infoliterate University

A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to speak at unCOILed (a local library workshop). I think I’ll share more about my talk in coming posts, but a topic came up that merited its own post. Before the first breakout session, all of the day’s speakers participated in a panel discussion about why information literacy matters and the best ways in which to teach those skills. As the conversation unfolded, several audience members spoke out about the need for information literacy instruction to be immediately relevant and practical to student needs, and that  Library schools needed to focus less on theory and more on teaching those pragmatic skills. As you might imagine if you’ve been reading this blog, I began to squirm.

As soon as there was a natural pause in the conversation, I raised my hand, and said the following (approximately):

I’d like to push back a little on this. Practical teaching skills are important to librarians and becoming more so, and I think Library schools can and should make sure that there is space in the curriculum for all students to become grounded in the basics of pedagogy and curriculum design. However, we can’t discount the importance of theory, which I think many library schools teach fairly well. While it’s important to learn how to be an instruction librarian, theory teaches you the reasons WHY information literacy matters to students and my extension to the university. Understanding and communicating those reasons will help us be better educators, and give freshmen more reasons to pay attention to Peer-Reviewed sources at 8:30 AM.

A decent response as far as it goes. But I got to thinking about the Theory Thing, and realized there are at least five detailed reasons why theory matters to practitioners and the students we serve.

Theory explains why something is worth doing

Librarians (and educators/universities in general) are here to help student learn the skills they need to succeed in life, however they personally define that success. Universities, educators, and academic librarians have a shriveling pile of resources with which to accomplish that goal. Understanding theories about student learning can help librarians understand what services and resources should be emphasized to get the biggest return on investment, and what activities can and should be left behind.

Theory can Describe or Suggest

In a recent course on Educational Leadership, our Prof talked about the difference between descriptive and prescriptive theory. I’d never heard the distinction, but it made total sense and helped me grapple with theory more effectively. Briefly, Descriptive theories attempt to describe the impact of one phenomenon on another one—Say a student’s SAILS score versus their CLA score, for schools who can afford those kinds of Blue Chip assessments.  Prescriptive theories actually suggest a course of action: For instance, if you teach source evaluation skills via a constructivist-based pedagogy, then students will score better on SAILS than if you used a post-positivist lecture-based approach. Both types of theories provide possible explanations for how your students learn, but they work very differently.

Theory helps make assumptions explicit, which allows practitioners to critique them

Every profession is grounded in some basic assumptions, which may be captured in concepts like The Five Laws or Kuhlthau’s Sense-making Model, or which may be more informal. Some somewhat informal assumptions that ground much of what the library does could be worded like this:

1. All knowledge (or at least all scholarly knowledge) is worth preserving.
2. All knowledge can theoretically be collected.
3. All knowledge can and should be arranged into a tidy, logical and unbiased form of organization such as subject headings and shelf call numbers to promote ease of access.

This is something that most of us librarians believe in our bones, but a 19-year old postmodernist sophomore could demolish this assumption with one hand tied behind his back. For that matter, Wikipedia’s much easier to navigate than your average library catalog. (Yes, I hear you screaming about Source Authority. I’m not getting into that here. Let’s just say Authority opens its own epistemological can of worms which I will be exploring in coming weeks) In short, by laying out this informal assumption and making it explicit, it becomes a theory which can be refined, critiqued, challenged, tested, and implemented.

Theory explains the significance of what you do to a wider audience

This cohort has provided a fascinating insight into the way that administrators think. Most good administrators want their universities to implement programs to help students learn the skills needed for success. They also want this process to be explainable and provable to other administrators, donors, local businesses who hire graduates, grad schools who recruit them, and the accreditors who allow us to operate. At the end of a presentation about your new information literacy curriculum, after showing charts and tables full of wonderful test results and quotes from students, some wiseacre VP will inevitably ask: So What?

Theory, if worded in plain English, gives you an answer to that question. 

Theory helps you verify whether you’re doing the right thing

FInally, if you’re a good librarian or library director, you are constantly asking yourself whether the things you are doing will help you reach your end goals. The good news is, theorists in student learning and librarianship have been pondering these issues longer than you, and in a more focused manner. By reading theories, evaluating them against your own knowledge and experience, and acting on what seems right, you build your own knowledge as a practitioner, manager, and leader. Theory, when implemented well, can lead to stronger librarians, stronger libraries, and universities better equipped to prepare students for the challenges they face.

It’s HOT here in Oklahoma already as I write this morning–the high is going to be 103, that’s 40 celsius for my metric readers. Like most CPUs, my brain starts frizzling after a certain point, so I’m glad that all I have to do today is share a few nifty links about this and that.

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Trying to decide what I think about the apparent resolution of the most recent Unshelved storyline. I enjoyed and it was pretty true to life, but something about Colleen falling on her sword seemed a bit anticlimactic. I’m waiting to see if they bring in a new character at some point to shake things up a bit. They couldn’t be an employee for obvious reasons, but…maybe the chair of the library Friends or something?

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Infolit Librarians: Have you readPaulo Freire? Go read Paulo Freire. I only agreed with about 75% of what he said, but there’s a lot there that challenges how we do business. If nothing else, see if you can read his description of “Banking Education” without squirming uncomfortably in memory of your last instruction session.

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After discovering 2 philosophers, 3 books, and a half-dozen articles i want to read this week alone, I am coming to the sad realization that I will never get it all read, even if I was a ‘traditional’ grad student. I frankly don’t know how those in broader fields keep up.

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Earlier this spring I heard of an intriguing looking workshop that the University of Stirling in Scotland is putting on next week. While at the time of application what I knew about Ed. Theory could fit in a teacup while leaving room for Jimmy Hoffa, the Lab for Educational theory puts on a lot of intriguing-looking workshops and such through the year. I’ve just about decided to put in an abstract for their next conference if I can work around other classes. A: I’d like to build a network on that side of the Atlantic, and B: highs in the upper 60s sound VERY good right now.

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Next week at Infoliterate:

Monday: OFF (Happy Independence Day to the American readers, and Happy All the Americans are on Vacation Day to the rest of the planet!)

Wednesday: Copyright, library rights, and the future of scholarly publishing (may post late due to another commitment)

Thanks, and have a great weekend!

Not to be completely Captain Obvious, but College is expensive, and becoming more so. This also isn’t a problem limited to the United States. One of my many research interests is how higher education works and is changing in emerging economies. For that reason, I’ve been wanting to blog for a while about the growth of microfinance as an alternative to student loans in developing nations. There are a lot of microlending operations out there that range from dodgy to Nobel prize-winning, but the most notable student microlenders are Lumni, Enzi, Vittana and the current 800-pound microlending gorilla Kiva. I encourage you to take a look at their sites (none of which I’m endorsing nor do I have any financial stake), but aside from the obvious rise in innovative financing options for students, there are some interesting points we can take away for our own use as innovative administrators.

1. Skipping the structures: I worked in the telecom industry in the early 2000s, just as broadband voice and data pipes were reaching South America, Africa, and other areas of the developing world. At the time there was a lot of handwringing over how long it would take to wire these areas locally, with pessimistic projections of decades-long projects being required before there would be any significant demand. The problem was: we were thinking about land lines in a world that was on the verge of going wireless. Instead of digging miles of wires, entrepreneurs and/or state telecom companies simply set up wireless towers and started selling cell phones (and in time, smartphones). In a way, microlending for students could work the same way. The concept developed because the no-collateral, low-interest student loans that can be found easily in the US are practically impossible to find outside the First World. As the education opportunities and the middle class started growing in developing nations, so did the need for financing. Traditional banks didn’t move fast enough, and microlending is filling in the gap.

2. Doing well by doing good: The microlending phenomenon is actually a win-win on both sides of the transaction. Investors know that there money is going to a particular cause (and often a particular student), and have a good chance of a decent return financially as well as socially. On the other side of the transaction, a student receives the seed money needed to make the jump into a more financially stable life that will enable them to serve their community more effectively, and he or she can pay the loan off at a rate that makes sense for that situation.  

3. If there is a need, then there is a market: Higher Ed has a lot of problems right now, and it’s even more obvious in a field like librarianship, where technology, funding, and theory are forcing us to ask some very deep existential questions about our theoretical foundation and the types of work we do. Instead of wringing our hands or mourning what is past, there can be opportunity in taking a step back, looking carefully, and seeing what our students need NOW in order to succeed. While they may or may not need a given collection or service, they DO need access to high quality information, and the tools to find that information and evaluate it critically. All three are essential, and all three are things librarians have done since the days of Dewey, if not longer.

So what does all of this tell us about the world of education entrepreneurship? Simply put, all of us are entrepreneurs, in the sense that we build our own careers and have a responsibility to seek innovative solutions to the problems we face. Some of our solutions will work, and some will go down in flames. However, most of us are blessed with either tenure or government employment, which often works out to the same thing. If those terms mean anything, then we have both the ability to take risks in our own careers and the obligation to create an environment where others can do the same.

The project I assumed I would finish yesterday evening is still being annoying and blocky, and I will not be able to do a post till wednesday at least. One of my go-to geek bloggers, Mark Evanier, posts a can of cream of mushroom soup when his life gets too crazy to blog: I think I’ll opt for the 2010 ALA Book Cart Drill Team Champions. Have fun, and I’ll see you later this week.

(the title is some obscure software joke related to an equally obscure language my husband learned during college. It was still having its kinks worked out, and every time the code errored out, it always returned the first error message in the list, which was, naturally, “unexpected semicolon”. This became a running gag for when things went wonky for some odd reason.)

I’m trying a new format for Friday posts—short quips on links I didn’t get to during the week, random silliness vaguely related to libraries and/or Higher Ed studies and/or the Ph.D experience, and insights that didn’t quite reach post length. If this works I might also throw in the occasional non-higher ed book review. In other news, thank all of you who read/retweeted for your support! I’ve had a major traffic spike this week, and it’s good to know that I’m saying something useful, or at least interesting. I’m going to experiment with a Monday/Wednesday/Friday post schedule for a while, as I seem to be able to do 3 posts a week in the evenings and still have time for my homework and husband.

Also, don’t be shy to comment, and you can reach me on twitter (@OKLibrarian) or via email if you have comments, suggestions, or would like to guest-post. Response times will be slow-to-nonexistent during US work hours (because I’m, y’know, *working*) but I do eventually return all @replies. Also, if you are interested in Information literacy, follow our “sister” blog run by the awesome Community of Oklahoma Instruction Librarians, on twitter as @coilok. I post there on Mondays, but it’s still cool. Our chair Emily Brown posts every Tuesday on web 2.0 and social media issues that impact the library and library instruction—I need to make sure she knows about an interesting new site, the Networked Researcher.

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Higher Ed readers: If you want to understand the Dark Heart of American Librarianship, follow the Annoyed Librarian. For a lighter look at the profession’s OCD-meets-public service foibles, check out Unshelved (currently running a great and depressingly timely storyline on public library layoffs) and the Libraran’s Guide to Etiquette.

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Academic Librarians: If you want to understand how those aloof administrators think (and you already read the Chronicle), check out this list. #1 on the list, Dean Dad, now writes for Inside Higher Ed, and his columns are must-read for me (along with anything from the University of Venus). If you are interested in adding support for administrators to your collection, you might also want to buy the ASHE higher ed readers, as they are the seminal series on Higher ed administration and policy issues.

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For those of you who care about intellectual property (i.e. you create or consume intellectual property), this Pottermore thing is going to be fascinating to watch, especially if there’s going to be an opportunity for members to create fan fiction, art, etc. As my advisor would say, we don’t know what we don’t know yet, but let’s just say I’m waiting to see the ToS before I go into Fangirl Squee Mode. It’s probably my cynical Gen X side, but something about major media conglomerates attempting to engage my sense of innocent childlike wonder always makes me want to put my hand on my wallet. And yes, while that may be JKR’s beaming entrepreneurial face alone in all the videos, just scroll down to the fine print to be reminded who else is always involved in the Hogwarts hijinks.

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In related news, you public and school librarians who are worried about downsizing and thinking about a new career ought to consider Intellectual Property Law. I’d look into it myself but A: one terminal degree is enough, and B: I once took the LSAT, but while I did OK on the test my body rejected the cerebral implant they attempted to install during registration.

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Are you a humanities Ph.D student, contemplating becoming one, or care about someone who is? Do you read either Henry Adams’ Academic Bait and Switch series or Thomas H. Benton/William Pannapacker’s column at the Chronicle? If not, go forth and do so. All prospective grad students should be required to read these, preferably after watching the infamous viral video that came out a year or so ago.

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Did you realize just how controversial and sociologically fraught the world of library cataloging can be? In the course of writing a weekly discussion post for my Diversity and Equity Class, I discovered the fascinating story of Sandy Berman and Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) reform. Even if you’re not a librarian, any social constructionist will find this story downright engrossing, I promise. I hope to explore the topic further in my final paper, which I’m debating turning into a longer blog post and/or submitting to In the Library with a Lead Pipe. (note: Sandy’s website appears to only work in IE)

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Next week at Infoliterate:

Monday: Copyright, library rights, and the future of scholarly publishing

Wednesday: Educational Entrepreneurship, Part 2 OR Gainful Employment (I haven’t decided)

Thanks, and have a great weekend!

*In a skimming kind of way for the main ideas and arguments. The Author disavows all responsibility for your grade if you’re silly enough to try this for a literary analysis paper. Offer void where prohibited.

Reading Man Detail, George F. Fishman's 1991 Mosaic "Faces Of Flower Avenue"

I read a lot. I’m a book addict, and it’s really a bit sad. As a child, I was grounded from my books. I fell in love with the internet as a teen in large part because it offered more reading material. I became an Academic Librarian. Doing a quick back of the envelope calculation of my average weekly page count, I’d estimate that I’ve read just about a half million pages for pleasure in the almost 30 years or so I’ve been literate. Somewhere along the line, I became a fast reader as well. I can polish off your average novel in 3 hours, about double that for an academic work of similar length and moderate detail. However, I’m going to tell you a secret: If you’ve been assigned a scholarly book with few complex theoretical or philosophical arguments for the purposes of an in-class discussion, brief summary/reaction paper, or a first pass for your lit review, it’s possible to learn how to glean everything you need in as little as one hour. Also, even if you need to read every page of the work closely, this can be a useful first-pass skim that will save you hours in the end. Here’s my reading method, no speedreading or fancy mnemonic tricks neccessary. All you need is your book and the notetaking device of your choice.

1. Read the introduction or preface in full–usually no more than 10-15 pages. Most authors will be nice enough to lay out both the key points of their argument, as well as an abbreviated outline of the book. Pay attention to these parts, as they will help you with step 2:

2. Outline the book. Flip through the table of contents and the book proper, Writing down chapter titles as well as headings and the first level of subheadings (if any). Between the introduction and the outline, you should begin to have a basic grasp of the book’s main topics and arguments.

3. Read the opening and closing sections of every chapter. These are usually no more than a couple pages each, and in some cases may give you enough info to understand the main points of each chapter. If parts or the whole don’t make sense, then read the appropriate section/chapter until it does. pay particular attention to lists and subheadings, and to particular words that you didn’t understand.

4. Read the conclusion in full. Usually these are the same length as the introduction, and outline the argument the author just spent the last few hundred pages making, ending with her particular theories, suggestions, and implications of the matter at hand.

Yay! You’ve read the book! Unfortunately, even if it’s “just” for a class discussion, you probably need to understand that book. Here’s how to make sure any of that skimming actually entered your thick skull, at least enough to get you through the semester, and/or give you a solid enough understanding of a work to know when and where to revisit it in your lit review process for a dissertation or article. take these notes to class or save them wherever you are organizing your sources, be it a bibliographic manager like refworks or something else.

5. Summarize the book in a paragraph. Don’t analyze or argue with it, just summarize the key points of the author’s argument and her key justifications for each point. You might want to jot down page numbers of key quotes if your seminar will involve close reading of selected bits.

6. Analyze the argument in a paragraph. you don’t have to answer all of these, this is just a list of suggested questions courtesy of my Diversity and Equity in Education Professor, Dr. Lucy Bailey. pick and choose a few that are the most appropriate.

• What are the major themes or views of the author?
• How does the author’s argument, her/his theoretical assumptions, and views differ from other course readings?
• Whose interests does the author address, whether covertly or overtly?
• Why is this reading and this theory applicable?
• What strikes you about the author’s use of language?
• What disciplines or language traditions does the author draw from in making his/her argument?
• What emerges from the author’s analysis?
• What new insights, understanding, and awareness did you take from this reading?
• What did you learn?
• What exceeded you?
• What more do you need to know?

7. What’s your take? Depending on how you expect to use this work, you might need a lot or a little here. For the average seminar discussion, I can jot down the 2 or three things I agreed with (and why), the things I disagreed with, and any strengths and weaknesses of the article that really jumped out at you.

Congratulations! With an hour of actual reading, plus maybe a half hour or so of consolidating your thoughts into notes, you can get through most class readings. And if you do need to read a work more closely for an analytic paper, don’t despair! By following this process before digging more deeply into the work, you will have created a roadmap that will guide your close reading, and actually save you time and stress in the end. Good luck, and happy researching!

Once upon a time, before facebook and twitter, we all had walls. I’m guessing my online strategy (if you could call it that) circa 2005  was pretty standard. I had a professional website with my resume and such, and used my email address from my school (and later that year when I got my first library gig, my work email) for all professional correspondence, blog replies, etc. Separate from that, often under pseudonyms, was my online life, as I’d had a fairly rich and nerdy one since the early ’90s. Neither contradicted the other, each was just irrelevant to the other. Work was work and life was life and never the twain would meet. But somewhere between being talked onto twitter by my friend Nicole, becoming a librarian in one of Second Life’s better-known Steampunk worlds (and co-presenting on that experience via Skype at Internet Librarian), and buying an iPhone, things got…blurry.  

The work/life binary, like most binaries, is at least partially an artificial construction. We constantly make decisions in each realm due to influences of other. And every time we share something personal woth a “work friend” or check our email on a sunday afternoon, that line blurs. Each of us needs to find a way to navigate that interplay in our online lives. For me, a lot of it goes back to the notion of friendships having ‘levels’, which most of us grasp intuitively but which I’ve seen outlined more succintly here and here. Like most earthlings, there are certain things I only share with certain people in certain contexts, and that’s as it should be. But at the same time, a little personality is helpful in networking, both in the F2F and online realms. Letting your hair down a bit can actually be good for your mental health and your career. It can also help others, in a way I’ll get to at the end of this post.

My new favorite blogger the Thesis Whisperer has been doing a series on using social media for networking, and I probably agree with 90% of what’s been said there. I have a similar approach to my blog, which is probably the most ‘professional’ of my personal online channels. My posts are almost exclusively library or higher ed focused, though they do generally tend more toward the practical than the theoretical (another binary that could use some questioning, but that’s another post that shall be written another time). My Twitter account, while a bit more personal early on, has evolved in a similar manner. This wasn’t any sort of professional decision so much as a simple matter of time: Twitter is possibly THE prime example of information overload, and even with a consciously restricted following list (<200) plus 3 or so hashtags, I struggle even to keep up with work-related content and shamelessly drop out for weeks at a stretch when life gets busy. Facebook, though, is a different animal, and my practices there are changing a bit.

When I first joined, I really just friended my closest online and offline friends, family, and such–not much over 50 people, really. Most of my updates were more along the lines of random musings on this and that from all areas of my life. And then more professional colleagues started sending friend requests. I worried for a bit, then accepted a few of the ones I saw as friends as well as colleagues. It turned out that they were posting the same random crap I was, and nobody cared! In fact, it was kind of neat to hear about their personal lives in much the same manner as we might catch up during lunch before a COIL meeting. Early on in my libblogging days I think I once posted something about social networking along the lines of “Never post anything online under your own name that you don’t want your mom or your boss to read.” Both my mom and my boss are on facebook and read this blog, and I am still both gainfully employed and invited to thanksgiving dinner. That quip still holds, but maybe it’s time we all gave our moms and our bosses a tad more credit and lightened up a little. 

All this, of course, is coming from a straight white middle-class female who deliberately chose a feminine noncompetitive and collaborative profession where the occasional bits of personal sharing aren’t just tolerated, they’re practically de rigeur. I am privileged to be able to make some personal disclosures without professional repercussions, though the rules are a bit different for ladies, as has been noted here and elsewhere recently. Only you know how much of yourself you can and should bring to your professional image. However, based on reading and experiences I’ve had in this summer’s diversity class, I’m going to close with two potential arguments for being more ‘out’ about your personal quirks in a professional space, particularly in the higher ed world.

First, while talking about oneself nonstop gets old fast, most professionals’ problems in this area lie in being too reserved rather than not reserved enough. Being open when you’re with trusted colleagues and when it’s appropriate to the conversation helps you strengthen connections and build an even tighter working and personal friendship. Taking the first step by asking for help or sharing a story pertinent to their own situation can even be a great help to your friend, who may also be interested in deepening your alliance but is timid about taking the risk.  While it’s neither practical or desireable to have too many of these tight connections, they are also the kinds of relationships that can lead to exciting projects and new opportunities.

More importantly, we all are helping to train a diverse population in the best ways to succeed personally and professionally in a diverse world. The best way for each of them to reach their goals is for them to become comfortable in their own differences, and the differences of others. If educators model the reality that they are human beings as well, while retaining appropriate distance and authority, it can have the pleasant side effect of calling the definition of “normality” into question for our students, assuming such a thing even exists. Our students and the society they live in will be the stronger for it, and continue to change in ways that enable more people to lead happier and more productive lives.