My breakup letter to academia

Can you be a librarian without a library? I am.

Can you be a researcher without an institution? I am.

Can you be a teacher without any students? I am.

I am other I now.

But who?

I started working in academic libraries in 1998. I qualified as a librarian in 2008, and began my first professional post in the same month. In 2018 I became a postdoctoral research fellow in higher education pedagogies. And in 2020 I experienced burnout for the final time and walked away from academia. This chapter both records that journey and is the final step in it.

Download repository version (preprint)

Coonan, E.M. ‘From survival to self-care: performative professionalism and the self in the neoliberal university’. In Lemon, Narelle, ed. Healthy Relationships in Higher Education: Promoting Wellbeing Across Academia. Routledge, 2021.

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Image credit: A. J. Booker

Journal articles: the ‘Thing Explainer’ version

Some while back I had a great conversation with my friend and esteemed library colleague @_moo_ about how the structure of a journal article can be explained in very simple language, even if the thought processes that lie beneath it might feel convoluted. “Look,” I said, putting my beer down briefly, “The ‘findings’ bit is really just ‘what I did’, right, and the methods section is just ‘how I decided to do it’, and if you put in a bit at the end about ‘further research’, well, that’s basically ‘Here’s what I didn’t get around to so, like, someone else should, yeah?'”

That’s a fairly loosely paraphrased version, given that we weren’t on our first beer. But what I remember of the conversation inspired me to have a go at writing a ‘simple English’ version of how journal articles in the social sciences are often constructed. I figured that if Randall Monroe could explain rocket science (or at least the Saturn V rocket) in the most common thousand English words, we should be able to do the same for scholarly comms. (Oxymoronic? Never!)

I showed it to participants at an Information Literacy Group Research Day, and they seemed to think it was OK, so here it is.

Here’s the thing I did	Introduction
This is why it needed doing
Here’s what other people said about this thing	Literature review
·    And what they left out
Here’s how I did it	Methods
This is why I did it that way
·    Here’s someone else doing it this way because that helped me see why it would work for my thing
·    Here’s why doing it this way meant I’d be able to actually learn something from it
Here’s how it might not have worked fully, all the same	Limitations
Oh, and this is why it’s OK to do it to humans	Ethical implications
Here’s what happened	Findings
This is what I think it means for what I started out wondering	Discussion
This is what it means for the rest of us and what we do (or know)
Here’s what else we could do about this	Further research

Note: it’s absolutely not meant to be followed slavishly. Lots of good articles deviate from this structure, especially more theoretical pieces; but it might be a handy springboard for jumping off. Or even a launch pad.

(Updated) downloadable version

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Image: Up Goer Five, xkcd.com (CC BY-NC 2.5)

Getting it wrong so you can get it right(er)

Image: Haragayato on Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Last week I had the huge privilege of giving a keynote talk at the Cambridge Libraries 2017 conference. Not only were there some great speakers present, both external and internal, but I’ve worked in various roles at a number of Cambridge libraries and attended many a CamLibs conference in my day: so to be asked to keynote at one was enormously exciting, gratifying, and above all TERRIFYING.

As it turned out, it was one of the best days of my life. Being given a platform to talk about issues that mean a great deal to you – in this case the importance of failure in learning, research, and teaching – and to be received with empathy, recognition, thanks and hugs, is one of the most amazing things there can be. I don’t know how to express my gratitude that it’s happened to me.

I’m always fascinated by how people use scripts, prompts and other aids to speaking. I don’t usually use much in the way of notes, relying on my slides to keep my argument on track (yes, this can sometimes go a bit wrong!). This time I didn’t want to wander too far off-piste, especially as my slot was 90 minutes long and I had visions of my audience petrifying with boredom, so I scripted the talk much more tightly than usual. Of course I added a bunch of revisions at the last minute all the same … so for fun or in case anyone is interested, here’s the version I spoke from, with all its scribbles and alterations, to complement the neat and tidy transcript that will appear on the CamLibs site in due course.

The talk is a wild melee of random things that go round in my head a lot, but there are many important anchor points that come from other people’s thinking. Most of these are attributed in the script, but there are three that aren’t and deserve to be:

“the Ow factor” was a phrase used by Hazel Rothera in talking (very postively!) about her experience of the peer review process

“you never get to be a good teacher” (because it’s an ongoing balance) was said by Michelle Bond

And I’d either forgotten or never knew that the wonderfully comforting “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly” – which I suddenly remembered mid-flow and managed to include – was written by G K Chesterton.

Information literacy of the heart

Among its many unpleasant impacts, Brexit has done information literacy a wry service: it demonstrated how well-founded was the fear that people either would not, or would not be able to, question the source and veracity of the information they were supplied. The appallingly misleading ‘Facts’ leaflet is surely going to replace martinlutherking.org as librarians’ new favourite instance of misinformation, while the use of brand names and logos – including that of the NHS – to grab both attention and allegiance was, unfortunately, as effective as it was unscrupulous. I’m not even going to mention the biggest lie of all, the one that was literally the size of a double decker bus.

Yet beyond the lies and the deliberately misleading information, there was on many parts a sheer wilful desire not to hear a message that was unwelcome, information that challenged comforting assumptions, implications that didn’t fit with beliefs and world-views. The phrase that I pray will haunt Michael Gove’s career, “People in this country have had enough of experts,” sums up this resistance to criticality. What Brexit demonstrated is that IL is not only a matter of taking a questioning stance towards information in the outside world: we must also point that same critically questioning focus on our own motives and beliefs, on the way in which we construct and  interpret reality and the meanings we impose on it.

We need to look with clearer eyes at the stories we tell ourselves and about ourselves. These oral narratives are information just as much as are the the textual and visual artefacts we more usually analyse, or the formal knowledge structures we work in. The labels we use to present our selves to others – “feminist”, “scientist”, “recovering Catholic” – are also value-laden and socially constructed, and as such they too require to be evaluated, interrogated, unpacked: just as do those labels that we hang, unasked, onto others. It is in those bits of shorthand, those conveniently abridged fictions, that bias is born.

There is a euphoric affirmation in subsuming our individual selves into a collective social identity, whatever its political status – football supporter, Labour party activist, supporter of Richard III’s reputation, anti-war marcher, choral singer. But if it weren’t for the stories we tell about ourselves, the stories we tell ourselves about others would not bear such an overwhelming capacity for harm. Because it’s when those others become Other – when their labels place them in opposition to us – that we allow ourselves to believe that the people on whom we’ve hung them aren’t people any more. They’re Tories. Or Leavers. Or neoliberal scum. Or, for that matter, tree-hugging bleeding-heart Liberals. It’s not the politics that matter, but the act of homogenising.

Hatred starts with homogeneity: the refusal to allow people to be individuals. Once people are diminished to the level of a despised group characteristic, they are no longer people. The stories we tell about Others are so reductive, so obviously simplistic, that an atom of discernment would surely bring them into incredulity, if it weren’t that the horrifying, betraying Otherness of “those people” (whoever they are this time) overrides all evidence, all intelligence, all integrity and all humanity. And by that stage not only have They become responsible for everything bad that’s ever happened to us, but it seems perfectly fine for us to do something about it.

So let’s remember that critical integrity around information is far from being a matter for the academic classroom, or to be directed only at search results and internet content. It is also, and fundamentally, a matter of our emotions, our values, the narratives through which we construct our identity, and the stories we tell to make sense of our reality. Information literacy is not an academic exercise. It is the human capacity to admit that our categories might be wrong, that our opinions aren’t facts, and that it’s possible we may be mistaken. It is having the strength and humility to “lie down where all the ladders start / In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart”.

What digital animal are you (and everyone else)?

I made a quiz! And very good fun it was to make, too. The background: it’s intended as a not-very-serious icebreaker for the first part of a course I’m designing on digital literacies – more about that here.

The quiz is built in Qzzr, which is a free site that lets you create Buzzfeed-style diagnostic timewasters. The questions are from University of Exeter’s iTest, which is licensed for reuse as CC BY-NC-SA. I’d love to have replicated Exeter’s radar diagram outcome, so that you would see your result for each category mapped onto a kind of spiderweb – this gives the quizee a great diagnostic snapshot of their digital presence. However, Qzzr only allows you to make single-outcomes quizzes (although you can choose either a graded test or a personality-based outcome) and I was happy enough with Qzzr’s user-friendliness to want to stick with it.

I also used some of the categories from the iTest, but renamed them. In the original there are six categories: Digital Guru, Online Networker, Digital Dodger, Information Junkie, Media Mogul, and Career Builder. As we’ll be doing a lot of work on employability later in the course, I left out the Career Builder questions altogether for this icebreaker, and chose animals to represent the other categories (click to zoom).

On the idea of using animals, a tip of the hat to Matt Borg and Erica Stretton’s very readable 2009 article My students and other animals. At around the same time I was also using animal metaphors in my referencing class, and was delighted to find that Borg & Stretton had run with the same idea! (For the record, I used to illustrate the feel of different referencing software by saying that EndNote worked best for systematic researchers – the worker ants; Zotero was great for squirrels – grab that reference and stash it safely; and to use Mendeley you really needed to be a meerkat – a researcher who enjoys the social aspect of citation-swapping.)

I really like that although not all animals are of equal cuteness (my apologies, fellow spiders), they can nevertheless help you avoid value judgements. For instance, we could have suggested that not being a prolific user of the digital is a bad thing – a form of Luddism rather than an informed choice. (Mind you, if we’d chosen an ostrich with its head in the sand, that would have carried an implicit value judgement whatever the text said …) However, in a course that’s meant to be encouraging awareness and thoughtful choice around digital issues, that really wouldn’t fit. We don’t want to impose values on our students: we want to give them opportunities to think about what they do online and work out their values for themselves.

So on the advice of Twitter (how else?) I chose the owl because of its reputation for wisdom, which fits nicely with a thoughtful scepticism:

Huge thanks to everyone who’s already tried out the quiz and given me feedback – particularly Jo who tried it out numerous times under the guise of different personas! If you’d like to have a go, it’s here. Enjoy!

UEA Digital Scholar course

‘Wikipedian protester’ by Randall Monroe, xkcd.com (CC BY-NC 2.5)

I’m currently working on a pretty exciting project – designing an online course to help UEA students develop and reflect on their digital literacies in three overlapping contexts: the personal, the academic, and the workplace. Me being me, of course I have talked a lot from the start about the complex nature of digital practices and identities, and the dangers of viewing DLs through a purely functional lens or of reducing it to a simplistic ‘skills’ discourse. From the outset, however, the project board has been clear that the course shouldn’t be a didactic, ‘death by Blackboard’ experience for participants but a genuinely active one: rather than reading about digital literacies (or watching videos about it – digital but still didactic) they should be involved in creating digital artefacts themselves all the way through, and critically (and contextually) appraising those made by others.

Here’s a piece I wrote for UEA’s Learning Highlights magazine about the course, the principles that informed its design, and the outcomes of a workshop on DLs we carried out with academic staff at UEA’s 2015 Learning and Teaching Day. (Disclaimer: I got a bit carried away in writing the piece and had to cut it down to fit the publication word limit! What follows is the original, full-length version, because it’s my blog and I can ;-) [Downloadable version here.])

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What does a ‘digital student’ look like, and does the answer vary according to discipline or context?

UEA’s Information Services Directorate is in the process of designing an online course on Digital Literacies for UEA students in partnership with Careers and with the support of Dean of Students’ Office. Despite being a somewhat elusive concept, the need for digital literacy among students, graduates and citizens generally is gaining recognition in higher education across the UK and beyond. Digital literacy has been identified as a UEA graduate attribute, and is a component in the UEA Skills Award. But what exactly is (or are) digital literacy (or literacies)? How are they different from IT skills? And what do they look like in an academic context?

Despite its persistence, the ‘digital natives/digital immigrants’ theory put forward by Prensky in 2001 has been challenged repeatedly in research literature (see e.g. White & Le Cornu, 2011; Bennett et al, 2008). Although the idea that those born after a certain year (usually given as 1980) possess an innate and sophisticated understanding of digital technologies seems anecdotally appealing, this belief is not borne out by the evidence (see, for instance, Margaryan et al., 2011, and the larger-scale study by Kennedy et al., 2008, both of which suggest that university students use a limited range of mainly established digital technologies).

Most importantly, the essentialist nature of the digital native concept masks the fact that young people’s fluency with technology and digital environments may not extend into critical, ethical or reflective judgements about online information or the behaviours and practices relating to using, creating or interacting with it. This is a dimension of digital literacy that lies beyond functional ICT skills, the capacity to download and use an app, or the ease of adaptation to a new device. “Human judgment, or criticality, is involved in most understandings of digital literacies” (Gillen & Barton, 2010, p.5), and it follows that a means of supporting the development of our students’ digital critical capabilities, as distinct from their ICT skills, is needed. This is not only about helping to make our students employable graduates: it’s also a crucial part of supporting their transition into the academic arena and its idiosyncratic uses of information and evidence; and perhaps most crucially, a vital part of what makes an individual an articulate, empowered and judicious member of society.

 

The ‘Digital Scholar’ course

ISD is piloting a four-unit online course to help UEA students reflect on and expand their existing digital skills and behaviours. The course will invite them to consider and share how they could deploy these skills in their own academic context as well as in preparing for future employability.

The focus throughout is on promoting participants’ awareness of online issues, practices and choices as well as tools and apps. Running on Blackboard and aligned with the UEA Award, through which we hope the course will be validated, the programme will require participants to create artefacts using a variety of tools and to think about the ethical and practical implications of using, making and sharing material. One unit will focus on digital practices in the academic context, and another on employability issues.

Although the course will be chiefly online we plan to offer a scheduled run (which will also be our pilot test) in November 2015, enabling us to give the programme a MOOC-like feel which we hope will encourage participants to develop a peer support network through the activities and discussion forums.

 

Learning and Teaching Day parallel workshop

At the 2015 Learning and Teaching Day Jane Helgesen and Emma Coonan presented an overview of the proposed Digital Scholar course, and also attempted to gain some insights into academic views and practices of ‘digitalness’. We were especially interested in how digital aspects have permeated academic practices, and in turn how these are reflected to students in course and assessment design and in the discipline-specific behaviours enacted by academics. To this end, our audience kindly participated in a workshop where they shared their perceptions and expectations of ‘digitalness’ in the academic arena.

Learning & Teaching Day workshop questions

The responses from workshop participants highlighted a variety of important aspects ranging from awareness of one’s online presence, through the need to filter and evaluate information critically, to understanding the ethical and contextual nature of using it.

• Online behaviour and digital professionalism

“What’s online is there forever”

“Be aware of who can see what you put online – things can go viral very quickly”

There were some interesting responses around appropriate online behaviour, including the need to “Develop a sense of responsibility” and for students to be “accountable for their actions”. One group noted that health professionals in particular “need to be aware of what they put on the internet”, highlighting the impact of the digital footprint in a professional as well as a personal context.

It was noted that “We all make digital things – blogs, Word, tweets, PPT, photos, email”, highlighting that ‘the digital’ is not an arena only inhabited by students. Indeed one response asked for “Academic staff access – can staff do this [to] develop our own skills”. (The answer is yes, you would be welcome!)

•  Discernment and evaluation

Many responses emphasised the need for critical discernment, especially in evaluating online information sources:

“Evaluation of sources – peer reviewed?”

“Accessing relevant info – rigour”

“Be aware [of] the source of where you get your information online – challenge (i.e. the Sun says …)”

Although dealing with the digital, these responses are very closely aligned with the academic emphasis on evidence-based, rigorous inquiry, for example the desire for students to “Challenge assumptions” and to “Think independently”. One group also pointed out that “Shortcuts/quick answers = surface learning” – a very relevant point in an era that resounds with internet-friendly soundbites.

•  Contextual appropriacy

“Understanding of appropriateness of using material or not and that it varies according to context”

“Able to find and filter relevant information and move from ‘spoon-fed’ approach to analytical approach which is reliable and gain discernment”

The issue of critical discernment in turn overlaps with an understanding of the contextual nature of how information is used in different environments. There is a strong ethical dimension within the workshop responses – copyright, legal responsibilities, citation and plagiarism were all mentioned. Alongside this was a desire for students to gain flexibility in their navigation of online environments – to recognise when they need to build their own skills, “understanding which area they need to develop”; to have “Confidence to experiment once acquired basic skills”, and the “Ability to use technology as a tool, not as an end in itself”.

Finally, one response really sums up what we would like the Digital Scholar programme to empower students to do:

“Make informed choices about what they could do, how they could do it, and the relative merits of this choice in a particular digital context”.

Next steps

Jane and Emma are keen to gain more insight into how digital behaviours intersect with academic practices, and would be delighted to meet any staff member willing to talk about this intersection from the point of view of their own subject area. Our session at the Learning and Teaching Day elicited some ‘critical friends’ for the programme, but we would be very happy to gain more.

We would be delighted to offer a closer look at the Digital Scholar programme content for anyone interested in exploring it further, either to assess how the course might support their students’ academic development or indeed to enhance their own digital literacies!

 

Many thanks to all those who attended our parallel session and contributed valuable insights. Please do get in touch to tell us how the programme could support your students or have a look at our webpages: https://portal.uea.ac.uk/library/uea-digital-literacies.

 

References

Bennett, S., Maton, K. & Kervin, L. (2008). The ‘digital natives’ debate: a critical review of the evidence. British Journal of Educational Technology, 39(5), 775–786. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8535.2007.00793.x.

Gillen, J., & Barton, D. (2010). Digital literacies: a research briefing by the Technology Enhanced Learning phase of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme. London. http://www.tlrp.org/docs/DigitalLiteracies.pdf

Kennedy, G., Judd, T., Dalgarno, B. & Waycott, J. (2010). Beyond natives and immigrants: exploring types of net generation students. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 26, 332–343. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2729.2010.00371.x

Margaryan, A., Littlejohn, A. & Vojt, G. (2011). Are digital natives a myth or reality? University students’ use of digital technologies. Computers and Education, 56(2), 429–440. doi:10.1016/j.compedu.2010.09.004.

Prenksy, M. (2001). Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the Horizon, 9(5), 1–6. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/10748120110424816

White, D. S., & Le Cornu, A. (2011). Visitors and residents: a new typology for online engagement. First Monday, 16(9). http://firstmonday.org/article/view/3171/3049

Publication without tears: a workshop for doctoral students

I’m a little sleep-deprived at the moment as this week I paid a brief visit to Aberdeen for the iDocQ student conference – up on Sunday night on the sleeper train, left for home again at 3pm Monday afternoon, finally got home at half past midnight on Tuesday … But I had a brilliant time at the conference, especially listening to the ‘One Minute Madness’ presentations where students talked about their doctoral research, and I really enjoyed giving this presentation on publishing.

The first part of this talk is inherited from previous JIL editor (and ANCIL co-conspirator) Jane Secker. It’s designed to be a demystifying glimpse inside the ‘black box’ of publishing – because nobody really knows what happens when you submit an article to a journal! This gives a step-by-step overview of how we work with articles submitted to the Journal of Information Literacy, from the peer review process through the copyediting stage right through to final publication.

The second section invited the listeners to think about their own research and what could be published from it. As this conference was specifically for PhD students, I talked about how theses and articles differ in scope and characteristics, and why it might not work to simply try to condense your thesis. We finished up with some of my favourite tips for managing the mess and uncertainty of the writing process. These include a gem from Jane – think about writing as like eating an elephant: break it down into bite-sized chunks!

Image from Pixabay (CC0)

‘This house believes …’

Yesterday I confronted a childhood terror: I took part in a debate and – to my great relief and even greater surprise – emerged unscathed. I’ve always been anxious about confrontational situations and fearful of verbal dexterity, so when I was invited to take part in a debate organised by CILIP it took me a whole week to get up enough courage to agree.

Far from being some kind of Perry Mason-style ripping-the-witness-to-bleeding-shreds affair, however, it was actually great fun and very friendly! For a start, the topic was ‘This house believes that the role of the librarian should be that of teacher‘, and I was speaking for the motion. Since I spend my time running round saying basically exactly this to everyone I meet professionally (to what is probably a monotonous degree), coming up with a passionate argument in favour of the motion wasn’t going to be a problem : ) I also knew that my partner in advocacy, Geoff Walton, would be able to provide convincing evidence to back up my airy-fairy theoretical wibbling.

All set for #cilipdebates in Birmingham! Let the fighting talk begin @GeoffWaltoniLit @LibGoddess @jsecker pic.twitter.com/HqvweVlsOz

— Eleanor Johnston (@elstopbanana) February 10, 2015

Our co-debators, speaking against the motion, were Darren Smart and Alka Sehgal Cuthbert, who were both a joy to listen to: thoughtful, enlightened, and insightful. Alka’s background is in school teaching and her research is in the philosophy of education, so her perceptions of how libraries and information collections fit the educational and academic spheres were very interesting. Darren’s passionate belief in public libraries, and his understanding of issues facing them, was totally convincing – as well as deeply poignant given that we were in the stunning, and threatened, Library of Birmingham.

Here’s my bit of talking – partly for the record, and partly because I think it’s interesting to read something that’s been designed to be spoken. I’m accustomed to building my arguments in the measured, circuitous, densely-evidenced manner of academic writing, and it was quite a challenge to work more polemically: I had to really cut down my sentence and clause length and relentlessly rip out all the hedging that’s so dear to the academic mind. I also ended up doing very odd things to the punctuation so that it would give me signals for spoken emphasis (more pregnant pauses than a Pinter play). So when I read this it feels hideously full of unsupported assertions and lousy grammar, although declaiming it to an audience felt fine! Just for fun, too, I’ve left in all my last-minute annotations and the timings from my practice runs.

The ‘F’ word: information literacy, ‘find’ and other verbs

Another short piece written for the UKSG Newsletter back in September. Thanks to editor Andrew Barker for letting me reproduce it here (and in a downloadable form over here), and for being brave enough to indulge my long-cherished desire to write about ‘the F-word’ : )

Autumn! Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, of Welcome Week and freshers’ flu, of hoarseness and voice loss from back-to-back induction sessions. The opportunity to welcome a new group of learners into the academic community and let them loose on knowledge ought to be joyful and exciting – but somehow the joy gets lost in the pressure to condense Everything You Need to Know About The Library into a single front-loaded session, usually in a lecture theatre, and sometimes into a five-minute ‘introductory’ slot that may be the only timetabled contact you have with a new cohort of students.

Every new academic year I struggle with the ever-present temptation to just focus on the basics, which in a five-minute ‘library slot’ means how to find your stuff. My struggles centre around the verb: as a passionate proponent of what Cottrell and Cohen call “real deal information literacy” (2012), I have issues with the fact that ‘find’ often comes across as the primary verb for what you do with information in an academic context.

It’s fairly frequently noted that in our disintermediated information world finding things is easy: it’s exercising critical evaluation of such a volume of material from such a range of sources that’s hard. In this regard it’s interesting that while classic models of information literacy such as SCONUL, ANZIIL and the original ACRL standards all include the concept of ‘find’ (sometimes as ‘access’ or ‘gather’) as a key action, it’s a verb that scarcely appears in the eight pages of the ANCIL curriculum. Instead, ANCIL uses verbs like ‘distinguish’, ‘critique’, ‘identify’, and ‘reflect’ to model the learner’s relationship with information – all of which involve doing something to, or with, the information found.

In the library world, where much of our focus is naturally on systems for organising and locating information, we can sometimes be fooled into thinking that the learner’s interaction with information is a kind of quest narrative that centres on seeking and culminates when the desired material is found. This is a seductive construction of academic information practice, placing the library and its search tools at the heart of scholarly creativity and incidentally ensuring that our role as gatekeeper retains its hieratic status. Again, this perception of information enshrines ‘find’ as the primary information activity: as Spiranec & Zorica have commented, “within IL standards information is usually treated as an object to be located and used by the individual” (2012).

But if the only message we have the chance to communicate to our students is that their relationship with information centres on finding information objects, we’re doing them a major disservice. At some point we need to make clear to learners in higher education that what really matters is what you do with the information once you’ve found it. Too much focus on ‘find’ implicitly communicates to students that their encounter with information is simply a matter of tracking down published artefacts, when in fact that encounter is about “Making meaning within unfamiliar discourse” (Wingate, 2006).

What it comes down to is that in library sessions we have a choice in how we present the concept of information. We can describe a book or a journal article as an artefact, a published and describable entity: you look for it, you find it, you’re done. Or we can describe information in terms of its contribution to knowledge, as a point of view expressed and negotiated within the academic discourse: you find it, you read it, you start answering back to it. The academic community’s relationship with information is not to absorb without question – it’s entirely the opposite. The whole purpose of HE is to develop in students a critical mindset: the weighing, sifting, questioning approach that isn’t cowed by expertise or silenced by authority.

Yet given the active, constructive, negotiated nature of this relationship with information, isn’t it interesting that our ‘induction’ weeks in general chiefly consist of telling our students things? Paradoxically, this first week of student life in higher education has very little to do with being introduced to the values and practices of the academic community, with a view to enabling each individual to negotiate and express an identity within that community. In fact, ‘induction’ is possibly the worst label there could be for an introductory experience that chiefly consists of directional wayfinding and basic know-how – finding the lecture theatre, managing to remember your username and password, learning where to get cheap pizza. This preliminary orientation phase isn’t really designed to foreground advanced intellectual content or knowledge construction: it’s about finding and finding out. Thus it deals chiefly with declarative rather than procedural knowledge – knowing what, rather than knowing how (Ambrose et al., 2010, 18).

Now it’s clearer why focusing on ‘find’ is such an overwhelming temptation in Welcome Week: it makes a good fit with the rest of what’s happening. ‘Find’ sits very well within a basic orientation-and-wayfinding phase; after all, there’s not much you can evaluate, construct or negotiate about either where the lecture theatre is or what you do to look up a book on your reading list. Finding information, in fact, bears the same surface and preliminary relationship to the information encounter that finding the lecture theatre does to attending (and attending to) a lecture. Therefore at some point we need to find a way to clearly signal to students that a shift from ‘find’ to ‘use’ will be necessary in order to engage with academic practices and succeed in their studies.

To do this we need to move away from telling, because although all these things that we tell our students are useful and good to know, in the act of telling itself we construct and subtly impose a transmissive model of learning in which we possess expertise that students must acquire. At some point we ourselves need to model a different relationship both with information and with our learners, to recognise that each is taking part in a fluid and negotiated process of knowledge construction. In short, we need to let them know the information experience doesn’t end with ‘find’: that find is where it starts.

As librarians, I believe we can still do more to reframe our thinking away from our search products and from the perception of information as artefact, and more towards alignment with the academic practices of the community we work with and in. Rather than merely demonstrating resources, we need to be able to articulate how use of those resources might support the academic journey as an ongoing process of making sense, constructing meaning, creating conceptual relationships and even negotiating one’s own identity within a community of practice.

The advent of discovery systems has given us a game-changing opportunity to model this realignment in how we talk to students about information. When you can introduce your library’s search tool in under five minutes you have the chance to reclaim interface demonstration time and use it to talk instead about the conventions and values of academic information communication (see e.g. Coonan, 2014). So I’m hoping that even if I spend only one of those five minutes flagging up the shift from finding to using, from transmitting to constructing, from telling to questioning, that I’ll still have managed to help students perceive a different relationship with information and with what it means to ‘be academic.’

Only once the introductions are over does the real practice start; and only when the practice starts does the induction to the community begin. And it’s at this point in the student’s journey that ‘real deal’ information literacy – the making of meaning – replaces ‘find’; and at this point, if we have the chance, that we can stop simply telling our students things and invite them to start constructing meaning for themselves.

 

References

ACRL (2000) Information Literacy Standards for Higher Education http://www.ala.org/acrl/sites/ala.org.acrl/files/content/standards/standards.pdf. (This document is now superseded by a threshold concepts approach: see http://acrl.ala.org/ilstandards/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/Framework-for-IL-for-HE-Draft-2.pdf)

Ambrose, S. A., Bridges, M. W., DiPietro, M., Lovett, M. C., & Norman, M. K. (2010). How learning works: seven research-based principles for smart teaching. San Francisco, Calif.: Wiley.

Australian and New Zealand Information Literacy Framework [ANZIIL], 2^nd ed. (2004). http://archive.caul.edu.au/info-literacy/InfoLiteracyFramework.pdf

Coonan, E., ed. (2014) Teaching, not telling: proceedings of the 2^nd Information Literacy and Summon Day. http://www.proquest.com/blog/2014/Teaching-not-Telling.html

Cottrell, Janet & Cohen, Sarah Faye (2012) Real deal information literacy: designing and implementing meaningful instruction and assessment. http://www.slideshare.net/infolit_group/cottrell-cohen

SCONUL Seven Pillars of Information Literacy: core model for Higher Education (2011) http://www.sconul.ac.uk/sites/default/files/documents/coremodel.pdf

Secker, J., & Coonan, E. (2011) A new curriculum for information literacy [ANCIL]. http://newcurriculum.wordpress.com/using-ancil/

Špiranec, S. & Banek Zorica, M. (2012) ‘Changing anatomies of information literacy at the postgraduate level: refinements of models and shifts in assessment’. Nordic Journal of Information Literacy in Higher Education 4

Wenger-Trayner, E. (n.d.) ‘Communities of practice: a brief introduction’. http://wenger-trayner.com/theory/

Wingate, U. (2006). Doing away with “study skills.” Teaching in Higher Education, 11(4), 457–469. http://embeddingskills.hud.ac.uk/sites/embeddingskills.hud.ac.uk/files/Wingate.pdf

[All URLs accessed 30 September 2014]

Goodbye, #AcWriMo (and hello #DecWriMo!)

I’m amazed – and frankly dead chuffed – at having made it through #AcWriMo. Yes, I set myself a low target (10-12 train rides; no pomodori for me!) and deliberately kept my aims fuzzy (to quote from my plan: “let’s call it ‘expanding each chapter from skeleton to emaciated flesh'”). I have just about enough wisdom, or experience, by now to ensure I do both those things, otherwise I set myself up for full-blown I AM FAIL mode from the start. But I’m still astonished that I managed 11 train rides and did get some flesh on those zombie bones – even though, er, I decided to completely rejig the structure and rewrite the whole aim of the book along the way *kicks table leg sheepishly*

And I’m even more astonished that with November over, I want to keep going. What the what … ? There I sat on the train yesterday looking back at my completed record for the month, relaxing in the glow of having finished something, and then all of a sudden I was writing a plan for December…

… and then I was sketching a literature map …

… and somehow now it’s not that I have to write because I’ve signed up publicly for #AcWriMo, it’s that I have to write because I’m impelled to, because that’s how I make sense of all the things still going round in my head.

I had no idea that the power of Don Diego could be such a force!

@LibGoddess Great to know someone else is the same way! #cheering for you from #yeg w Don Diego (guinea pig) pic.twitter.com/K67YNoCedM

— Julieta (@js_delossantos) November 12, 2014

 

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Thank you again to Julieta and Don Diego, @charlottefrost, and the whole #AcWriMo community. If you want to join the December writing bunch, you can sign up on the spreadsheet and tweet your progress using the hashtag #AcWri.