If You Are Ever Lucky Enough...

you must have Hilary Hughes speak at your campus!

A while ago my friend and mentor, Dr. Mary Somerville (U. of Colorado, Denver), told me that Australian scholar, Dr. Hilary Hughes, would be in the U.S. on a Fulbright Scholarship doing a project that involves three institutions in Denver. She suggested that I invite Hilary to visit Colgate University (where I am the Information Literacy Librarian).

Fortunately for me, Hilary did agree to visit. She brought with her a wonderfully refreshing positive outlook. She even delighted in our Halloween snowfall (typical for Central New York), that made local residents a bit grumpy as we anticipated the rest of the winter months. Hilary's good cheer spilled over into our information literacy discussions as well.

Hilary met with some teaching faculty over lunch to discuss ways of working with international students. She also provided a workshop titled, Six Frames of Informed Learning, attended by Colgate librarians, a couple visiting librarians from Hamilton & Middlebury Colleges, and a colleague from Colgate's Information Technology Services. In the workshop, Hilary introduced the group to key ideas about "informed learning" and in particular the six frames (for more on the 6 frames see this article by Bruce, Edwards, & Lupton) that can be used to understand varying approaches to the teaching and learning of information use. Then, everyone worked in groups of two to design a learning scenario that corresponded to one of the particular frames.

The afternoon of Nov. 2, Hilary gave an inspiring campus talk titled, Informed Learning as Social and Educational Capital. I think the best thing about Hilary's visit was that it got us all thinking (and discussing) what it means to be information literate in the current era. For example, at the dinner after the talk we discussed different ways of addressing the concept of authority over information in teaching, e.g., does the teacher need to be perceived as an authority over the topic of the class? what do students bring to the conversation? etc.

The take-away message for me was that we all need to be working together to design learning exercises that teach learners to use information in the context of what they are trying to learn. I know, this sounds obvious, right? Still, so much information literacy work is about developing basic skills out of context, and not about using information to simultaneously learn subject content.

All-in-all, a wonderful visit!

More information about Dr. Hilary Hughes:

Queensland U. of Technology (QUT) Profile

Fulbright Profile

Other resources:

Bruce, C., & Hughes, H. (2010). Informed learning: A pedagogical construct for information literacy. Library and Information Science Research, 32 (4), A2-A8.

Bruce, C. (2008). Informed learning. Chicago, IL: American Library Association.