Six Researchers from Texas

My favorite session at the 3Ts conference yesterday was presented by six women (most of who were doctoral students) from Texas who came all the way to NY State to present their initial findings and future plans for studying the use of technology with K-12 students. I suppose I should confess right now that what I was most interested in was how they had decided to work as a team in addition to their own doctoral work. I think working as a team would be a great addition to my own doctoral program.

They described how they had been meeting monthly to discuss ideas during which they realized their shared research interests in technology and literacy. Eventually this developed into a collaborative research team. I thought, this is how it is supposed to be. I also liked how the presenters personal views & observations were intertwined with their research. On my way out I asked Merry Boggs (I just had a suspicion) if she was supervising some of the other women's dissertation work. She said yes, but in this situation they were all just members of the team. Nice!

I think we'll be hearing more from these folks.Session: First Contact: Working to Build Transliteracy Spaces in Classrooms
Presenters: Merry Boggs; Texas A&M-Commerce & Melissa Brumfield; Mesquite Independent School District, with Leslie Haas, Carrie Manning, Maribeth Nottingham, and Susan Williams; Texas A&M-Commerce

Transliteracy Conference

Today I attended 3 T's: Exploring New Frontiers in Teaching, Technology and Transliteracy, a 1-day conference at the Fulton Montgomery Community College in Johnstown, NY. It was an interesting day, and the folks who arranged this deserve huge kudos for planning an event to explore transliteracy, which seems so potentially important to librarianship.

What I find the most interesting about transliteracy is that it plausibly explains how we engage with information in our distributed information landscape. I was a little concerned with how many of the conference presentations described literacy as outfitting one's toolkit with skills & abilities. Whereas it seems to me that we need to learn to use information and associated technologies in context - meaning in connection with what we are learning about (content). Teaching people to use information in context is necessary if we are to get discipline faculty to "get it" and to collaborate with librarians and others to help their students achieve it.

In one session, the concept of content was downplayed and processes and skills that enable one to "learn to learn" were emphasized. I don't disagree that we need to focus on process (I suppose I've made that clear in past posts), but I also think that content and process need to share the stage when designing learning activities.

Although I am sure I would disagree about the specifics, I thought the keynote speaker's (Dr. Thomas Mackey from Empire State College) recasting of information literacy as an overarching "metaliteracy" made a good deal of sense.

Now I am off to bed, for tomorrow holds the exciting promise of getting to analyze pilot data.

Informed Learning & the 6 Frames Workshop

Glynis Asu from Hamilton College and I had a great workshop introducing informed learning and the 6 frames to a group at Hamilton on Tuesday this week (3/22). I think it was made more interesting by the mix of librarians and instruction technologists that attended. Everyone was from Hamilton except for three librarians from other local institutions. I explained in an earlier post that the workshop was adapted from Hilary Hughes' workshop at Colgate. In the workshop, we asked folks to design learning scenarios that tie together learning to use information with learning new content (informed learning). The six frames then gave us a way of thinking about our own approaches to teaching as well as the pedagogic approaches of the teachers with whom we collaborate. We examined what the different approaches would mean for informed learning.

Best of all was the fantastic conversation we had at our working lunch during which people really started to delve into different ways of thinking about information, e.g., objective, scientific method, subjective, intersubjective, qualitative vs. quantitative, and so on. There seemed to be agreement that our students need to consider different ways that information can be understood. Another recurring theme was the need for students to use different sorts of information to more comprehensively understand and explain whatever they are examining.

At the end of the day, the group discussed the possibility of continuing to have meetings to discuss pedagogy and theory. I am really hoping we can make this happen! I think we do a lot of this kind of thing at Colgate, but I would relish the chance to continue building connections with my colleagues from Hamilton. They have this way of always making me think about things in a new way. My other Hamilton colleague & friend, Janet Simons, was for once not the first to say that we should have teachers at these events as well. I agree, of course - just like what we wish for our students, the more perspectives at the table the better chance we have of understanding things in new & better ways.

PS. I like the above photo one of my colleagues took at the workshop because of how it brings me, informed learning (the slide), and an ipad together in the same shot. A nice metaphor for what we talked about across the day, i.e., developing pedagogy that simultaneously focuses on people, ideas and technologies.

Time Isn't Holding Us

Time isn't holding us, time isn't after us; Time isn't holding us, time doesn't hold you back - Talking Heads

I was thinking today about my new hero, Andrew Whitworth, and so like anyone I Googled him. This led me to the transliteracy.com page where I learned that Andrew had given a conference presentation about transliteracy. Considering his work, all that makes sense. But it sparked some thinking on my part (remember this blog is at least partly my muse space) about how much informed learning embraces new technologies and new ways we navigate the information landscape.

Informed learning is about learning to use information in the ways that we actually use it. So while it doesn't promote engaging in new ways of using information, it still would provide an appropriate framework for learning that happens to be underpinned by new ways of engaging the information sphere (did you notice that I just upgraded us from a "landscape" to a "sphere" in the space of two sentences). But there lies the question - should informed learning address new ways we engage with information more intentionally? And what would that look like?

Off to bed for me.

Applying the Relational Frame

I just came across Andrew Whitworth's article in the J. of IL about how he uses the relational frame described in the 6 frames of information literacy (see Bruce, Edwards, & Lupton) to design learning activities in a course he teaches at the University of Manchester. He nicely explains the need to bring the perspectives of each of the 6 frames into view. He notes the importance of the content and competency frames, which he associates with scientific ways of knowing (information is objective). Combined with the other frames in which information is understood either as subjective or intersubjective, a more comprehensive understanding is made possible. Quite interesting!




Whitworth, A. (2009). Teaching in the relational frame: the Media and Information Literacy course at Manchester. Journal of Information Literacy, 3 (2), 25-38.

What Does the Future Hold?

I have been thinking today about the future of librarians. I hear a lot of murmuring about whether our roles are diminishing (due to our students ability to find ALL on the internet), or conversely expanding (due to the evolving complexity of the information landscape). Will our work be really different down the road a piece? Will there be libraries on college campuses, or just study centers? What title would the future "me" have in an academic setting and what would I actually do? No one who knows me will be too surprised to learn that I think the role of consultants and teachers who help people learn to use information will grow.

Here's what I see the future me doing with my work time:

• Designing learning activities that attend to the ways we use information
• Helping others to understand the evolving information landscape
• Teaching people how to use information to learn
• Teaching about the information landscape (as the content)
• Researching aspects of the information landscape and our engagement with it

Of course, much of this I do already. I guess what I am thinking is that the need to further develop this work will actually increase over time - particularly if this need can be articulated well to the parties who stand to benefit, e.g., students, teachers, administrators, parents, etc.

I would love to hear others thoughts on this too.

Clarence

Getting the Word Out

Some days I have to look for the inspiration... particularly long about the end of February. But I usually manage to find it. My uplifting March moment came this year when I was asked to work with Glynis Asu, the Coordinator of Information Literacy at Hamilton College, to do a workshop on informed learning for some of the librarians at Hamilton and a few visitors. The workshop, based on the one Hilary Hughes did at Colgate, will focus on the 6 frames model for understanding different pedagogic approaches and how to leverage them to enable students to learn to use information as well as subject content. I am very excited at the idea of planting more informed learning seeds out in the world and see what comes of that. Much to be gained for learners I think!