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.