Information Masters and Slaves

Fons Wijnhoven knows how to attract attention. Wijnhoven's article in JASIST has interesting language. To describe the information providers or authorities and information seekers Wijnhoven writes,

 ...these authorities may be named information masters, and the people who need to be informed may be called information slaves, because they are dependent on the master's resources to become well informed. This inequality of informing resources results in opinion-influencing power of the masters, from which it is difficult for slaves to emancipate.

After the dramatic language near the start of the article, straightforward source evaluation techniques are framed with Hegelian dialectic. I prefer simplicity to the 17-step flow chart in the article. On the other hand, it's possibly that I'm eliminating important steps when I boil things down to a handful of steps for myself and for students.

I like one step of his method that I don't use or teach enough. The step is to formulate an antithesis, the mortal enemy of your thesis, and to look for and evaluate information supporting the antithesis. That step could counteract confirmation bias.

Teaching Information Literacy or Just Pieces of it?

I was happy today when I saw a ProfHacker post in the Chronicle of Higher Education using the phrase "information literacy" and was not written by a librarian. A couple years ago, I read letters to the editor in the Daily Egyptian from SIU faculty that superficially were about climate change. They seemed to me to really be about information literacy. Not one of them ever used that phrase. Maybe it's finally catching on -- just in time for librarians to switch to the phrase "information fluency."

Granted, an assistant professor of English is not that far afield from a librarian, but it's a step in the right direction. The comments on the post so far have come from librarians and composition instructors, and they seem to understand that information literacy is more than how to use the library or how to find information.

The Google resource that the article is about, on the other hand, is not so clear that the people at Google understand what else is involved in information literacy. Admittedly, most of my one-shot sessions in classes focus on those two things too. In the long run, though, those two things aren't the most important parts of information literacy for students to take with them after they leave college.

Knowing how to order a book from the McLafferty Annex or how to use Boolean operators will help them in the short term. After graduation, students won't need to think about the McLafferty Annex again. Online searching is moving toward something more like weighted text matching of search terms and less like the set operations that most library databases use today, so I don't know how valuable Boolean operators will be in the long term.

In the long term, it's more helpful for them to be able to recognize limitations in their knowledge and that research is needed. It's more helpful for them to be able to discern differences among sources. It's more helpful to use that discernment to decide how much trust to place in their sources.

Now the challenge for me is to keep the long term in mind when I'm doing one-shot instruction. I want to make sure that the students can handle the basic (but convoluted) mechanics of getting information sources from the library. Too often, I lose the long term in that.

Information Literacy Fail

Which of the following statements comes closest to representing the point of view expressed by the American Library Association (ALA) and presented in class or in class readings?
a.    Do No Harm: A library collection should not include any materials that would be harmful to the most-vulnerable members of the community the library serves.
b.    Neutrality: Libraries should carry only materials that have been vetted as fact and should avoid controversial materials.
c.    Freedom to Read: Libraries should include materials that express diverse viewpoints and should oppose censorship.
d.    The Best Thinking: Libraries should carry materials that represent the best thinking on topics and should not carry materials that contain bad, unorthodox, or dangerous ideas.
e.    All of the Above are statements of principle from the ALA.

This semester, I promised myself to spend more time with my students on evaluating information sources. After last semester, when one of the students who earned an A in the class didn't notice any potential bias in a source funded by groups promoting low taxes and reduced government intervention, I thought that I hadn't done enough for them. I felt like I had failed them in this area.

I feel like I've failed again. This semester, we looked at The Freedom Read Statement. I tried to convey to my students that the statement includes emotional language like "censorship," "coerce," and "freedom" and that language conveys a particular point of view. I tried to explain that a site that would take the opposite point of view would not describe what they are doing as censorship or coercion and would use positive language. When I wrote this exam question, I made sure that the answers all had details to make it clear which answers were contrary to the Freedom to Read Statement. Nevertheless, E was a popular answer choice for this exam question. 

What can I do next time to get them to see when sources are not neutral and to see the stands that writers are taking?

Anthroplogists Study Students and the Library

Some colleges and universities in Illinois have worked with anthropologists to study library use. This study is one of several that come on the heels of the University of Rochester study. Their results are that both librarians and faculty expect college students to be more thoughtful, skilled, dedicated researchers than they are.

Their results match my experience, so I'm surprised at their surprise. Someone who is 20 years old today does not have much of a memory of a time Before Google (B.G.). The whole frame of mind about how search is supposed to work completely different from what an "old fogy" like me expects. I've tried to explain how sparse the information in the library's catalog is compared to what Google pulls off a Web site and why it requires a different mindset. I think it just gave them the impression that the library catalog and paper books are a lot of bother.

The one statement that troubles me is, "Librarians tend to overestimate the research skills of some of their students, which can result in interactions that leave students feeling intimidated and alienated, say the ERIAL researchers." Comments on my teaching evaluations sometimes say that the information I present is too basic, but at the information desk, I see students struggle with things that I think should be easy. I'm still trying to find the sweet spot: not too easy and not too difficult.