More thinking about Information Fluency

7 Feb 2001
So we're the Task Force on Collaboration for Information Fluency, and I seem to be chairing our upcoming meeting at Southwestern. What follows is my usual Web-living rumination, (1) to get my own thoughts in order, and (2) to try to define a sensible agenda for 2 1/2 hours of discussion --it's not as coherent or as polished and complete as I'd like it to be. I expect that I'll add more to this in the next week or so, and I'd be glad to have comments from others (blackmerh@wlu.edu).

I gather from what several people said in our conference call that just what Information Fluency is isn't clear to some Deans. I'm in no doubt myself, about definition or about my own agendas for fluency:

It's really important to recognize that and that Students and professors need to know things in 2001 that weren't even imagined in 1991, and have tools at their fingertips that dramatically change what a scholar can do. In this burgeoning environment, fluency is a process, not an accomplishment, and being fluent is a continuing challenge for everyone --students, faculty and staff.

Fluency develops as a person uses Information, as the available tools are employed to solve problems and do research and learn and teach. Fluency is an outcome of an active stance toward learning, a stance that emphasizes exploring and experimenting and keeping in touch with new developments. Every campus has students and professors whose habits and activities are exemplary of this active stance, and we all know students and professors who are passive and not (or no longer) exploring and experimenting.

The task of Information Fluency programs and initiatives is to encourage the active stance wherever and whenever possible --to intrigue and inspire students and faculty to choose the active mode. Such lifelong active engagement has always been one of the basic goals of a liberal arts education. Universities have always recognized their responsibility to provide and support the tools of information access and communication; new media and new resources broaden demands and require collaboration and cooperation.

Collaboration is an essential part of Information Fluency because nobody can know or do it all  --set up networks, navigate databases, teach academic specialties, write software--  especially in the context of rapidly evolving technologies and wave upon wave of new possibilities for knowing and communicating.

Collaborations develop around issues, and because partners recognize complementarities, or see ways to accomplish together what they can't do alone. Most collaborations begin as ad hoc cooperation, based on shared interests, and many are unique to situation and circumstance, and to fortuitous personality combinations, not necessarily replicable in other settings. This makes it difficult to identify portable 'best practises'.

Collaboration is often subversive: it sidesteps hierarchies and happens in spite of local structures, as individuals share resources and knowledge across administrative and budgetary boundaries. Very often a collaboration generates a demand for more resources from someplace --and a problem for interdepartmental collaborations is: who gets to pay for something that benefits more than one party? The answer seems often to involve searching for external funding, since the regular budgetary process is defined and constrained by the structure and needs of separate administrative units.

Often the downfall of a promising collaboration has to do with access to resources (money and/or time) to carry through from a prototype or pilot. Another rock upon which collaborations founder is inadequate attention by the collaborators to mobilizing the support and engagement of the intended beneficiaries; every collaboration presents both opportunities and necessities for education.

I'm involved in a lot of collaborations myself, and I've tacitly assumed that others are too --that it's just the natural way to do things, the obvious solution to practical problems of knowing some things and not-knowing others.
 

Computers in Classrooms --and then what?
A headline in a recent issue of The Chronicle calls attention to the gulf we are trying to address:

Campus survey finds that adding technology to teaching is a top issue
Helping faculty members integrate technology with instruction continues to be the main priority of academic-computing administrators... At the same time, however, only 14 percent of the administrators surveyed agreed that 'technology has improved instruction on my campus.'(27 Oct 2000, pg. A46)
In fact, this is a silly article on several grounds: 'academic-computing administrators' are pretty peripheral to the actual 'helping' and are rarely in much of a position to gauge what is going on in classrooms, and 'technology' is too nebulous a term to convey what is actually happening on the frontiers of teaching and learning.  Still, for our purposes the headline is useful and eloquent. Just HOW is technology to be "added" if not via collaboration? And a moment's thought makes it clear that the collaborators HAVE to include a broad range of different skills and perspectives. Implementation of classroom 'technology' involves hardware issues, networking problems, software questions, training quandaries, and support dilemmas, all of which involve multiple perspectives which cannot be contained in a single administrative entity.

Every institution needs computers in some classrooms, and most colleges are experimenting with various configurations of 'computer classrooms', but once the computers are in classrooms, where do responsibilities lie for their condition and use? The responsibility for installation, maintenance and troubleshooting differs from campus to campus and so does responsibility for training in effective use. Just how do professors use those new computers that seem to be appearing? While a few jump readily into experiments with presentation and specialized software, or plunge into Web page creation, others use the computer as a fancier overhead projector and confine themselves to PowerPoint presentations. Most need help at some point, and on most campuses there is somebody whose job it is to provide that help. But all too often the pieces don't fit together, and the professor who is attempting to use instructional technology is in the uncomfortable position of having to coordinate the activities of people from several offices. As one frustrated instructor put it to me, "it's not my job to get the whole institution organized to be able to use the equipment they already have."

At W&L, for historical reasons, development and support of 'computer classrooms' has fallen to a unit within the Library, though 'computer labs' (and 'academic computing') are the province of University Computing; UC isn't much concerned with classroom instruction, but does provide a broad array of workshops.

The Library office that began as a distribution point for projectors has become the (increasingly computer-based) Media Center, which is now morphing into a Teaching and Learning Resource Center, where faculty and students can get assistance with a very wide range of projects (scanning images to video production to GIS), and where innovative and collaborative pilot programs in teaching with technology are launched and supported (see the Teaching Portfolio Pilot Project, now operating with Mellon funds). Demand for Media Center services (including planning for new classroom installations) has risen to the point that it has become necessary to add additional staff to cover the traditional support functions.

An avalanche of new resources
We think mostly in terms of skills and knowledge our users don't have, and which we propose to install and develop by traditional classrrom means --by teaching interfaces, software skills, library skills, research skills. Those skills continue to be relevant, but they aren't ambitious enough in the face of the practical needs imposed by the Information explosion we're in the Eye of. Here we are at W&L in Winter 2001 with a suite of greatly enhanced access tools:

These developments directly imply different ways of using Information in teaching, but only collaboration can bring this to fruition. Our users can (quite suddenly and without their realizing it), get to vastly more than they could six months (or even one month) ago. How on earth are we librarians going to teach faculty and students to use these potentials? And how are we going to distribute and manage these resources? How are the resources going to find their way into teaching? And what can we do beyond the reactive, to really change students' (and for that matter faculty...) minds about what to do with these possibilities? Creative collaboration is the only possible answer.
 

Integrating new Information resources into teaching
New information tools and resources challenge everyone to rethink how they do things, and create opportunities for collaboration. A recent example of such a transformative information tool is ISI's Web of Science, which Washington & Lee has finally been able to add to the stable of electronic tools on networked desktops. I don't know how many ACS campuses have this tool, but I'm sure that most want it.

By itself Web of Science is certainly the most powerful tool for mining scientific literatures, but its additional capability of linking to full text of many titles turns a powerful tool into a practical utility that will change how the sciences are taught and studied.
Getting from one librarian's conviction of this power and value to general acceptance and widespread use of Web of Science as an everyday tool is the problem of collaboration in microcosm: we provide a tool and must teach it, support it, and convince people to use it. That's one of the challenges I'm now grappling with.

Collaborations among campuses
Inter-campus collaboration is another facet of the Collaboration Task Force's interests. What are the prospects and the problems? We know so little about each other's actual material and organizational circumstances. Without exchanges (reciprocal visits in job contexts) that won't change, except on an individual basis (the example of Tom Lairson's Vietnam course is one of the few exceptions I know about). My own experience in attempting to mobilize the wherewithal to support collaborative development of GIS as a teaching tool across ACS institutions is instructive:

Following up on ideas mentioned in my November 1999 remarks, and in consultation with Bob Whyte, between January and April 2000 I poured a lot of energy into an application to FIPSE's Learn Anytime Anyplace Program (LAAP) for funds to support an (over)ambitious ACS-wide Initiative for GIS Across the Curriculum . The proposal didn't make it to the second stage of the grant competition ( brief summary here ), and in retrospect that's just as well.  If it had been funded, could it have accomplished its lofty collaborative aims?  And the answer, really, is NO, on quite a few grounds --many relevant to the general questions of Collaboration:


Glorious failure and lessons learned
Sometimes it's useful to look at failed collaborations, and to ask why they did not go on to glory, despite their noble intent and careful design.  A case in point is a project I undertook with a Biology professor, mobilizing several collaborators to create a tool for management and Web display of his slide collection ( beginnings in March '98, ACRL presentation in April '99, and EDUCAUSE presentation in October '99): a year later the tool that seemed to have such promise is unused and the professor in question is really no further along the path to personal fluency.  Why? Among the answers:

It was a great idea, and further experiments in image management have resulted (notably in the Art Department), but the scheme itself didn't change anything.

Late-breaking example, hot off the press
At W&L we're struggling with development of sensible approaches to planning of instructional technology expansion, and discovering the need for systematic knowledge about and access to information on our existing resources and facilities. An inventory would seem to be an obvious necessity, but how can we compile what we need from the fragments in various domains? I asked a few questions and constructed a scheme that could solve the problem, if we can mobilize the necessary resources (mostly human capital, in the form of time and specific skills). Is this Information Fluency? Yes it is, in the fullest sense of developing tools to manage the Information around us.  It may seem a long way from what students need to know to be Fluent, but that's just my point: Information Fluency is a systemic concern, and should not be thought of as a student issue.

Some links to useful materials:

Slides from David Brown's talk, Nov 1999

 Building the 21st Century Learning Environment (University of Richmond)

 Information Literacy in a Nutshell: Basic Information for Academic Administrators and Faculty (American Library Association)

 Information Literacy and the Oberlin Education (1996) and  Information Literacy Grant project outline of Five Colleges of Ohio (1998)