August 2000 thoughts on Collaboration and Information Fluency

(in the wake of this morning's conference call, and before departing for a two week vacation, I want to summarize some of what rattles between my ears so that I'll have a place to pick up the threads in late August. I have the sense that I've said a lot of this before, perhaps even to some of you...)

• develop
  and
• teach
  and
• support

The "old model" of information literacy was entirely text- and print-based: the young scholar had to learn how to use indexes and card catalogs, and mastered the niceties of bibliographic style. The necessary information was mostly to be found within the walls of libraries. Our adoption of fluency as the central concept and primary goal signals a shift in what we mean to include: relevant information must be sought in many places and may come in multifarious forms, and the scholar's task has broadened accordingly.

Fluency is an attitude and a process, rather than an accomplishment --one is never finished with becoming fluent, and can always be discovering new possibilities and refining skills. Evolving information technologies certainly push us into lifelong learning and greatly enlarge the resources upon which we can draw.

And how does this broadening of scope affect how we think about supporting and teaching? Librarians must broaden their teaching responsibilities to include an expanded range of information media, and must include what to do with the information, as well as ever more sophisticated searching skills and evaluation of source quality, reliability, and timeliness. Teaching faculty have the challenge of staying current with disciplinary tools and classroom technologies, with literatures and pedagogies that have changed remarkably in the last decade.

We who seek to foster information fluency have a substantial task with development and support of faculty fluency, in the context of rapid proliferation of digital sources that should be incorporated into classroom teaching and research. Few faculty can meet the Competency Standards that are suggested for students.

The ACRL Task Force statement (www.ala.org/arcl/ilcomstan.html) is a nice clear and unobjectionable summary, but it is confined entirely to what students should know and do. It doesn't tell us (still less faculty) what to do in support of its laudable aims --and that's the really interesting problem. How, for example, should we go about incorporating spatial data into fluency? How should we integrate online access to journal backfiles (viz: JSTOR) into teaching? How should we support multimedia, or encourage student-made web pages?

The ACS Fluency initiative seeks to generate some new motivation for the exploration of information resources, among faculty as well as students. We need to raise the level of awareness of what might be done, through examples and adventures, and bring fluency into the classroom. This is where collaboration becomes a necessity, and where evolving information technologies become tools instead of toys.

In our conference call this morning several people mentioned developments on their campuses and I should have described Washington & Lee's Teaching and Learning Resource Center, funded by a Mellon grant and just beginning to define its role and methods. The Center's primary constituency is faculty, and its principal mission is to assist teachers to explore and develop appropriate and innovative instructional technology. Here's the opening statement from the (successful) Mellon funding proposal:

The essence of scholarship is, and always has been, communication. Today, revolutionary new technologies promise to improve, enhance, and even transform that scholarly communication on our campus and on others around the world. Scholarship is by definition public, subject to peer review, and accessible for use by others. A very basic goal of the Teaching and Learning Resource Center is to bring that same spirit of scholarly rigor and openness to the craft of teaching through the use of new technology, to make instruction itself available for use, exchange, and review by all our faculty and possibly those at other campuses. Just as the printing press made modern scholarship possible, through the wide dissemination and reproduction of printed books and articles, computer technology promises to broaden and enrich, similarly, the educational conversation between and among instructors and students.