For ICUVAD: Information Fluency
14 Mar 2000
Only a year ago we'd probably have been talking about "information
literacy", but it's now common to hear fluency
invoked, implying a broader spectrum of competencies than those
usually attached to literacy. To be fluent is to be at ease, able
to communicate
across the full spectrum of discourse, attuned to nuance, an active
participant in
conversations.
The analogy to linguistic fluency is apt in realms of information and
technology, and even more in their intersection --you keep fluency
by USING it, fluency degrades with
disuse, and there's a slang effect too... a native speaker's colloqualisms
age with him, unless he makes a strenuous effort to keep up involvement in
the discourse, and even then he is eventually generation-gapped by
unforeseen evolution. And so it is with hardware and software: one goes
through spurts of learning and patches of "it'll do" passivity, which give
way to new involvement when perceived potentials reach critical
mass.
Supporting a population of users and learners who are navigating
these snakes and ladders is an enormous challenge, exacerbated by
the accelerating change that is endemic in Technological and Information
realms --but this
is exactly what computing services and IT
people and librarians face every day. In the classroom setting it's
pretty clear what to do: involve students in the
evolutionary
process, make it an explicit part of what one teaches, make the use of new
tools essential and inescapable. Faculty development is harder to manage,
in part because of the complexites of incentives and specializations and
egos. Professors teach what they know, and not all that many are
secure enough to be adventurous outside their areas of expertise.
This is part of the territory we want to explore this evening.
Fluency is often cast in terms of skills, and (whatever else is
true) "skills" are
- difficult to deliver to those who don't have
them (because you gain skills by practise), and
- quickly
obsolete in their details
In that context, it
matters WHO gets to define the skill set(s) that we're going to invest in
delivering and/or developing. The VFIC Technology Skills contretemps is a
case in point: the original version was indigestible to some people
because their candidates for necessary skills were left out,
but nobody commands a really full spectrum of skills. What
does the "market" for certification really want? And just how
sensitive should post-secondary education be to this alleged
"market", given what we know about the rapidity of change? The skills of
1998 are now hopelessly obsolete --or anyway they aren't what we know we
should be teaching in 2000, and they fit 2002 even less well... So if it's
skills we're fixated on, they need to be pretty general.
Clearly,
we in Liberal Education are in the business of developing
metaskills: helping students
learn
how to learn. This is especially true in the rapidly changing worlds
of information and technology.
It's a long way from literacy to fluency, and it's a journey
with a lot of implications for post-secondary education --for students,
for professors, for librarians, and for administrators. In fact, the
world has changed under us, in ways almost nobody foresaw a decade
ago. And there's every reason to think the curve of change will continue
to
get steeper.
Computers are to blame, of course. They present us with insurmountable
opportunities, things we HAVE to do, offers we can't refuse, a series
of Devil's Bargains, Hobson's Choices, Procrustean Beds... and other
dilemma clichés.
We have several points we want to make about information fluency,
and some examples we want to describe:
- Pay attention to what librarians are up to: Librarians have
traditionally been responsible for "bibliographic instruction".
In the old days of print-on-paper inside library walls,
"BI" was primarily concerned with navigating knowledge, learning
library
and disciplinary systems for organizing and retrieving. For more than 5
years we've been adding more and more electronic sources and databases and
tools, and taking a much more active role, working at figuring out how to
- improve access and
- encourage
sensible use of the overwhelming riches on desktops.
To these
essentially bottomless tasks we're adding support the productive
use of other digital media
--sound, images, data files of many sorts-- that are now part of the world
of
Information... In many cases librarians have the skills and knowledge
and the mandate to explore new forms of Information and new
technologies. They enjoy perspectives that faculty in disciplines don't
have.
- It's important to foster environments for active
learning,
incorporating
the moving frontiers of media and technology. The single most powerful
tool in our hands is the Web, which offers the possibility that students
(and of course faculty) can work at producing content,
not just navigating knowledge. Hypertext is a creative medium,
enabling students to develop the vital skills of
presentation to audiences.
portfolios: Christine
Metzger's as case in point
- You never know what'll happen next... integration of multiple media
(ink on paper is only one mode
of information)
blindsided
by Napster; GIS
- How do you create environments for fructification of
faculty fluency? ...faculty skills (support? incentives?)
GIS bootstrapping? ACS?
A couple of summary statements:
Information Literacy
Competency
Standards for Higher Education (Association of College & Research
Libraries)
Being Fluent with
Information Technology (National Research Council)