Thursday, July 25, 2013

I'll read #ILread

Unfortunately I had to miss yesterday’s #ILread discussion, since I was in attendance at our state’s information literacy summit. I was impressed with Barbara Fister's talk at LOEX. As I recall, every one of her "outrageous claims" was loudly cheered by a large section of the audience. After I got home, I discussed her claims with a group of colleagues who were aghast that a librarian would say such things. I thought it was an interesting divergence of opinion. The claims were framed to get attention, so the statements appear more outrageous than they actually are, once we consider the underlying thoughts.

This is how I interpret them:
  1. Emphasize process over product. The research paper is the end product of the process. The learning is in the journey; the end product is just an artifact.
  2. Finding stuff is not hard. Coming up with good questions is more important.
  3. Citations are an academic thing. Incorporating the work of others into one’s own is the real skill.
  4. We're educators, not enforcers.
  5. There are reasons why students are expected to use scholarly sources. It is important for students to understand those reasons.
  6. “Librarians should spend as much time working with faculty as with students.” Actually, I think this is more obvious than outrageous. Faculty are our route to the students. We need to connect with them because we need them to advocate for us to their students.
One other thought about the discussion: I know that there are differences between how education is structured and how it operates in the US and UK, but I don't really know what all the differences are. It seems to make for a strange little language barrier that popped up now and then in the discussion.

2 comments:

  1. Thanks for the comments! Yes, the faculty question is the one that everyone agreed about! Though, over here we would normally talk about "the academics" rather than "the faculty"... It's easier when it's obvious there's a difference (e.g. I didn't know what "K12" meant when I first came across it, but there was no chance of me thinking it meant something else) whereas I got baffled for a while when North Americans talked about "school", because in the UK we only use that to mean, um, K12, not university. And that's just linguistic differences ...

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  2. It was a great conversation, and thanks for translating my claims into sensible ideas :) I especially like "We're educators, not enforcers."

    The faculty one is both obvious and rarely actually accomplished - well, we talk to faculty in advance of sessions, but that's one person at a time about a very specific goal. And this is odd because generally they really care about information literacy but don't have much occasion to really think about it and how it might happen in a systematic way.

    Also enjoyed learning more about which of my assumptions and phrases are totally US-centric!

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