Ironies, paradoxes, challenges and opportunities: a personal view of information literacy in 2013, by Andrew K. Shenton

IRONIES, PARADOXES, CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES:

A PERSONAL VIEW OF INFORMATION LITERACY IN 2013

Dr. Andrew K. Shenton

Formerly of Northumbria University

            I’d like to begin by extending my warmest good wishes to all of you who are attending today. I always feel that we should begin each new year with a sense of anticipation and optimism but we may know in our hearts that many of the challenges that have recently dogged us – personally, professionally or academically – will probably continue to do so. There is, after all, an essential continuity between one year and the next. Some of the most serious issues facing information literacy today are certainly longstanding. A few may be regarded as rather ironic, and perhaps even paradoxical. If it weren’t for their importance, we might almost find them amusing. Let us take a moment to consider three in a little detail.

            There are many “buzz” terms that we hear with great regularity in twenty-first century Britain. We are told to “think outside the box” and, just as often, we are urged to use “joined up thinking”. Yet, despite the vogue for the latter expression, how many times do we read in information science about the disconnection between information literacy instruction and research into information behaviour? In theory, of course, there should be close ties between these two activities. Effective information literacy teaching should lead to information behaviour which exhibits the principles that have been conveyed in the instruction and is seen, in research, to do this. At the very least, the two areas should service each other. Ideally, programmes of information literacy teaching will be designed with a view to addressing information-related problems which research has shown individuals experience and will also point to good practice among information users that has come to light through formal studies of what they do. Similarly, even if it is too fanciful to expect people to adhere to “textbook” information behaviour in real situations, we would hope that research will reveal that they have absorbed some of what has been taught in information literacy sessions.

            Much is made these days of the value of transferable skills. We see them stressed in contexts as diverse as learning taxonomies and person specifications for jobs. The sheer usefulness of skills that can be applied across the curriculum in our schools is undeniable. In terms of our own area, only recently, when reading a prospectus relating to the courses offered for sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds in my local high school, I was struck by how often the skills that particular courses were said to foster included those relating to “research” or “independent learning”. The tragedy is that, despite all this kind of attention, information literacy is still seldom regarded as an actual subject, probably because it lacks a core base of knowledge which may be equated with that pertaining to traditional subjects such as, for example, history or geography. Moreover, the information specialist is rarely regarded as a teacher even though their educative role and their potential to enhance learning across a range of curriculum areas are obvious. Undoubtedly, one of the reasons for this situation in Britain lies in the fact that information specialists in schools find themselves part of a motley collection of “support staff” who, all too frequently, tend to be regarded as second class citizens.

We cannot expect children and young people to understand the nature of transferable skills from the perspective that we might take as adults. Clearly, in order to demonstrate to this group the value of information literacy we need to resort to other tactics. We can show, for example, the close links between information literacy and academic achievement; we can explain how information literacy can help us find out more about topics of special interest to us; we can emphasise how it can enable us to make wise choices as a consumer and reach a better understanding of global problems and local issues that affect us personally. Perhaps most fundamentally, however, our first battle may well be to convince youngsters that any form of information literacy teaching or even mere “support” from an information specialist is necessary at all. Here we must overturn much of the mythology that the Web and the tools associated with it are so easy to use that effective searching results can be gained without the need for any real training whatsoever.

            As information is very much our business, it may be tempting for us to assume that the acquisition of at least a measure of information literacy will be second nature to those with whom we work. Yet, some areas of information literacy are themselves problematic. An aspect that young people seem to find especially difficult is that of evaluating information. This is also, though, among the most important, since so much information made available via the Web is of dubious quality and the task of distinguishing between trustworthy and untrustworthy material falls squarely on the searcher’s shoulders. One of the most commonly employed methods for assessing the quality of information is to test it against our own knowledge. This strategy has provoked ridicule in various quarters, however, with certain experts asserting that, in order to be able to make such an appraisal with confidence, we must know the subject involved so well that there is little point in looking it up in the first place! If our knowledge is inadequate for such verificational purposes, an alternative option lies in comparing the information we see in front of us against that in other sources. This, too, can be questionable since, where the sources that are used to test for validation are themselves inaccurate, incorrect material in the original source may be seen to be “confirmed”, rather than exposed for what it is. The fact that even the task of selecting sites on the Web for corroborative purposes must be handled with care returns us to the central problem that so much material found in this environment is untrustworthy. Of course, there are many other actions that we can encourage information users to take in order to assess the quality of the contents of a source but the problematic nature of two of the most commonly discussed underlines the need for youngsters to develop a true armoury which consists of a variety.

            So, as we have seen, in the field of information literacy alone there are major issues that must be faced by the information professional operating in 2013. I have concentrated here on a few of the most puzzling – in so many walks of life, the need to make connections across disparate ideas is highlighted yet the closely related territories of information behaviour research and information literacy instruction are frequently treated as separate entities; while transferable skills are often lauded, scant recognition is given to those who teach some of the most important; individual techniques that are routinely advocated in information literacy teaching may either be futile or have the opposite effect to that which we intend. Still, before we become too downcast, let us remember that challenges also present opportunities and, if we can reach effective solutions, either in our own day-to-day work with the information users we know or on a wider scale, we may gain a little satisfaction from the knowledge that we have played a part in advancing the cause of information literacy. It is triumphs such as these that make the role of the information specialist so worthwhile.