Information Literacy Presentation for NFO

Goal.  Presentaiton for NFO to send along thoughts about searching & using info in new students.  Ask new faculty to consider how this might impact what they teach.

The slides for this presentation are available at here: Information Literacy and Your Students

Information has never been stable. That may be a truism, but it bears pondering. It could serve as a corrective to the belief that the speedup in technological change has catapulted us into a new age, in which information has spun completely out of control. I would argue that the new information technology should force us to rethink the notion of information itself. It should not be understood as if it took the form of hard facts or nuggets of reality ready to be quarried out of newspapers, archives, and libraries, but rather as messages that are constantly being reshaped in the process of transmission. Instead of firmly fixed documents, we must deal with multiple, mutable texts. By studying them skeptically on our computer screens, we can learn how to read our daily newspaper more effectively—and even how to appreciate old books.

from The New York Reivew of Books, Volume 55, Number 10 · June 12, 2008

The Library in the New Age

By Robert Darnton

1. Types of Information
2. Teach about information - dualistic personal epistemology
3. Experts don't research like new students.  Experts tend: 1) watch literature as it emergest to get new stuff, 2) follow references in works cited to get older stuff, 3) rarely sit down and do a large, comprehensive literature search in a database.  new researchers start with #3 and don't do #1 or #2. 
4. new searchers over estimate the ability for research, research shows that first experiences totally shape future interactions and probalby of using resources in particular ways
5. Student survey and focus groups show vast improvement in success, future usage, and awareness of sources after library info lit session.  Without a session, students indicate that they would have missed many useful resources. 
6. Not aware of the scientific/scholarly process - theory, test, theory
7. Latent Ambiguity: Legal term, but used for technology to mean that new situations come up that old rules do not fit.  Web 2.0 and blogs are examples in research. 
8. Make their experiences their own theories to test
9. Do not know peer review
10. Use topics that touch their lives - but do not fear difficult topics
11. Read to your students.  they don't read.  They need to hear it and learn to be patient readers.   We learn language naturally, but we have to be taught to read. It's not too late for your students.
12. Make writing process visible
13. Make a community of researchers in the classroom