Wacky Screencast Week

Check out my screencast assignment: SI_643_Screencast,_International_Children's_Digita

The information literacy articles I consulted for this week’s class are all from the Library Quarterly, probably because its the only library journal archived in JSTOR. Full citations are as follows:

Bertot, John Carlo, Charles R. McClure and Paul T. Jaeger. “The Impacts of Free Public Internet Access on Public Library Patrons and Communities,” Library Quarterly 78/3 (2008).

Julien, Heidi and Cameron Hoffman. “Information Literacy Training in Canada’s Public Libraries”, Library Quarterly 78/1 (2008).

Patterson, David. “Information Literacy and Community College Students: Using New Approaches to Literacy Theory to Produce Equity,” Library Quarterly 79/3 (2009).

Contrary to my initial assumptions, the first article (“Impacts of Free Public Internet”) does not take the stance that free public internet access at public libraries is a universally essential and positive service. Mostly, this comes down to budgetary concerns. The authors of the article clearly believe that libraries can better use their money to buy print materials instead of maintaining the hardware and infrastructure necessary to provide a particular community with an outlet for free internet. Furthermore, they contend that other community and governmental bodies should share the burden of providing this service, both through funding and staffing. Surprisingly, the subtext of this article seems to accuse patrons of taking internet access at the library for granted and acting ungrateful. While it is never explicitly stated, and the concluding sentence exhorts librarians to look for creative ways to maintain this service, the authors appear to have a certain resentment of change, and especially of being forced to shoulder the burden of this change alone. 

The second article, "Community College", was heavy on the french philosophy and short on facts. I kept wanting the author to provide me with some statistics to back up his evaluations of community college students as almost universally victims of the "digital divide", but instead he seemed more interested in the "magnificent" musings of De Certeau, which state that reading creates "gardens that miniaturize and collate a world".  Poetic, certainly. Helpful? Not really. I'm not sure I understood more than 50% of this article, and even though it takes a significant amount of obfuscation and purple prose to confuse me, some of the author's digressions made little sense. His frequent referrals to the ancient catalogs of Hittusas and Nippur--quite apart from being somewhat discordant notes in an article that also discusses Wikipedia--take on much more significance than they are due. One sentence on  librarians as historical gatekeepers of information would have been fine, but I think hyperbolic section headings like "The Hattusas Catalog, Hostile Encounters and Disqualified Knowledge" really distract from Patterson's message, which is, simply, that librarians in community colleges have the potential to help their students succeed at transitioning 4-year universities by giving them a sophisticated grounding in IL and taking a look at their own power structures. 

The last article ("Canada's Public Libraries") takes an almost completely opposite approach, but ends up with essentially the same conclusion as the other two--information literacy training is most important to the most disadvantaged and public libraries shouldn't have to bear the burden of providing internet access all on their own. Instead of Patterson's disconnected philosophical ramblings, however, the team of Julien and Hoffman take an eminently practical approach--they conduct a study. The concrete, quantifiable results of the study are presented with contextual information and explanation of results. This is by far the best-structured, unbiased, and most useful of the three articles I read.

Readings, Week 2 (Online Learning)

I'd like to start out by acknowledging that my response to this week's readings will almost certainly be influenced by a tragic event in my personal life: namely, the attempted murder of my beloved laptop. Infected by a malicious virus this weekend, it has gone into a coma and can only be awoken by the kiss of an IT professional. Anyway, the upshot is, I'm typing this entry on an XP computer running Internet Explorer in the middle of the undergraduate library. Its noisy, crowded, and, I suspect, not entirely sanitary here at the Shapiro, and the atmosphere significantly impacts my attitude towards online learning. Not only has my self-esteem suffered from my inability to first diagnose and then cure this malady, but has reawakened a particularly hidebound love of learning through physical books. Furthermore, this incident has made real to me the difficulty of ensuring consistent access to internet-based teaching modules. With face-to-face and textbook learning, the only requirements are time and space--the ability to be in the right place at a specified time. Teaching via the web requires not only a secure uplink but an expensive, fractious, and incredibly complex piece of technology to process the connection. Take away either one--the computer or the high-speed connection--and you're pretty much out of luck. The argument expressed by Johnston that long-distance learners experience a greater net benefit from these tactics is not without its detractors as well. Even in modern-day first-world countries, it can still be difficult for rural dwellers to get an affordable high-speed connection. My parents' ongoing battle with HughesNet--the only provider in their area-- provides a prime example of this, and while I could describe the history and substance of their dispute in depth, suffice to say that HughesNet knows they have a monopoly and are not afraid to charge exorbitant fees for even the most basic service. Of course, the flipside to this, and the point that Johnston was undoubtedly getting at, is that long-distance learners (including people living in rural areas) are by definition going to have to go through a lot more in order to be in the right place at the right time-- in other words, to participate in a traditional learning experience.


For this reason, online learning presents a viable--if not perfect--alternative. Apart from the "gee whiz" factor of new technology and methods of communication, which information professionals should be wary of, pod- and screencasting can prove useful in these scenarios. The availability of free software, such as Jing, Trailfire, Wink, and Slideshare, makes it possible for even the most cash-strapped of libraries to provide learning modules for their patrons based solely on the investment of human capital. Were these librarians to use the ADDIE model in developing their lessons, these could subsequently be repurposed and customized for years to come, allowing for them to be taught by even inexperienced library personnel. Several case studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of these tools in teaching computer literacy as well. As the Johnston and Yelnick et al. readings demonstrate, self-paced modules for both college and high school students have proved successful in the past.

I would contend, however, that these scenarios were not the unadulterated successes that their chroniclers have suggested. The product that Yelnik et al. created using Captivate MenuBuilder for the SusQ-Cyber Charter School met with less-than-glowing feedback and in evaluative testing, 20% of the focus group answered more than 35% of questions incorrectly. Yelnik and colleagues later made adjustments to the contents of the tutorial, and even I can agree that it was better than the system previously in place to orient students to courses. The small size of the group of students tested on the tutorial makes the evaluation somewhat problematic, however, and this trend is only magnified in Johnston's study. Of the 100 social work students who took  the internet searching skills module, only a quarter reported back. Of these, over half responded with "neutral" when asked whether they had gained an "improved understanding of information literacy". Both studies admitted that students often performed better and preferred being taught face-to-face. In my opinion, online learning of this sort can best be deployed when supplementing classroom instruction but shouldn't replace it all together. Information professionals such as librarians would definitely benefit from learning how to create modules like these, if only so that they might decide for themselves if and when to implement them.

Reflections on Chapters 1 and 2 of How People Learn

Essentially, How People Learn concludes that experts differ from novices not only in the amount of information they possess on a particular topic, but how they access and think about that knowledge. They draw on a number of studies (most of them conducted in the 1970s) in order to make this claim, using experts in the fields of physics, history, mathematics, and chess. The chess study, for example, discovered that a Grand Master differs from an A Class player not in the number of possible moves they consider, but simply the effectiveness and suitability of these moves. In other words, they don't try out every possible permutation before deciding on a move, just the ones that their brains have already cross-referenced for deployment in this scenario. Less experienced players, on the other hand, are much more likely to take a sequential approach for considering plays.