November was a whirlwind. I felt both overwhelmed and enlightened after #OpenEd15 in Vancouver last week. The conference empowered me to see a different side of the Open Education movement, which helped me realize just how much I still have to learn. Still, I found myself yearning for more critical, strategic conversations about openness. Both Robin DeRosa and Adam Heidebrink-Bruno have written brilliant reflections about this that echo my feelings.
I also just completed the interview process to become a curriculum designer/ presenter for ACRL’s Intersections initiative. While I didn’t end up getting the position, the interview process made me seriously reflect on how my work engages information literacy, scholarly communication, and rich and important intersections of both. After visiting an Anthropology of Social Movements course last week to talk about Open Access and activism, I knew that I needed to reflect on just how important these intersections are.
I have extensive experience with teaching information literacy sessions and concepts. I have created workshops, programming, and grant opportunities that engage altmetrics, OA, and other scholarly communication issues. I have talked to LIS classes and international librarians about how to not only find and evaluate OER but also how to share their own learning objects openly. Yet, I still struggle with articulating how exactly the intersections of these two areas are present in my work. I wholeheartedly believe that the intersections are integral and—dare I say it—the most important component of what I do. But that doesn’t mean that they are always tangible or even visible.
I think that this is explained, in part, by how ingrained they are in how I teach and engage.
ACRL’s Intersections of Scholarly Communication and Information Literacy document identifies three important intersections that librarians should strategically pursue:
1) economics of the distribution of scholarship (including access to scholarship, the changing nature of scholarly publishing, and the education of students to be knowledgeable content consumers and content creators);
2) digital literacies (including teaching new technologies and rights issues, and the emergence of multiple types of non-textual content);
3) our changing roles (including the imperative to contribute to the building of new infrastructures for scholarship, and deep involvement with creative approaches to teaching).
The document and responses to it hold that while scholarly communication outreach is traditionally focused on collections/faculty and information literacy work is traditionally focused on students/pedagogy, this dichotomy is continually blurring (pg. 20). Students are blogging, publishing in undergraduate journals, and deciding how to share their honors theses and other publications. Further, many experiential learning opportunities ask students to delve into digital content creation, which often intersects with librarians’ expertise in data literacy, intellectual property issues, and copyright. All librarians, particularly information literacy librarians that work closely with students, need to be knowledgeable about scholarly communication topics and think critically about how it redefines their work.
I find the ways that scholarly communication is being infused with information literacy even more interesting and exciting, partly because I believe that IL can make scholarly communication outreach more holistic and approachable. One of the best examples of this is librarians’ outreach on altmetrics and impact factor. Asking faculty and graduate students to think critically about how we evaluate scholarship and what impact really means to them as scholars and information consumers is information literacy. When I taught an altmetrics workshop, I didn’t just teach tools like the ISI’s JCR, Google Scholar, and Impact Story. I taught participants how to interrogate what impact is and the role it has in academia. I asked them to consider why the academy should value public discourse and impact. I pushed them to find a combination of metrics would give others a holistic view of their own impact. In my mind, this is “Scholarship as a Conversation” at its best. This is information literacy at its best.
The ACRL Intersections document built a valuable foundation for me to understand these intersections. But I’d like to use this space to push the boundaries. Are there intersections that are even more unique and, thus, less visible? Are there intersections that are pushing our job descriptions and our conceptions of our work even further? I’ll list a few that have been on my mind a lot lately. These are, of course, up for debate.
As I present Open Access issues to students, I have a slide that asks “how can libraries keep buying these journals? How can faculty keep publishing in them?” I usually talk about the faculty reward system and how faculty are incentivized to publish in high impact journals, regardless of their cost. But then Emily Drabinski tweeted something that made me reconsider my explanation:
Since then, I’ve been thinking about discovery a lot. Scholarship is about more than tenure. Faculty want to share their life’s work with others that care about their niche too. What if, instead of using my watered down explanation, I asked students the question “why even publish in a journal? What is the benefit of doing so?” I think the result would be a much more rich conversation about indexing, how databases organize information, which journals are in each database, how information flows within the academy, and why we search the way that we do. It would bring “Searching as Strategic Exploration” to the next level. Instead of just teaching them Boolean, I would be teaching them all of the connecting dots for why Boolean is a useful searching mechanism within databases. Further, I would be connecting IL and SC in a rich and nuanced way.
I know what you’re thinking! Isn’t that too complicated for undergraduates? Don’t they just need a two minute explanation about AND/ OR/ NOT? In their recent book chapter about the intersections of IL and SC, Kim Duckett and Scott Warren provide an explanation for why they think complexity is both valuable and necessary:
True enculturation takes time, but if students must find, read, understand, and use peer-reviewed literature in a rhetorical style mimicking scholars, they deserve to have these concepts, tools, and values explained to them in order to facilitated the process of becoming more academically information literature and hence better students (29)
The second intersection I see is what I personally regard as the most interesting aspect of my work and the most valuable intersection of these areas that I live in. I attempted to articulate it in a recent Twitter debate:
I believe that the most integral statement in the Framework for Information Literacy is “Experts understand that value may be wielded by powerful interests in ways that marginalize certain voices” (para 16). Information production is an undeniable intersection that has value in the IL classroom just as much as it does in a SC consultation with a faculty member.
Last semester, my team started exploring how the concept of information privilege might be incorporated into our information literacy goals. In doing so, we want to make students aware of the great amount of information privilege and access they have while they are at Davidson. We also hope to make them aware of how they will lose that access. We frame this conversation around their opportunity to change the system as knowledge creators. We hold that they too are authors and can decide how they’d like to share and disseminate their own work.
A second goal of addressing information privilege focuses on who can enter the scholarly conversation. In almost every IL session I do, I find that students have a very shallow understanding of credibility and expertise. Scholarly communication through blogs, social media, and other informal channels is deemed illegitimate or untrustworthy, which often creates a barrier for many voices. Credentials are equated with PhDs, so a person’s lived experience isn’t even considered. Format is an oversimplified indicator of quality and a crutch for students really interrogating a publication’s vetting process. We should push our students to consider how they privilege specific information formats, voices, or vetting systems in their research and how this replicates privilege.
The second-most valuable intersection I’ve found is Open Educational Resources (OER). In my opinion, OER combine the most interesting aspects of SC and IL. OER outreach is focused on access and licensing but also instructional design and pedagogy. This brings me back to #OpenEd15 and the reflections that Robin and Adam wrote. Interestingly, Robin and Adam both use information production and social justice as a lens for understanding open education.
The most powerful portion of Adam’s post:
Yet the amount of information produced needs to be measured in relation to its quality. Empirical studies suggest that, while it isn’t the industry-standard double-blind peer-review, the information on Wikipedia is fairly accurate. We’ve reiterated this finding for nearly a decade and still Wikipedia has not and will not become a widely accepted location for academic knowledge. Something else is going on. And I think it has to do with the grossly simplified definitions of “reliability” and “credibility” used in such studies. Researchers often assume that quality is a measure of error.
In an open context, however, I argue that quality is a measure of inclusion.
Robin adds that engaging and involving learners must be at the forefront “so that knowledge becomes a community endeavor rather than a commodity that needs to be made accessible” and that open licenses are much more valuable than open textbooks because the license “enables us to do more with the ideas that we ourselves as learners, teachers, scholars are generating.”
The OER movement, at its best, is about doing the important work of making knowledge creation both accessible and inclusive. It’s about moving beyond linear information presentation and instead asking students to have ownership and autonomy over their learning. It’s the same work that I try to do with my students in the information literacy classroom. The intersections enable us to go beyond increasing access; they give us a space to consider how we can foster increased participation and inclusivity through that access.
I started this post with recognizing how much November resembled a whirlwind for me. I wholeheartedly recognize that my writing here mirrors one as well. It is disjointed and maybe even scattered. But sometimes our best work comes as a blur. This is how many of my thoughts develop, how much of my work is shaped and improved. It’s an uncomfortable, confusing process. But as much as it is confusing, it is rewarding. Being intentional and honest about where I find value in my work, where I don’t, and how I need to improve is worth it.
Where do you do your best work? How is that place changing?
Note: This post does not represent ACRL or the ACRL Intersections Professional Development Working Group.