Category: Conference Blogging

Includes the blogging of conference programs

The Great (?) Debate: Is Information Literacy A Fad And A Waste Of Time

A highly anticipated program at the ALA conference was the ACRL President’s Program that featured “The Great Debate”. This year’s debate resolution was “The Emperor Has No Clothes: Be It Resolved That Information Literacy is a Fad and Waste of Librarians’ Time and Talent”. Arguing in support of that resolution were Jeffrey Rutenbeck Associate Professor and Director, Digital Media Studies at the University of Denver and Stanley Wilder, Associate Dean, Library, University of Rochester. Speaking against the resolution were Gary P. Radford, Prof. of Communication Studies, Fairleigh Dickinson University and Julie B. Todaro, Dean, Library Services, Austin Community College and ACRL President-Elect. Jim Neal, Vice President for Information Services & University Librarian, Columbia University was the debate Moderator. As expected the cavernous room was filled to capacity. The debaters had 10 minutes each to make their initial statements in favor of or opposing the resolution. In between there were some humorous interludes and responses from the audience. Then the debaters had opportunities for shorter rebuttals.

acrlgreatdebatepanel

The debate participants are, left to right, Todaro, Neal, Rutenbeck, Radford, Wilder, and they are joined by Camila Alire, ACRL President for 2005-2006.

Was it a great debate? I spoke with a number of folks afterwards, and while most of them thought it was an excellent topic for a debate it seems they expected a bit more fireworks given the premise of turning a room full of information literacy advocates into a tinderbox with this explosive resolution. Neal got things off to a good start by making this exact point. Just what, he asked, were we even doing having a debate about the need for information literacy programs or questioning our commitment to it when it is certainly one of academic librarianship’s most valued and ingrained programmatic accomplishments. Neal said that we should stand back and question these values so that we may affirm them or determine how they need to change. After Neal’s excellent prelude to the debate, but before the first match was dropped near the powderkeg, it was time for some fun. That came in the form of “The Information Literacy Top Five List”:

How Can You Tell That Your Information Literacy Class Is Going Down The Tubes?
5. The students cry out in unison “Dewey or Don’t We”.
4. The students complain that they thought BI stood for “bartending instruction”.
3. The students all simultaneously download and sing along with Olivia Newton John’s “Let’s Get Physical.”
2. Campus librarians march outside the classroom carrying signs with “Faculty Status…Who Needs It?”
1. The students ask if the book “On Bullshit” will be required reading for the class?

The first vote was then taken. By a show of hands Neal judged that 50 attendees agreed with the resolution and that 350 attendees disagreed with the resolution. No real surprise there. Would the debaters change some minds?

Stanley Wilder led things off with a spirited and passionate denouncement of information literacy reminiscent of his Chronicle (“Information Literacy Makes All The Wrong Assumptions” 1/7/05) article. Wilder challenged the audience by introducing a concept he called “fad free teaching function” and defined what he thought that would be like (it was described quite quickly and I couldn’t get it all down). Of course he took a shot at the complexity of library resources, and said there was no point in teaching students how to use them. Rather, he stated, we should remove the complexity and focus on helping students get their learning done. Just one question. If your accreditation agency requires your institution to develop an information literacy program and you comply with their standards, can you really be accused of jumping on a bandwagon?

Next came Julie Todaro to reject the resolution. She made some good points in attacking the claims that information literacy was a fad (even though it’s been around since 1974) and a waste of time. If taking one’s teaching responsibilities seriously is a waste of time, than what’s a good use of our time. Todaro finished with a clever analogy to the health sciences where the goal is more than just curing the patient (e.g., get/give answers). Rather, health professionals become involved in the patient’s life in an effort to create lifestyle enhancements that will lead to better health. Todaro pointed out the parallel between that and what academic librarians can do to integrate information literacy into the student’s life in order to enhance their research capabilities. Just like health professionals, Todaro said we needed to create awareness and help prevent ignorance. She said that Wilder thinks that information literacy is about starting with the cure, but she said that we build up to the cure, and then finish with preventative care for the future. Pretty good stuff, but given that she had access to Wilder’s Chronicle article I would have thought that a few of his premises would be attacked more directly

At the next interlude we were entertained by the ACRL PomPom squad (sorry, no photo – but maybe that’s not a bad thing). Here’s the chorus of their now famous cheer:

Do you know what you don’t know
Info lit can tell you so
I-N-F-O-L-I-T
Literate’s the way to be

Try leading your faculty through the cheer the next time you’re asked to explain what information literacy is.

Next we heard from the two faculty representatives, Rutenbeck and Radford. Rutenback’s primary attack on information literacy was based on a decade of critiques of literacy. He said that scholars are saying that literacy is not a skill you can learn, and that you can lose literacy over time. He told us that we were hitching our wagon to a horse that’s dying. Information literacy, he said, cannot sustain in an increasingly digital non-linear world. This is the world the students are coming from and working in. There were definitely some points of interest, but I don’t think we heard anything in Rutenbeck’s remarks that would convince anyone that information literacy was a waste of time. Radford was the most academic of the four in his remarks. He made a number of references to characters in the book 1984. Although his approach was a bit abstract he made it clear that he was in favor of information literacy as a faculty member, and that it should emphasize critical thinking. He said we needed, through information literacy, to create a student who goes beyond what’s in the text book – some one who does think critically. He said a truly information literate person doesn’t find answers but only more questions, and that he or she would able to locate the answers to those questions on their own. He said information literacy was not a goal, but on ongoing conversation between faculty and students.

The next interlude featured “headline stories” from the Information Literacy News network. Stories included Microsoft’s plan to include the TILT tutorial in all future versions of Windows. We then were treated to a spoof video called “Is Information Literacy Working” but what didn’t work so well was the video. Not only was the image too dark and the sound hard to hear, but it just seemed sort of silly. For example, a patron being asked if he needed serials and then responding that he’d already had cereal for breakfast (what does that have to do with information literacy I wondered).

The rebuttals were a bit of a let down. It seemed like the perfect opportunity for Todaro and Radford to whip the partisan crowd into a frenzy with an attack on Wilder’s original statements about information literacy, but that never happened. In fact, both sides were fairly restrained. Todaro used her time to emphasize that we all have to step out of our comfort zones and get outside the library to integrate information literacy into the curriculum. She advised us to educate our institutions that we to do more than organize information, and that what makes us unique is the added value we bring to the content through information literacy. Wilder said he’s not opposed to user education or the library’s role in educating users. He said that since words and ideas matter it was fair game to hold information literacy accountable for what it says it is and for what it claims to do. He asked if we thought that information literacy would be the last word in user education. He said it would not be and that we must remain open minded about our education function, and think about what works (I tend to think that well planned and implemented information literacy initiatives work pretty well).

There’s no question that many good points were made on both sides, and that all who attended, no matter what side of the debate they were on likely learned something useful that they can take back to their institution and share with their colleagues, both librarians and faculty. While the faculty members made some good points as well, I wondered if their presence really helped make the debate, as Camila Alire wanted, a program we all would be talking about far into the future. Although I’m just doing some Monday morning quarterbacking here, perhaps the debate would have been improved with two librarians on each team, supplemented by videotaped segments in which faculty were interviewed about their position on information literacy. Overall, I don’t think this debate lived up to the standard set by the Great Debate on the Library Building held at the Toronto conference in 2003. At that debate the two sides really gave it to each other and the audience responded with cheers and catcalls. Perhaps the problem was, with the topic being information literacy, that the crowd always assumed a foregone conclusion and never felt the need to get vocal about their stand on the resolution.

Then Carnak was in the room to bring the debate to its conclusion:

Carnak’s answer: Pull out their fingernails.
The question: What would students rather do than sit through another information literacy session?

Carnak’s answer: Diddly squat
The question: What do students recall from their information literacy instruction?

Carnak’s answer: Hasta la vista baby.
The question: What did Arnold Schwarzenegger say when he realized he had to take information literacy at boby building school?

Carnak’s answer: Intelligent design.
The question: How do we explain the way our library catalogs organize information?

Carnak’s answer: Laura Bush.
The question: Overcoming tremendous competition who was selected the White House Information Literacy Librarian of the Century?

Then came the final vote. As you might expect it was pretty much like the beginning vote with perhaps a few more joining the majority in rejecting the resolution. That’s the thing about these debates. What transpires is not likely to change anyone’s mind, but they can be fun and informative. We left the program with a strong endorsement from ACRL that information literacy is one of our important and enduring values.

NOTE: ACRLog has created a special features page to provide the prepared remarks of the four debate presenters. All were invited to provide their remarks.

ANSS Program At ALA Is Food For Thought

I’m pleased to share another post from our guest ALA Conference blogger, Kim Leeder. Kim is the Special Assistant to the Dean at the University of Arizona Libraries. She also maintains her own blog, Park Ranger for the Intellectual Commons:

Among all the interesting sessions offered at ALA Annual this year, ACRL’s Anthropology and Sociology Section’s “Drug Foods, Fast Foods, and Feasts: A Social Science of Eating” had me hooked from the moment I spotted it in the program. I was intrigued not only because the subject is inherently personal and omnipresent for all of us, but because the description of the panel suggested that it would be a wide-ranging academic discussion on the subject of food tied only loosely to libraries. And so it was.

The session opened with a talk by Wendy Woloson of The Library Company, who provided an analysis of the cultural history of sugar in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Next up was Gerald Patout of The Historic New Orleans Collection, who shared experiences and discoveries from the development of a bibliography of New Orleans cookbooks and related texts. Third was Susan Tucker from Tulane University’s Center for Research on Women, who played video clips from the Louisiana Culinary Oral History. Finally, Jason Block, an internal medicine resident in Boston who earned his MD at Tulane, spoke about the effects of environmental factors (and particularly fast food establishments) on obesity.

When I described this session to a friend, she immediately asked what it had to do with libraries. “But that’s the beauty of it,” I responded. “It started from libraries and went out into the world from there.” Each panel was distinctly different in topic and perspective, and the cumulative effect was powerful. What it boiled down to was a message about the importance of food in our lives for survival, health, and pleasure, and how that importance has changed in the past several hundred years. The culture of eating has shifted from scarcity to abundance, a circumstance that brings both benefits and dangers. From worries about pesticides and fat to grocery shelves filled with endless ingredients, our experience of food will never be the same.

Go Where They Are (And Go Now!)

I’m pleased to share this post from our guest ALA Conference blogger, Kim Leeder. Kim is the Special Assistant to the Dean at the University of Arizona Libraries. She also maintains her own blog, Park Ranger for the Intellectual Commons:

Library news delivered to RSS feeders. iPods loaded with course reserves. Library profiles on Facebook. As academic libraries scramble to keep up with the technologies so effortlessly adopted by their students, the University Libraries Section gave librarians at ALA Annual an opportunity to pause and reflect on the issue. At the ULS President’s Program, “Use What They Own, Go Where They Are: Plugging the Library into Student Gadgets and Habitats,” Nancy Davenport and Lynne O’Brien addressed the topic before a packed room.

The two speakers expressed great enthusiasm for the ways libraries can take advantage of new technologies, peppered by the concern that libraries shouldn’t use technology for its own sake. Davenport, President of the Council on Library and Information Resources, emphasized the fact that students are becoming increasingly wired and that libraries need to meet them on their own turf. When looking at ways to use technology, she explained, librarians should be trying to bring content to the places (and the media) where students feel most comfortable. O’Brien, Director of Duke University’s Center for Instructional Technology, reviewed Duke’s digital initiatives (such as their iPod First-Year Experience program), which have been created to spur educational interest in new technologies and foster instructional innovation.

Overall, the message from both Davenport and O’Brien was that libraries should be moving ahead quickly to provide content in formats that students can easily incorporate into their wired lives. Despite the repeated assertion that libraries should not use technology for its own sake, and that we should ensure that it furthers educational goals, this cautionary message may have been lost in the sauce. The issue of how to assess the effectiveness of technology in delivering content and advancing students’ education was not addressed during the presentations, and received only a brief nod during the Q&A. So the question we are left with is this: ARE libraries using technology for its own sake?

The ACRLog blogging team thanks Kim for her excellent post.

Honoring Ray English – ACRL Academic/Research Librarian Of The Year

One of the best ACRL traditions that occurs at ALA conferences is the reception that follows the ACRL President’s Program. The focus of the reception, other than general schmoozing, is to celebrate the winner of the ACRL Academic/Research Librarian of the Year. The winner of the 2006 award, Ray English, Azariah Smith Root Director of Libraries at Oberlin College, was honored at the reception. The award, sponsored by YBP Library Services, recognizes an outstanding member of the library profession who has made a significant national or international contribution to academic/research librarianship and library development. In the photo below from the well-attended reception, Ray English receives the award from a representative from YBP. To the left of English is Dr. Camila A. Alire, Dean of University Libraries at the University of New Mexico, ACRL President for 2005 – 2006. Congratulations to Ray English on receiving the ACRL Academic/Research Librarian of the Year award.
ray english receives award
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Stopping By The ACRL Booth

ACRL’s booth on the convention floor at the ALA Conference in New Orleans received quite a bit of traffic despite being located off in a far corner of the exhibits (although near the ever popular Internet Room). In this photo I’m at the booth with Lori Goetsch of Kansas State University, and a current member of the ACRL Board of Directors.
acrlbooth
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