From a “Crusade Against Ignorance to a Crisis of Authenticity”: Cultivating

Information Literacy for a 21st Century Democracy

Andrew BattistaInformation Literacy & Reference Librarian

University of Montevallo2012 LOEX Annual Conference, Columbus, OH

May 4-5, 2010

Librarians should help students become sustainable learners, citizens who cultivate networks of information that compel them to pursue fairness, equality, and human rights.

Many prominent information literacy metrics do not correspond with the challenges of living and learning in our “swirling vortex of information.”

Information literacy instruction that directs students to curate content on social media platforms is an essential component of a democracy-centered education in the 21st century.

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Me talking: 22 minutesEngaged

discussion: 28 minutes

Information literacy should be understood “as a new liberal art […] as essential to the mental framework of the information-age citizen as the trivium of basic liberal arts (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) was to the educated person in medieval society.”

Shapiro & Hughes (1996)

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“…strong emphasis on undergraduate liberal arts studies [designed for] intellectual and personal growth in the pursuit of meaningful employment and responsible, informed citizenship.”

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“Preach, my dear Sir, a crusade against ignorance; establish and improve the law for educating the common people. Let our countrymen know that the people alone can protect us against these evils, and that the tax which will be paid for this purpose is not more than the thousandth part of what will be paid to kings, priests, & nobles who will rise up among us if we leave the people in ignorance.”

--Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to George Wythe 1786

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Thomas Jefferson, Rembrandt Peale, ca. 1800

“Over the past decade, we have seen a crisis of authenticity emerge. We now live in a world where anyone can publish an opinion or perspective, whether true or not, and have that opinion amplified within the information marketplace. […] Our Nation’s educators and institutions of learning must be aware of—and adjust to—these new realities.”

Barack Obama, National Information Literacy Awareness Month, October 2009Barack Obama, Hampton University

Commencement, May 9, 2010. Source: whitehouse YouTube channel

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#LOEX2012“Public education is a

scheme dreamed up by the captains of industry to incubate servility and ultimately sabotage anything like a real democracy”

-- Erik Reece, “The Schools We Need,” Orion September/October 2011

“Despite their reputation of being avid computer users who are fluent with new technologies, few students [use] a growing number of Web 2.0 applications for collaborating on course research assignments.”

Head and Eisenberg (2010), Project Information Literacy

Colleges and universities, for all the benefits they bring, accomplish far less for their students than they should.”

Derek Bok, quoted in Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (Arum & Roksa 2011)

The organizational structure and operating principles that have formed the foundation of higher education for more than two hundred years no longer function effectively.”

--Mark Taylor, Crisis on Campus

Since World War II, education has “increasingly been decoupled from the life and practice of democracy.”

--Benjamin Barber, A Passion For Democracy

Our great universities have “lost sigh of the essential purpose of undergraduate education”

Harry Lewis, Excellence Without a Soul

“Online, kids have to make choices among seemingly infinite possibilities. There’s a mismatch between our national standards of testing and the way students are tested every time they sit by themselves in front of a computer screen.”

--Cathy N. Davidson, Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn

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Determine the extent of information needed Access the needed information effectively and

efficiently Evaluate information and its sources critically Incorporate selected information into one’s knowledge

base Use information effectively to accomplish a specific

purpose Understand the economic, legal, and social issues

surround the use of information and access and use information ethically and legally

Phrases from ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education

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A Fresh Rhizome of Cimicifuga RacemosaJohn Uri Lloyd and Curtis G. Lloyd, The Drugs and Medicines of North America, ca. 1884-87

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Literally…

“Any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be.”

“A rhizome may be broken, shattered at any given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines”

A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot, but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines.”

Theoretically…

“A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.”

Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

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Social Media destabilizes existing information hierarchies and allows students to make real changes in the world.

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Social media create “framing mechanisms for how people understand politics” and allow students to “actually create a culture in which questions of dialogue, dissent, critical engagement, [and] global responsibility can come into play.”

Henry Giroux, interview with Al Jazeera (October 8, 2011)

1.

Why Use Social Media?

Social Media encourages students to integrate diverse kinds of evidence into their writing, especially evidence that is publically important.

“[E]very year, I become more and more convinced that having first-year students use peer-reviewed literature in their research is a terrible idea that takes the focus away from what is important for them to learn.”

Meredith Farkas, Information Wants to be Free (blog)

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Why Use Social Media?

2.

Social media presents an alternative to sources of information (i.e., scholarly communication contained on proprietary databases) that are probably not financially sustainable.

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Why Use Social Media?

3.“Many large journal publishers have made the scholarly communication environment fiscally unsustainable and academically restrictive. [...] major periodical subscriptions, especially to electronic journals published by historically key providers, cannot be sustained: continuing these subscriptions on their current footing is financially untenable.”

Harvard University memorandum to Faculty Advisory Council, April 17, 2012

Social media allows students to present themselves publically and become engaged with discussions that take place in the public sphere.

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Why Use Social Media?

4.

Basic Elements

Curate a list over a semester Establish the organizing principle of the list Be prepared to talk about the logic of the list

Basic Learning Outcomes

Encourages students to organize information into meaningful categories and reign in the challenge of attention

Students evaluate the quality and source of information

The class is able to crowdsource knowledge and present information to others

We begin to understand that the process of information seeking is always ongoing and lasts even after the class ends

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Assignment: Curate a Twitter List

James D. Griffioen, The Disappearing City ,“Feral Houses”

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“This is the most extreme and long-term hope Detroit offers us: the hope that we can reclaim what we paved over and poisoned, that nature will not punish us, that it will welcome us home—not with the landscape that was here when we arrived, perhaps, but with land that is alive, lush, and varied all the same.”

- Rebecca Solnit, “Detroit Arcadia: Exploring the Post-American Landscape.”

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“...a school with a 90% graduation rate and a 50% college acceptance rate for its pregnant students sounds like a good thing to me. Students are taught to grow their own food, build, and they even have farm animals which they have learned to take care of. Instead of being praised for their actions, the school is being shut down entirely (it’s pretty sketchy if you read the whole article).

- Lauren Tinchey, class blog

Protests for Mary Catherine Ferguson School

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Professor assigns project and requires defined amount of sources.

Student locates requires sources and integrates them into project.

Student turns in project, gets a grade, and moves on with life.

Task-based Information Seeking

Process of discovery begins by reading curated sources. Twitter assignment supports this goal.

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Student writes and makes connections enabled by a Twitter account. Writing is motivated by the desire to essay and participate in public process of democracy.

Student reads and learns about social problems in Detroit through class discussion.

Student starts curation of Twitter feeds without a specific goal in mind, other than cultivating a useful network of information.

Fluid Information Discovery Facilitated by Social Media

Selected References

Barber, B. (1998). A Passion for Democracy:  American Essays.  Princeton:  Princeton UP.

Bivens-Tatum, W. (2012).  Libraries and the Enlightenment.  Duluth, MN:  Library Juice Press.

Dabrinski E., Kumbier, A. & Accardi, M. (Eds.). (2010). Critical library instruction: theories and methods. Duluth, MN: Library Juice Press.

Davidson, C. (2011). Now You See It:  How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn.  New York:  Viking.

“Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education” (n.d.)  Association of College and Research Libraries. Retrieved from http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/informationliteracycompetency

Jefferson, T. (n.d.). “A Crusade Against Ignorance”:  To George Wythe, Paris, August 13, 1786. Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library. Retrieved February 28, 2012, from http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccernew2?id=JefLett.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=47&division=div1

Kopp, B. M. & Olson-Kopp, K. (2010)  “Depositories of knowledge:  library instruction and the development of critical consciousness.”  In Dabrinski, E., Kumbier, A., & Accardi, M. (Eds.), Critical library instruction:  theories and methods.  Duluth, MN:  Library Juice Press.

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Kvenild, C., & Calkins, K., Eds. (2011). Embedded librarians: Moving beyond one-shot instruction. Chicago:Association of College and Research Libraries.

National Information Literacy Awareness Month, 2009 by the President of the United States of America:  A Proclamation. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.whitehouse.gov/assets/documents/2009literacy_prc_rel.pdf

Pawley, C. (2003). Information literacy:  a contradictory coupling. Library Quarterly, 73(4), 422-452.

Shapiro, J. & Hughes, S. (1996). Information literacy as a liberal art. Educom Review, 31. Retrieved fromhttp://net.educause.edu/apps/er/review/reviewArticles/31231.html

Solnit, R. (2007).  Detroit arcadia:  exploring the post-American landscape.  Harper’s Magazine.  July. 65-73.

Tinchy, L. (2011, June 8). Michigan farming high school shutting down. ENG 230 Introduction to Literature.Retrieved November 4, 2011, from http://thepastoral.wordpress.com/2011/06/08/michigan-farming-high-school-shutting-down

Zimmerman, J. (2011, June 8). Amazing urban farm school for teen moms will be shut down. Grist. RetrievedNovember 4, 2011, from http://www.grist.org/list/2011-06-08-amazing-urban-farm-school-for-teen-moms-will-be-shut-down

Contact Information

Andrew Battista, Ph.D.Information Literacy & Reference LibrarianUniversity of MontevalloE mail: abattista@montevallo.eduTwitter: @rawdeal85Hash tag: #curationculture

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More Information

You can download a copy of this presentation and a draft of the essay, with the Twitter assignment attached.

http://tiny.cc/crusadeloex

http://tiny.cc/twitterassign

An extended version of this essay is slated to be included in the forthcoming collection, Information Literacy and Social Justice: Radical Professional Praxis, edited by Shana Higgins and Lua Gregory (Library Juice Press).

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Questions

What are some ways that we’ve had success collaborating with teaching faculty to integrate social media tools into the narrative arcs of courses?

I think the advantages of social media are evident, but what are some of the challenges of bringing social media tools into information literacy instruction?

How can we can use social media tools to facilitate the discovery of traditional sources of information?

Is the issue of publicness something to be concerned about when we ask students to participate on social media networks?

Can social media tools work for “one shot” instruction contexts, or does the involvement of the librarian have to be much more substantial than that?