Ithaka Report Generates Good Discussion of Library as Instruction/Learning Partner

The new Ithaka Report is out.  According to a summary in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “[between 2003 and 2006], faculty members across the disciplines have shown a marked decline in how devoted they are to libraries as information portals. Eighty percent of humanities scholars are still devoted to library research—although that may be not because they’re traditionalists but because they can’t yet get what they need in digital form. But only 48 percent of economists and 50 percent of scientists value libraries as gateways.”  We could talk about the nuances of those findings all day.

But what I found even more interesting was that the Chronicle article linked to Stephen Bell’s commentary on ACRL’s blog.  Bell commented about The Question they Forgot to Ask, which is about the importance of libraries’ emerging instructional role.

Bell’s analysis has since been commented by both authors of the Ithaka study.  Roger Schonfeld clarified some questions about the data set and wrote, “I’ve made a note of your suggestion that we add a question about the learning partner role should we pursue a 2009 faculty survey. Through other research areas and our affiliated organization NITLE, we have an ongoing interest in the support of teaching and learning, and these surveys could do a better job of addressing these interests.”   Then Ross Housewright wrote “I took a look at the data to see how questions addressing the value of the library varied between faculty who self-reported seeing themselves as more of a teacher or as more of a researcher. In general, more faculty who considered themselves as primarily teachers felt that the role of the library had continuing importance than did those faculty who considered themselves primarily researchers.”  (for the full text see the comments to Bell’s post).   It’s really heartening that the authors of studies are reading the posts and taking the recommendations seriously and I hope there is a new study that takes on these questions.

Lunchtime Listening — “More Information, Less Knowledge”

Here are a few interesting tidbits from the webcast, “More Information, Less Knowledge?” It was hard for me to concentrate for the full hour, my mind must be warped by Google and multitasking!

Nicholas Carr, who wrote the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” was one of the panelists. He said, “one thing we know from neuroscience is that the human brain is very adaptable. … Reading .. and other patterns of thinking aren’t hard wired into our brain, they’re learned behaviors …. New technologies can change, at a very deep level, the circuitry of our brains…. Although it’s too early to have proof that that’s happening with the Internet at a biological level, there are some important clues out there that the internet is beginning to have an effect on cognition and memory ….”

ALA Annual Conference

I don’t get to learn much at ALA these days because I spend most of my time in committee meetings.  Here are a few interesting things I did, though:

• Attended both Instruction Section Discussion Sessions, one on online instruction and one on “Using the Social Web to Enhance and Promote Information Literacy These are huge discussions where you learn a lot about what others are doing, and a digest with summary is posted on the web after conference.
• Attended a kickoff meeting of the ACRL Instruction Section/ALISE Joint Working Group on curriculum.  This committee resulted from an action plan I submitted to ACRL and was made possible by the approval of the ACRL and ALISE Boards.  The group will explore good practices for preparing LIS students for careers in instruction/information literacy in academic libraries.
• Started my year as Chair of the ACRL Instruction Section, which will be a big job!  If you’re interested in getting involved in any way, let’s talk

Five Things You Should Read about Copyright and Sharing Instructional Materials

A new publication from the ACRL Instruction Section, “Five Things You Should Read about…” debuted this week.   I am very impressed!

Going to ALA? IS Program Speaker Jeff Liles to facilitate @ LILI Retreat

I will be attending ALA in Anaheim next week.  As incoming chair of the Instruction Section, I will be attending many, many meetings and not have much time for fun.  But here are a few things I’m looking forward to (all Instruction Section sponsored, so you can look at our online schedule for times):

• The Instruction Section Soiree will be 5:30-7 Friday at the Tangerine Grill & Patio at The Anabella Hotel.  This event is open to anyone with an interest in instruction, so stop on by!
• Instruction Section Discussion Groups will feature “Using the Social Web to Promote and Enhance Information Literacy” on Saturday at 4 and “Academic Library Instruction in an Online Learning Environment”  Sunday afternoon at 4.
• The IS Conference Program on Sunday will be Dr. Jeff Liles, “Creating Change: Teacher Librarians and New Learners.”

Here’s the exciting part… Jeff Liles will be coming to Madison for our LILI Retreat August 14.  His workshop will have the same topic as the IS Program but will have a more discussion-based structure so that we can work together on real instructional problems that we encounter in our work.   Mark your calendars!

Academic Technology Brownbag

I spoke at the academic technology brown bag today. I put together a presentation on information literacy and opportunities for collaboration that I hope to share with the librarians soon — maybe at a LILI Forum. I talked about the future of information literacy and possible library/academic technology collaborations. For one part of the presentation, I discussed Craig Gibson’s “Prisms around Student Learning” talk at an EDUCAUSE ELI Focus Session last year; this was something that Ron Cramer referenced in his conversation with us at the March LILI Forum. Here’s the slide I created — extracted from Gibson’s content with a few other ideas sprinkled in. Gibson’s idea here is that information literacy has been through multiple phases — bibliographic/library instruction, library-centric information literacy, and collaborative information literacy, and that a new sociocultural phase is emerging. This was only one small part of his presentation; more detail is available in Craig’s slides and podcast on the EDUCAUSE site (link above). Craig won the 2008 Miriam Dudley Instruction Librarian Award from ACRL IS this year. Looking forward to sharing the full content of my talk soon.

RSS for National Information Literacy and Instruction List (ILI-L)

I just learned that the Information Literacy and Instruction List (ILI-L) is now available as an RSS Feed! I moderated this list, formerly BI-L, for several years, and it’s a great source of news, expertise, and job postings. Many people stop subscribing because there tend to be some long, mailbox-clogging debates, and an RSS feed seems like a perfect solution to this problem.