Information Literacy

 

What is it? How is it evolving? How to teach it? Ideas aggregated from the companion web log.

 

You cannot suceed in today’s world without being able to read and write. You can survive without understading Google. But for how much longer? While schools manage the reading and writing part well, they are struggling with the web and information literacy.

 

As a parent I think it’s important to teach certain skills to our kids - we cannot rely on our teacher to teach them. Yet.

 

What are those skills. Searching, filtering, some programming skills or at least introduction to the concepts are important as well aka psuedo-code. Maybe not programming, but at least ‘configuring’ the online environment to suit one’s needs.

 

transliteracy reading and writing across media, and that includes offline as well as online media.

 

Programming Literacy

Understanding ‘programming’ at least at the level of pseudocode and configuration, seems to be a life skill we’ll all need. Why? “I can’t get Outlook to display the date field” “I can’t get rid of that custom-menu feature in Office programs” “I spend all day cutting and pasting the same data back and forth, I wonder if a macro would make this easier”

 

So where to begin. At work, programming, by non-IS folk is kind of frowned upon. Installing languages like PERL or Python is simply not an option for me. So I do this at home. But for the novice non-IS programmer it’s nice to have some tools you can use at work.

 

A few possibilites include Batch File programming, Microsoft VBA (VisualBasic for Applications, e.g. VBA in Excel), and JavaScript.

 

taking responsibility for managing your information resources?

 

Literacy is a prerequisite to being able to read a book, and to manage that pipeline of information. Knowing-where-stuff-is-or-who-to-ask, though. knowing what tools are available and how to use them, and actually putting them in your toolbox.

 

the ability to hack your environment. Digital or otherwise. Especially otherwise. Hacking your daily life with technological tools. Or not always so technological. Hacking implies understanding and using tools. So maybe it’s not transliteracy, but trans-hacking…. Start playing with the sematics and compare models.

 

Virtual cleaning

Organization and general upkeep and cleaning of your 'desktop' is a routine chore now, just like doing the dishes. Dangit.

 

Social computing requires information literacy, not just the library-help-me-with-my-term-paper information literacy, but 'Social Information Literacy.'

 

Social information literacy means knowing how to 'do stuff' in your everyday life, interacting with others through the information commons: uploading pictures, sending hyperlinks, email, IM, ..

 

And how about day-to-day information literacy, or personal technology literacy, which includes things like: where to find that file you just downloaded, how to transfer mp3s to your player, how to back up your 'Money' file. Personal information technology literacy?

 

Tags are the new links

Hyperlinks are the foundation and tags are the flexible social glue keeping them relevant.

 

From John Battelle's Searchblog, "The ongoing trend of tagging. Which for now I see to 2005 as links were to 1995 - hard to do, done mainly by geeks, but very important as a signal for future revs of search… "

 

…and as links became ubiquitous, we learned how to use them. There are links and URLs everywhere now.

 

Now that we've got the concept of hyperlinks down, we're using tags to organize the links (del.icio.us). The road to everyone getting the concepts of tagging must through information literacy.

 

More items to add to the IL curriculum

IL = information literacy.

 

People need:

Decent email search

Easy webscraping

Keyboard macros

filepile for everyone (flickr does this)

 

Search Literacy

Reading John Battelle's Searchblog a post about Search Literacy with the quoted comments below sets me on the hunt for others of the same mind.

 

"Are schools handling this yet? Or do they mostly assume that the search box is self-explanatory?"

 

And Mr. Battelle's comment: "It made me think - perhaps it is just a matter of some simple training. Or maybe it's a bit of both, as the more one learns how to search, the more pointers one gets, the more one might develop critical thinking skills essential to good searching. I wonder, is there an opportunity there somewhere? "

 

This sounds like part of the curriculum I've been building in my posts on Information Literacy.

 

A link to related comments from Gary Price leads to more information about approaching this literacy question. He says elsewhere "People can't use what they don't know about. " Check out the Answers.com toolkit site. OK, we're getting somewhere now. I think I'm uncovering the community of practice I was looking for.

 

And in the comments, some interesting points:

 

students ought to be taught the rigors of Boolean operations from about second grade.

 

I think training in Information Literacy ought to begin in elementary school. I don't think it's truly broached until junior high in our school district - not in an organized way, in any case. I'm amazed when the teacher sends homework home with the charge, "Use the Internet to find the answers." Not a lot of guidance there.

 

Information Literacy and Search

An interesting read describing different ways and/or reasons to search, by Donna Maurer:

 

"Four modes of Seeking Information and How to Design for Them"

 

Described are searches for:

1. Known items

2. Exploratory, have-some-idea searches

3. Exploratory, have-no-idea, or have-wrong-idea searches

4. Re-finding

 

I'd tagged this on del.icio.us, and while browsing other tagged links came across this site, on NoodleTools, "Information Literacy: Search Strategies, Choose the Best Search for Your Information Need." File this one under Information Literacy, the concept is part of my proposed curriculum.

 

Life skills and information literacy

Some things that seem novel to those of us that were around to see the birth of the web, but that will be life skills, mundane, for our kids (or their kids):

 

Create a web site for personal reasons, hosted, or on a personal box

How to choose a type of site, e.g. web log, geocities, etc. Static vs. dynamic

How to best publish information, e.g. IA. It works better if it looks good

Upload photos to share with a group

How to use hyperlinks, send links to people via email

How to best distrubute info to a group, via attachments, or links

How to use IM

How to and when to use asynchronous vs. synchronous communication

Manage 'found' information with browser or shared bookmark tools

Know how to craft a good Google query, and when not to use Google.

How to manage your search history (e.g. google/ig)

What to use when Google doesn't cut it

How to use online maps

How to find business, people, etc. using the web

How to build your own 'newspaper' through RSS feeds

How to use message boards, wikis, web logs

How to install software

How to uninstall software

Desktop shortcuts, e.g. Quick Launch menus, batch files

How to create short scripts or macros do complete repetitive tasks

How to manage files within a file system - how to find them again

Desktop search engines

Run a web server off a home box

How to manage calender issues, personal, group, family

How to use Google earch alerts to keep up to date, also things like Nerac

How to back up data

How to use Amazon, how to shop online

Online and offline privacy

How to use Office, templates, tips and tricks

These are tutorial topics, these should become a syllabus - part of the curriculum for elementary students.

How to share videos on Google video, create movies, convert movies.

 

Not all of the curriculum items are virtual. As we're hit with more information from online sources, we need better ways to manage our time, for example. Some items will be useful topics, though they're falling into obscurity, such as paper and ink libraries, how to navigate a newspaper.

 

How to manage time and get things done

How to, and when to, use an actual library

 

Multimedia literacy?

 

Multimedia is the use of several different media to convey information (text, audio, graphics, animation, video, and interactivity) But consider multimedia literacy then. We read, listen, and watch the news. These are all ways to get news. We have to be good at getting information from many sources in many ways.

 

 

The web is approaching an author:user ratio of 1:1 = web 3.0 = social computing. The read/write web. Social computing requires information literacy, not just the library-help-me-with-my-term-paper information literacy, but 'Social Information Literacy.'

 

Virtual cleaning

Organization and general upkeep and cleaning of your 'desktop' is a routine chore now, just like doing the dishes. Dangit.

 

combat information anxiety in "The myth of keeping up." Of note, the recommendation to find a person to help you filter the information overload: a mentat as Frank Herbert and Richard Hunter (World without Secrets) might tell you.

 

"That's no excuse …for failing to come to grips with the need for senior managers to get a clue about the century in which they live."

 

"A manager who is not yet 60 years old may have been imprinted in his or her 20s with the idea that databases are tools for storage, not for analysis. While your competitors are data mining with tools like SPSS' Clementine, your company may think that it's keeping managers informed by giving them data dashboards that require looking for patterns instead of letting algorithms spot them sooner. "

 

"We want map-analysis tools to be as ubiquitous as spreadsheets," Erle summed up. "Everybody should be able to do geo-analysis."

 

'bit literacy' : "An awareness of bits: what bits are, how they affect our lives, and how we can survive in a society permeated by bits"

 

With the explosion of digital information, the bit literate have the solution to keep themselves free from information anxiety: Let the bits go. Don't sign up for newsletters, keep your inbox empty, don't always allow your phone to interrupt you, don't open new bitstreams, e.g. news ticker, ongoing feeds…the remaining bits are the valuable ones.

 

 

What is the question?

What is Information Literacy and how best to begin introducing the topic to those that need it (which at some level is all of us - not just kids), and how to improve the state of Information Literacy.

 

What is the end product?

An end product would be a curriculum to present to kids, to schools, or within a book (A book like 'information hacks' maybe.) Specifically, for this project the end product will be:

 

 

 

How to complete the project?

*Define Literacy

*Define Information Literacy (IL)

*Find Online resources for IL

*Find Online definitions for IL

*Find books on IL, or discussing IL

*Brainstorm what I mean by IL

*Search for others with similar concepts, see what they call it, how they handle it

*Summarize concepts from sources

*Categorize areas of IL

*Define ways to improve IL in those catagories

 

Next steps

*Google for definitions and aggregate here. Target 7/10/06

*Begin archiving Online resources. Target 7/14/06

*Search for books. Target 7/14/06

 

Comments

There are practical and theoretical paths to follow here. The 'hacks' route is a practical route. Imagining 101 hacks broken up into major IL categories of searching, finding, validating, remembering, learning, communicating, sharing, interacting, collaborating, publishing, protecting....all verbs, interesting.

 

Information hacks

• a book I'd buy
• lists, notepad, excel, online, paper
• organization files, from GTD using labels make it easy
• GTD
• books read lists
• email
• news
• rss
• files archive on cd # excel print to file
• pencil paper = KM
• Pocketmod
• online office
• pictures
• lists, how-to different types
• search information hakcs
• virtual cleaning
• templates
• PKM
• grocery lists, camping lists
• don't panic guide to...
• infohacks include bookshelf, bench

 

Tables are multidimensional lists databases with keys are a subset.

 

Consider the list:

• apples
• milk
• napkins
• soda
• bananas
• paper towels
• sour cream

 

Then consider where like items are grouped:

• milk
• sour cream
• paper towels
• napkins
• apples
• bananas
• soda

 

Then consider where grouped items are presented as in the store:

 

• apples
• bananas
• soda
• paper towels
• napkins
• milk
• sour cream

 

Here we've increased the order, utility, useability, and embedded the context of the store (one store) into the list. Lists, and classification, organization is not done in a vacuum but is affected by politics, life view...and utility.

 

I like to think of "-ing words;" verbs, where using technology means applying tools for practical reasons = doing something. And these "ing words" illustrate that: Exchanging, sharing, meeting, evaluating, coordinating, programming, searching, customizing, and socializing, finding, validating, remembering, learning, communicating, interacting, collaborating, publishing, protecting....

 

Creating, designing, searching, finding, organizing, planning, refinding (bookmark personal search tagging), storing/archiving/saving, sharing, learning, communicating (email, disc board/forum, IM, IRC chat, blog, wiki)

 

Lists - types alpha, heirarchical, categorization, tables are lists with more dimensions, databases, calendars