Taking a Side-trip…
…to Berlin, to attend the triannual ECIS Librarians’ Conference here. I’ve always wanted to catch an ECIS conference, having spent twenty years seeing many of the same faces at various conferences in Southeast Asia.
Dr. Ross Todd http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/~rtodd/ is the keynote speaker here, on the topic of Inquiry Learning, and I’m thrilled to say that he’s lived up to all advanced billing. In the all-day preconference, Dr. Todd called us to account for historically abandoning students to their own devices at the key point in their research! For too long, he says, we’ve obsessed about providing “Collections of Stuff” which our students can access, retrieve and excerpt from, but have NOT helped them with the really important work of “creating their own understandings”. Libraries need to become involved in Transformational vs. Informational work.
If we DON’T move beyond the Scope and Sequence information literacy to a mindset of moving from “information to knowledge”, we do ourselves, and our profession, a great disservice. In the end, we put not only our own relevance at risk, but we denigrate the importance of libraries - and reading itself - and when reading is at risk, knowledge itself is at risk!
In the report I’m preparing to take back home with me next week, I’ve highlighted some of the “Rossisms” that I’m bringing back with me. In a nutshell, Ross has convinced me that if I’m going to stay the course, I need to;
- Get off the
InformationBandwagon! - STOP obsessing over “found” items (locating, accessing, finding, evaluating “stuff”)
- Start helping kids Transform Information and Create New Ideas instead of just “finding stuff”
- Have my library be(come) an Intellectual Center, rather than the “Collection” Center I’ve so carefully built over the past 10 years…
And finally, Ross reminded me, keeping in mind that not everyone is ready to jump on this runaway train at exactly the same point I have now rejoined it. Ross lets me off the hook a bit here, and I’ll have to remember this one.
- Don’t Water Rocks!!! (work with the kids, teachers and parents that are ready to join the Adventure)
Powerful exhortations indeed! Now just to get back home, catch up on the work I’ve missed in the past week, and Start the Process. ONWARD!!!
I have pondered your ‘Rossisms’ for a while now - especially the two:
-STOP obsessing over “found” items (locating, accessing, finding, evaluating “stuff”)
-Start helping kids Transform Information and Create New Ideas instead of just “finding stuff”
and yes, as a teacher-librarian for 26 years I have obsessed over the ‘found’ items. But I wonder how new knowledge and ideas can be created without the old to build on. To create this new knowledge our students must be able to discover the old.
I am a very strong proponent of all that the new read/write web offers but even so I cannot say creating new ideas or products are more important than the skills that allow one to successfully find and understand the information that responds to a curiosity that one might have. I believe that it is our understanding and internalization of knowledge that leads to new ideas.
I do agree that we need to help kids create new ideas and in doing so they learn about ownership, evaluation and the critical analysis of their own and others’ work. But can they do so without the skills to use ‘found’ information effectively?
I believe that we, all teachers, but especially teacher-librarians have a responsibility to ensure that students acquire and have the ability use the skills to find, access, and evaluate information.
http://donnadesroches.ca
Donna,
Thanks very much for your comments on my “Rossisms”. I do share your reservations about “throwing out the baby with the bathwater” regarding libraries and research. Since taking over my first ES library in ’78, I’ve considered Library Research as having basically what became the Big6 steps - with the addition of a “Presentation” step following “Synthesis”. One of the most important of those steps is clearly locating and accessing material which becomes the foundation for something new.
Perhaps I did Ross a disservice in my post by oversimplifying his message. His and Carol Kuhlthau’s Guided Inquiry process involves much more than simply “transforming information”. That’s only one step in their Guided Inquiry process – but what I heard him to say is that all the other steps exist in the service of this main one.
Big 6 (Eisenberg and Berkowitz)
1. Task Definition – O think Ross would agree that there’s not much really creative about generating something to no purpose. See Step 1 below
2. Information Seeking (Ross might suggest that there’s a wealth of info readily available, but would agree, think, that the wise researcher would gather from both the open web and from the “formal” resources carefully selected by information professionals. GI steps 2 & 3.
3. Location and Access (the “found” items”) I guess this is where I agree that the new tools allow this step to be a much less onerous step than it used to be, so that a much greater percentage of time can be devoted to the creation of new ideas GI steps 2 & 3.
4. Use (I used to call this “data manipulation” – taking all the “found” information and looking at it from all directions to make sense of it. GI step 4 & 5
5. Synthesis (here’s where Ross’s “transformational” steps kick in. Creating something new from the products of steps 1-4) GI steps 4,6
6. Evaluation
Guided Inquiry (Todd & Kuhthau)
1 Initiation:
2 Selection:
3 Exploration:
4 Formulation:
5 Collection:
6 Presentation:
7 Assessment:
Big 6 and Many other Information Literacy models at; http://ictnz.com/infolitmodels.htm
Thanks again for your thoughtful comment. As we begin to seriously review our MS/HS library program with an eye to recreating our Main Library in a form more suited to the needs of our “21st Century Learners”, I really value the insights I gain from considering responses like yours.
Rob Rubis
“It’s not what we say, it’s what we do - day by day.