Some reading

Today I set myself the aim of reading. I managed to cover two books (along with everything else).

The titles are:

1. Walton, G. and A. Pope (2006). Information literacy: recognising the need: Staffordshire University, Stoke-on-Trent, United Kingdom, 17 May 2006. Oxford, Chandos Publishing.

2. Andretta, S. (2005). Information literacy: a practitioner's guide. Oxford, Chandos.

Starting with the Walton title. This is the conference proceeding of Information Literacy: Recognising the Need, held in Staffordshire university in May 2006. Immediately I found this title interesting because, i) It is relatively new; ii) it is from a British perspective. Of the eight sections, Walton and Pope’s; Andretta’s, and Brauer’s were perhaps the most useful to me in terms of my research.

Walton and Pope starts off with a good overview of IL mentioning Zikowski in 1974, 2003 Prague Declaration linking into the SCONUL 7 pillars. This paper is very much still relating to IL in the HE context, and perhaps it is too much to expect anything else given the setting of the conference. Despite this it is a good, if not brief introduction to the subject.

Andretta’s paper asks the question is IL the new “pedagogy of the question” relating here to Paulo Freire’s theory which proposed a pedagogy that forces learners to think critically and adopt a critical attitude toward the world. Andretta proposes that there are parallels between IL as “a way of emancipating the learner through the development of life long learning” and Freire’s theory of critical pedagogy. Andretta goes on to discuss the contexts with the teaching in an institution and examines its challenges. This is a very thought provoking article which requires substantially more space than I can give here!

Lastly, Brauer asks “information overload and the re-invention of brutality”. This is an extremely thought provoking paper, seeking to distinguish the complexities of reality form data. He argues that we live in such an information rich society, where we can find pictures of great paintings on the on Google but does that help us appreciate them? To quote Brauer, “I came across four young people looking at a street map [in London] and they were wondering where to go. I suggested the National Gallery – One of then replies ‘I did Art Appreciation at West Texas U, so I guess I’ve already seen all that’”

From a practical IL perspective Brauer uses the example of the growth of evidence-based medicine (or evidence-based anything else for that matter) which has become the dominant ideology in Medicine in the past 20 years (I can vouch for this having been a clinical librarian for the past 8 years); here he quotes Clark (1998:1246)

The contextually bound nature of research findings, consequential in the acknowledgment of researcher and theoretical biases, warrants that knowledge deemed to be ‘truthful’ under-positivistic inquiry is not universally generalizable to all cases and all situations.

For Brauer, the point of the story is that all encompassing truth remains elusive as we live in amid paradox and uncertainly. This means that the simplistic and easy results provided by the internet and a search engine can not readily provide us with “practical or esoteric wisdom”. He argues that books, and not search engines, when selected wisely with data which is set into interpretive context can provide us with better understanding. “Internet searching and the reinvention of brutality, the: a future in which people can, for a remarkably low price, locate the facts about anything; but who will uncover the value of nothing: Big on quantity, for cretin, but, it would appear, regrettably low on quality.

Clark, A. M. (1998) The qualitative-quantitative debate: moving from positivism and confrontation to post-positivism and reconciliation, Journal of Advanced Nursing 27:1242:1249