Crystallising my purpose

I am in the process of doctoring one of my old power points for a presentation I will be giving in a few weeks.   The old ppt is the presentation I used at LILAC 2008, and so is not very old--and yet seems so out of date.  It is perhaps, a mark of the development of my thinking that it has changed.   So what has changed?  Well, it is in the crystallising my purpose.   My original proposal spoke a lot about information literacy, a term, which  I believe, certainly in the English speaking West, is inextricably linked to academic libraries and or some kind of mechanistic training programs, rather than an overarching notion of tying together the strands of information seeking, information use and information behaviours.   As a term, information literacy conjures up preconceived notions by its very statement.   So back to my purpose,

• How do parents in modern Britain seek meaning and answers to their questions to make informed decisions?
• What sources do they turn to and how do they then construct meaning and assess relevance and trustworthiness?

More Grind and Harry Potter

Ok, today (and this past week), I have being intersecting my reading and work with trying to grab time to read the New Potter book – which despite Will Self’s denigration of it on the Today programme this morning it is great! Anyway back to work: I spent the morning reading three articles (and Harry potter):

For those people interested the articles were:

• O’Neil, W. (1970), Properly Literate, Harvard Educational Review, 40(2)
• Levin, K. (1982), Functional Literacy: Fond Illusions and False Economies, Harvard Educational Review, 52(3), p.249
• Wilson, T. (2000), Human Information behaviour, Informing Science, 3(2): 49-55

Buch und Lesen: Historical Perspectives on Literacy and Schooling.

Clifford, G., J (1984). "Buch und Lesen: Historical Perspectives on Literacy and Schooling." Review of Educational Research 54(4).

Today I read this paper, I know that I have diarised this week for reading up about research methodologies; however, I have manager to find more interesting papers to read. I ordered this paper some time ago from the British Library and so when tidying up some files I found this to read.

This is a great paper that presents a critical historical overview of literacy (not information literacy!) and its affect on society. It includes arguments made against literacy itself, and examines the literacy creep – from being classed as literate when you could mark X to sign your name through to functional literacies. There are elements of the paper when looking at the developments of literacy that fit very nicely with the development of IL as a theory. This is a must for anyone looking at information literacy as it presents a definition of literacy itself, and is firmly not written form a librarian perspective.