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   The old ppt is the presentation I used at LILAC 2008, and so is not very old--and yet seems so out of date.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?

Literacy and Literacies: Texts, Power

I have started reading Literacy and Literacies: Texts, Power, and Identity by Collins and Bolt. I must admit that I have yet to proceed from chapter 2; however, it has been quite refreshing to read. The book deals with the subject of literacy – rather than information literacy per se. A quote form page 2 has really got me thinking about what information literacy actually is, the quote being:

“This impressive diversity of possible literacies – from moral literacy to simulation reading – suggests that “literacy,” as a key word in our culture, has a status in the current era rather like that of “science” in the nineteenth: it refers loosely to any body of systematic useful knowledge. This plurality of sense is, however, countered by a contrary pressure to determine precisely and authoritatively which practices, which ways with text, legitimately fall under the rubric “literacy”; or, more colloquially, to ask what “real literacy “ is. (Collins and Blot, 2003: p.2-3)