Mid-South Instructional Technology Conference
Teaching, Learning, & Technology
The Connected Classroom
April 7-9, 2002
Flesh and Bone: Information Literacy, Teaching, and the Connected Classroom
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By: Kathleen Lant |
Abstract
A discussion of how the principles of Information Literacy (as delineated by the American Library Association) offer guides to our use of technology in the connected classroom. The theories of Gunther Kress, Jerome Bruner, Bill Readings, and Mikhail Csikszentmihalyi considered with respect to the goals of information literacy can illuminate our use of media resources and the internet in our teaching. Classroom materials and student work will be demonstrated and implications for future directions in the use of the enhanced and connected classroom will be considered.
Description
In the past, we have occasionally taken the structure and theoretical frameworks of our respective fields for granted. Without ever discussing these matters with our students, we frequently assumed that they--and we--knew what "geology" was or "algebra" or "poetry," that we were clear on the anatomy of our work because that anatomy was self evident-a poem is a poem, literature is literature, an equation is an equation. But now that we all--from the youngest of students in the primary grades to the most venerable of scholars in research institutions--create, format, reformat, move, and manage information with digital resources, the representational structure of our work has come more fully to our attention.
To answer such questions, we find that our teaching now involves the need to guide our students toward an understanding of the kinds of knowledge, research, questions, studies, and activities appropriate to the subjects they consider with us. Talking about how information is created, discovered, analyzed, and evaluated in our disciplines and how that information becomes, in turn, knowledge is as central to our work as the actual study of the matter of our field.
In fact, to suppose that a comfortable and unproblematic distinction can be made between the presentation and the matter of our study may be dangerously arrogant. In many ways, then, our vision has become less than visionary. A unified, "totalizing" view of a poem would bespeak carelessness. We must always see binocularly but at the same time laterally--like a fish or bird with two divided fields of vision--rather than stereoscopically with both fields of our binocular vision unified to provide a single, seamless image. We must, then, engage in the activities we deem appropriate to our field even as we observe, evaluate, and monitor these activities.
In studies of this nature, we are cultivating what the Presidential Committee on Information Literacy of the American Library Association calls "information literacy" or the ability "to recognize when information is needed and.the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information." As early as 1989, the ALA identified information literacy as "a survival skill in the Information Age" (American Library Association, Presidential Committee on Information Literacy: Final Report: Chicago: 1989: http://www.ala.org/acrl/nili/ilit1st.html).
When we consider the goals of information literacy alongside the theories of such educators as Gunther Kress, Jerome Bruner, Bill Readings, and Mikhail Csikszentmihalyi, we discover new ways of using the classroom, engaging and inspiring ways of augmenting the lecture, and provocative ways of modeling our own thinking, learning, and research strategies for our students.
In my own classes, I have found that teaching the skills necessary to develop information literacy is not really necessary. When I remind myself that all information and ultimately all knowledge exist within contexts and that those contexts themselves confer significance and meaning, I find that I am offering my students experiences which cultivate information literacy. My guiding principle, then, is this: contextualize all work, every question, each exercise, every discussion. In this way, my students and I observe not simply the object of our gaze, but also the surrounding contexts which confer upon that object its shape and heft.
In this presentation, I will cover these theoretical issues. I will also present in-class and on-line examples of how the enhanced classroom supports the teaching strategies of engagement, flow, negotiation, conversation, and synaesthesia--to promote and develop in our students information literacy.
Proceeding