– Thank you. I guess I’ll start out. We can introduce ourselves. I’m Sara Miller. I am a librarian for Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning Initiatives at Michigan State University in Michigan in the U.S. And Craig, go ahead and introduce yourself.

– I’m Craig Gibson. I’m the Professional Development Coordinator in the libraries at the Ohio State University. I have to say “the,” and then I’m a faculty fellow in the Drake Institute for Teaching and Learning here.

– So we are here today to talk about information literacy. So we are, since we don’t have that much time, we’re gonna jump right in. And I believe we have a Q&A channel for asking questions. And we will save time at the end for answering your questions as well. So with that, I will turn it over to Craig to get us started.

– Okay, so what is informational literacy? This term has been with us for about 50 years. It is not new. We have come to different understandings of it over time. And you may have heard a lot of related terms like technology literacy, now AI literacy or fluency. But I was part of a group about 12 years ago that worked on what we call the Framework for Information Literacy and we developed a definition, which is a fairly lengthy one, so I’ll parse it out a little bit for us today. There are some key words that I think are really important here. Integrated abilities, integrative learning is important. Reflective discovery, it’s not just the discovery of information, it’s the reflection on what one is finding. Understanding of the information ecosystem in the sense of how it comes into being and how it’s produced, and valued by different individuals and groups. And then using it, the user does something, the student, the faculty member, does something with information and creating something new, new knowledge, and while they’re doing that, they’re participating ethically, we hope, in communities. They’re part of a community. They’re not just learning individually.

So if I could give you a really, really, really concise definition here that sums up a lot of this longer one, I would say it’s active, self-directed learning about the information ecosystem and participating in it responsibly. So that’s, you know, my concise definition of what it is. So we can go on now. So the group that I was part of developed what we call frames, and these are big ideas that we hope that students would learn over time to think about the information world, the information ecosystem in a cohesive way. So there are six of these. Authority is Constructed in Contextual; Information Creation as a Process; Information has value; Research as Inquiry, Scholarship as Conversation; and Searching as Strategic Exploration. I’ll just talk about two of these very, very briefly. The first one: Authority is Constructed in Contextual, is one of those favorite ones, I think for me, because I think it gets at some of the nuance about authority and credibility that students often think that anything that you know is peer reviewed, you know, we understand that is the gold standard, but it really does depend on what one is wanting to do with the information, what the assignment is all about, what level of authority’s being called for. A blog post could have authority for a particular kind of assignment. A social media post could have authority for a particular kind of assignment. A recorded lecturer could have authority for a particular kind of assignment. So there’s a great deal of nuance and subtlety in thinking about what authority is really all about. Then the other one that I’ll mention Scholarship as Conversation. So many students, undergraduate students, land on an article or a book and they don’t see the connections between the larger flow or discussion of a particular topic over time. So they don’t see the connections and they don’t have that larger understanding of how scholarship works and how their scholarly debates and disagreements and agreements and how scholarship might evolve so that frame is really important. We like to think of these six as all interconnected, and once students learn to see, one of them understand one of them over time, they’ll see how the others link with it or tie in with it. So we can go to the next slide now.

So when Sara and I were talking about this course, we were talking about bringing together three different models, actually. The framework for informational literacy has those six frames that I’ve just described. So that’s kind of the big ideas theoretical piece, but there’s also a different model for teaching naive, I’m using the word naive, but maybe novice users in a particular field how to understand the complexities of that field, and it’s called decoding the disciplines. So that’s helped a lot of faculty understand how to rethink how they teach in the classroom or in over a particular course to get students through the gaps and understanding or the bottlenecks, the roadblocks so that the tacit knowledge that the faculty member has gets converted into knowledge that students can learn over time about that particular discipline. And then we thought, ideally, this could be translated into another model called Transparency in Learning and Teaching, and that’s really about the language that’s used in course documents and syllabi or in assignments to help students understand in the clearest possible way how the language of that field works or how in that particular course or in that particular assignment how it works. So ideally these, in this course, these three pieces fit together from the theoretical to the classroom-based discussion level and then into the assignment level. So we’re connecting up those frames, the actual classroom experience and the actual teaching documents. So we hope that this makes sense in terms of a coherent approach to understanding informational literacy. So Sara will be explaining now a series of reflection questions.

– Okay, thank you Craig. So as Craig was talking, I just was thinking a little bit more about how a lot of times we encounter everyone has their own definition of information literacy and what it means. And it’s more than just using the library or learning how to use sources properly or citation. It has those very deep concepts that were represented in the frames. And so I think one of the benefits of looking at it conceptually is thinking about how we as learners came to learn information literacy in our own fields. So we are all experts in our fields and we are working with students who are just being introduced to the field. So it’s really helpful to kind of think back on our own experience. So a lot of times I like to ask folks to think about their own experience with information and what is information literacy or the ability to navigate the information world of your discipline as an expert or a member of your discipline look like? So what does that look like for you? You might think of questions about like in what types of publications is research disseminated in your field? Are there unique formats? Do you publish in books or monographs? Do you publish in conference proceedings? Do you publish in traditional journal articles? Are there other formats that you need to learn about or use? Are there top journals or top publications, and what are those? What makes someone an authoritative voice in your field? How does that person or that institution gain that authority? And what does that look like? So these are some types, these are not exhaustive by any means, but these are some types of reflective questions you can think about how you know as an expert how to navigate information, the information ecosystem in your own field, and then think about how did you learn these things? How did you come to know in what types of publications are research disseminated, how did you know? Was that explicitly taught to you maybe in graduate school or did you just learn it somehow as participating in the assignments of whatever your discipline was? Or was it explicitly taught at some point? Did you have a mentor help you with that? How did that happen for you? How did you come to know what you know? And also how did you develop the practices that you use to navigate information in your field? So you may have a system for keeping up with literature in your field or for, you know, automatically dismissing something that comes across your desktop saying, oh no, that’s not, you know, relevant or what I wanna look at. You may have those practices, and how did you develop those over time? How did those come to be? This kind of, if I were, I would love to let everybody share their experiences today who’s here participating because everyone’s experience is completely different.

Everyone learns information literacy in different ways, and some people have very inconsistent experiences in learning information literacy. Something to know is that inconsistent instruction in information literacy is very common, especially in the U.S. we see some students come to university having had comprehensive instruction in secondary school or high school in information literacy, and some students come without any specific instruction at all. They’ve just been kind of, they’ve thrown things together. It’s also very common, mostly when I talk to faculty members who are teaching courses very often, and there’s a lot of assumption that something has been already learned somewhere else. Like, oh, they should have learned this in, you know, their first year writing class or this should have been learned here or should have been learned there. Since it’s not explicitly taught very often, especially in a large institution like I’m at with silos, disciplinary silos that don’t really talk to one another. People are always assuming that these skills are taught in especially something like a first year writing class where the first year writing class doesn’t necessarily address how to write a scientific paper, right? So there is a lot of disconnect going on there, and then as I mentioned before, students, some come with a strong background and others don’t, and there’s really no way of telling that in your classes. So this brings us to the point of working within your curriculum. This is the piece that Craig referred to as decoding the disciplines, the middle chunk in his graph there. So this involves, when you encounter difficulties, students having difficulties with information literacy or practices in your course, it’s helpful to think about working backwards from what you know. So where are students getting hung up? Where are they having difficulties? A lot of times when I speak to an instructor, they’ll say, oh, “my students are not using sources appropriately “or they’re not able to identify what’s a scholarly, “or a research article or a scholarly source. “They’re not really integrating the sources “into their writing, “they’re just pulling things from the sources “and putting them in there, “and there’s no real integration “or their citations are not working out” or something like that. So these are some common examples that I hear, there are others as well. And think back, you as an expert know how to do these things.

So just think back, what are some tacit or unspoken ideas or practices that you think students might be missing? A tacit practice is something that you do automatically as an expert that you don’t even think twice about. Something that’s just a habit for you, but it might not be clear to a student that that’s a habit that you’ve developed over time. A practice that you’ve developed over time for information literacy that you’re expecting of them as well. So how can you go back and think about, specifically, what practices or ideas that are just a part of your own practice that might not be clear to students that they may need some additional instruction for? This leads me to just thinking about how you might frame things differently in your course. So you may need to clarify what is an appropriate contextual source in your field and how would a student recognize that? I see quite a bit clarifying expectations for working with sources. A lot of times someone will assign a research paper and say, “you need to have three scholarly sources “in your research paper.” But there’s really not a lot of explanation about first of all what they are, how you should use those in your paper. Do you want students to quote them or do you want them to say there was research being done in this area or do you want them to read them thoroughly and analyze and critique the scholarly source? So there’s sometimes not a lot of consistency there. Sometimes when I work with more humanities classes, they really want students to use a source to stimulate some sort of question or response or original thought rather than just pulling facts or quotations out of the article, but that’s not really specified either. Even questions like, “why would you need a scholarly source? “And how would you use it?” So these are questions that may seem very basic because as an expert, again, you’ve internalized these processes, but clarifying these things can really help students think what exactly those relationship, what exactly is a scholarly source? Who makes it? How is it responding to others, and how can they participate in that conversation as well? And there are several other things that you could do differently just depending on where it is that you see students struggling. So we do have a couple resources and I know that Dasha has shared the link and Niya as well to their slides. So we do have these, you could link to these as well. These are some excellent resources. “Decoding the Disciplines” is a great strategy for not just information literacy, but for any part in your field that seems opaque to students. There’s some things there. Craig, did you wanna say more about these resources?

– Well, yes, the “Decoding the Disciplines” methodology was developed at Indiana University as part of, as I recall, their freshman learning project or their history learning project, and then there’s an entire book. Now the second item on the list, “Overcoming Student Learning Bottlenecks:” which explains the methodology. The first link is to their website. The second link is to the book “Overcoming Student Bottlenecks,” and as I mentioned earlier, gaps in understanding or bottlenecks are kind of key to understanding what decoding is all about. So I’d encourage you, if you’re interested, to maybe look at the website first and then explore the book, the “Transparency in Learning and Teaching” is a website link, and it explains how that methodology works. It’s based on the research done by Mary-Ann Winkelmes, who has done work over a lot of years with faculty to help them design better course materials, particularly syllabi and assignments to help students become more academically successful and maybe demystify some of the language that we use in academia. So I encourage you to use all three, look at all three of these.

– We also, Craig, and I also have a OneHE course with the same name that has a very detailed way of walking through some of these things. And we have, you know, we have 20 minutes today, but we had the classes, you can pause it, you can do all of the reflection and we have a even kind of a little quiz you can go through to help you identify some of the possible bottlenecks for your students and some different ways to frame those or think about those. So we do have that as well. And I think we are ready to take folks questions. I see a couple folks having their hand raised.

– If there’s one biggest misconception about information literacy, what is it and why?

– Well, I don’t know if Sara and I might have slightly different takes on that, but I’ll go first. I think the biggest misconception is that it’s just a set of skills that are going to be for all time or that get used, you know, once you learn in freshman English or in some other course, then you learn that little bundle of competencies or skills and then you’re good for life, and that’s just not the case. And with the framework, what we tried to do is build an architecture of big ideas that have some sustainability. I guess that’s the best way of expressing that because technology obviously keeps changing and we’re in the throes of all of that right now, but I’ll stop. Sara, you may have other thoughts there.

– No, I agree with that too, and I think that a lot of people think, oh, “we can just teach this stuff to them “one time and that’s it. “They’ll never need to encounter this again. “They’ll be all set. “They’ll be information literate “for the rest of their, you know, lives.” And these things are practices that develop over time. They’re threshold concepts, which I won’t get into now ’cause that’s a whole different theory, but basically a threshold takes a while to approach and to get over, and so the big ideas that we have here are more framed as those concepts, which you can’t just say, “okay, I learned today that scholarship “is a conversation, I’m done.” Right, you know, that’s something that you practice over time, so I would agree with that.

– It’s like learning at any other major idea in a field. It takes some a while to take, you know. It’s like David Perkins and psychologists like that have been telling us that for decades. And it’s the learning that must be, there are difficulties with it, and we’re having a lot of conversation in higher ed and K-12 right now. The need for difficulty, desirable difficulties, you know, what are the desirable difficulties and not just the reductive or the easy ways of learning? So I think that’s a really important point to make now.

– Okay, so first question is, it seems that you have tied information literacy and critical thinking together. We have separate institutional learning outcomes for each of those. Do you feel like those outcomes could be merged?

– Sara, do you wanna go for that one?

– Sure, well, they have a lot of overlap. I don’t think they’re quite mergeable as an outcome because they have several, a lot of sub things that you could look at. And critical thinking is a huge, I mean that’s a huge thing, right? And people define that also in very different ways. The same way that they do information literacy. And I believe information literacy supports critical thinking and it’s – critical thinking is an essential part of becoming more [unclear] information, but I think that they are separate just because the information literacy has some distinct concepts.

– The critical thinking, I know one of the ongoing controversies there over time is whether it is discipline specific or whether it is generic, and philosophers and psychologists, cognitive psychologists like Daniel Willingham disagree about that some. But, you know, I kind of land in the cap of thinking that it’s more discipline focused, whereas these things we call virtues or dispositions, which we kind of built into the framework may be more generic. So, anyway, there’s just a whole range of ideas about what critical thinking is.

– Thank you. We have two questions about AI. They might be able to be answered together. Can you speak to how AI has impacted your information literacy conversations?

– Yeah, we’re laughing ’cause it has a lot.

– [Craig] Oh, yeah.

– Well, Craig was one of the initial authors of the Information Literacy framework with the six frames that we presented, and I’m currently co-chairing the group that is revising, reviewing and revising the framework because it’s been over 10 years since we’ve had that framework. And, of course, that’s the number one question we have in our revision about how are we going to address AI and how are we going to think about AI? Our current thinking on that is that the concepts that we currently have, those six frames that we listed in our second slide, there are many aspects of AI that can be covered by those concepts, right? So we can also think about, if you take for example, information creation as a process, you can think about how does AI create information? Where is it pulling it from? What are the ethical implications? How are you using it? So all of those frames provide concepts where we can continue to think about AI, and as we rewrite those, we’re gonna put probably a little bit more specific reference to emerging technologies in those to help people think about how these concepts can also apply to this technology, which of course isn’t set. It’s also evolving constantly. So right now we think that these concepts can pretty much support that, but we don’t know about the future.

– Yeah, that’s for sure. And I’m at an institution now that has a major AI fluency initiative. One of the, I mean, higher ed institutions are grappling with this in real time right now, but Ohio State University has an whole initiative now to incorporate at all levels, including general education courses. So there are faculty who are grappling with that and knowing how to think about that, and what that really means in course design, and I have another colleague who wrote an interesting article about AI and prompt engineering and those of you know something about AI know what that term means. And when I was reading an article, I was reminded of what we talked about 30 years ago with this strategy called question analysis, which was taking the research question and having, you know, the four or five major factors, the time aspect of the topic, the geographical scope of the topic, the kind of information needed, whether it was peer reviewed or dataset or whatever. And that’s kind of what those who talk about prompt engineering and AI are doing. It’s not exactly the same, but it’s similar. So some of these things come back around.

– We have another question about that temporal element that you both talked about. Since information literacy is built upon over time, do you have suggestions about ways to assess students’ competency during that development, I guess?

– Yes, there are lots of ways that have been talked about a lot in our community especially since the framework came out 10 years ago. Craig, do you wanna start on that one with the assessment?

– Assessment, I think early on, the way we were getting all these questions about how do we assess student learning of these big ideas? And I think early on suggestions, it had to be qualitative. There is a standard instrument now, and Sara remind me, I’m getting the title, that instrument.

– Yeah, there’s a threshold assessment.

– Yeah, but we think that it has to be cumulative assessment and faculty and librarians need to work together because they can get snapshots of learning in a particular course. But cumulatively over time, we need to see a trajectory, you know, whether students are doing an e-portfolio, that’s one method. We have an e-portfolio linked with the Gen Ed program at our university, so students can include documentation of their learning of difference. It’s like snapshots over time. Okay, now I understand this. Or an assignment might have encouraged them to go in this direction, so that’s one way of doing it. There are myriad others and Sara, you might wanna address some of those too.

– Yeah, well there’s so many things to assess, right? And these big ideas, again, portfolios are a good way to think about that. These are definitely not concepts you can, you know, address with a multiple choice question. I mean, you can do things along the way. The other thing is I think that assessing these within courses is probably the most helpful because they may be asked to do a very specific thing in a course that shows that they’re now, you know, kind of reaching out and seeing the ways that scholarship contributes to a conversation, right? So they can be assessed very granularly and in stages. So, yeah, it’s something we’ve struggled with. We used to, before we were focused on these big ideas. We used to have a set of competencies that were a little bit, I guess, easier to assess, but they were not in any way indicative of the depth of the kind of teaching that folks were doing with information literacy. So, yes, the assessment can be challenging and it requires a lot of collaboration. So yeah, I can, that’s what I have to say about that.

– I have to think about the framework, think about information literacy as the curricular architecture that could be embedded in multiple courses rather than isolated instances of it, you know, that’s always the chat, you know, how to think about it in a developmental way for a whole campus.

– Right, it’s also information literacy is also, I consider it to be transdisciplinary because it crosses disciplines, but it looks a little bit different in each one. And so there are different ways of assessing it, again, within disciplines and across disciplines.

– That makes perfect sense. We have one more question. Is that all right if we end on this one? Okay. Is there a difference between information literacy and information fluency? I often hear these terms used interchangeably, but I’m not sure if that’s accurate.

– I don’t know. I don’t know if that there’s a real difference because, you know, I followed the evolution of these terms over about 20 or 30 years and different groups at different times have come up with different ways of just, the longest lasting one is information literacy, which came into being in 1974, so it’s been 50 years, but there was a document, the National Research Council coined the term IT Fluency. So fluency and literacy have woven in and out of different groups thinking over time. And, you know, if you were to put all these documents side-by-side or try to do some crosswalk or, you know, figuring out where they’re touching or where they’re diverging, that would be an interesting activity. But I’m not sure that I would say there’s a real difference, although the intention of those who created the term ‘Information Fluency may have been trending more toward technology. That’s my, more or less, informed guess.

– Yeah, and I’ve heard too that some folks prefer one to the other because if you use the term literacy it, you know, suggests that you could be information illiterate, which no one wants to say that, right?

– [Craig] You’re right.

– No one’s really information illiterate. Everyone has some sort of knowledge about information, right? And it’s kind of a punitive term and folks don’t wanna use that. Fluency is a little bit more of a generous term, the showing that you can kinda expand over time. With both these terms, I don’t think anyone ever reaches 100% literate or 100% fluent, right? So, and we also, you know, we also can’t go in the other direction. So I think the people that I have seen use fluency tend to prefer it as a more generous term, I believe. But information literacy like Craig said, has been the one that has kind of stuck around officially for the past 50 years.

– You know, and frankly some of these terms, I mean faculty sometimes wonder about them, you know, the term information literacy itself because of their way they’ve been acculturated or what they learned in graduate school and it may seem remedial and it’s really not. It’s meant to be developmental even though the term literacy, you know, conveys something maybe static or remedial and it really isn’t, but, you know, at the higher end of this spec, you know, scholarly inquiry, you know. All of these terms kind of connect. And so it depends on what your campus is interested in and how they think they could use the overarching concept behind it to unify everybody in a common goal.

– Well, thank you so much. We are at time, but we were so grateful to have you here sharing your knowledge with us and answering these questions and so glad to have you resource, your course in our community.

– Yeah, thank you so much, yeah.

– We’re very glad to be able to talk with everyone today, and hope that you become interested in the course itself.

– Yep, I would recommend that if you wanted to take a deeper dive.