Michael Feldstein picked up on some of the points of my previous post, and it got me thinking more about the Sisyphean task (as he rightly identifies it) that I was characterizing. I'm not sure if my characterization is completely fair. More importantly, its not very useful to create a paralyzing vision (though maybe it's a little cathartic).
It's important to note that the academy is not the only institution undergoing this transformation. In fact, the urgency for higher ed. to catch up (however urgent we may see that call) is reflective a larger cultural shifts, particularly changes in the workplace. That said, in a way, colleges need to stay at the leading edge as much as possible in order to give their students a current education. Corporations, on the other hand, make decisions about adoption for different reasons; they may not need to always be considering new technologies. At Cortland our response to the need for information literacy is especially recursive since a significant portion of our graduates become public school teachers. Our ability to prepare teachers as information literate individuals will have an eventual impact upon our future students.
Anyway, the scenario I described in my last post demostrates the significant challenges of simply trying to institute from the top-down a grand move toward information literacy.
Clearly this is not the way that technologies get adopted by institutions (though administrative support and encouragement are always important components). Suw Charman provides a useful accounting of how social software becomes adopted in enterprise through an approach that includes both bottom-up and top-down elements. Though her focus here is not on higher education, the principles are applicable.
There are two general qualities of academics that I see as especially relevant in seeking to develop information literacy.
1. Faculty highly value their freedom. Obvioiusly academic freedom has been under attack from a variety of directions recently, so faculty can be especially sensitive if they believe their freedom is being restrained. Academic freedom is a big, tangential issue that I won't go into here. However, I think academics will be more welcoming of technology initiatives that come from other faculty. That should be a no brainer. More importantly, I think faculty will be attracted to technologies that they can see as enhancing their academic freedom.
In general, I think web 2.0 technologies are conducive to this, though faculty may need help in seeing how this is the case. Essentially the principle is that increased access to information and communication options increases the choices one has as both a teacher and a researcher.
2. Faculty highly value their disciplinary authority. From a students' perspective, I'm sure faculty sometimes come off as pompous or egotistical, as know-it-alls. I'm sure I come off that way sometimes. However, academics work hard to get their degrees and later tenure. All through the process their expertise and qualifications are questioned and evaluated. Introducing new technologies into the classroom or research removes the faculty member from their authoritative space.
The real challenge here is an epistemological one. The existing model assumes that knowledge is relatively fixed. Once you get your PhD, you're pretty much good for life. Yes, you have to stay current in your field, but the changes are incremental and vertical within an ever-narrowing degree of specialization. With the infoscape, we are looking at exponetial and horizontal change in a proliferating network of associations. Managing that kind of information flow requires different skills.
This is a tough one. The trick is to understand how that authority operates in a different infoscape. Once upon a time, academics had to accept the appearance of libraries on campus. It wasn't easy, and now everything is happening much faster. Essentially I see the necessary change this way. We used to think of disciplinary education in terms of mastery: you rise to become a master in your field; you have control over your context. Now we must think about education as providing an expert perspective, a unique set of methods from which new knowledge can be produced.
After all, contemporary information literacy is not so much about what you know as it is about your ability to participate in the infoscape. That doesn't meant that there isn't "foundational" knowledge. It just means that the pyramid is inverted. Instead of a narrowing field of specialization, one begins with a basic set of skills and builds outward.
So I guess the trick here is to demonstrate how practices like blogging, wikis, social bookmarking, screencasting, and podcasting do not undermine disciplinary authority but, suprisingly, can enhance that authority by offering powerful means to articulate one's expert perspective, to organize one's experience of the infoscape, and to communicate that perspective to others. This is part of what Collin discusses in his recent screencast.
This becomes a means for getting around the logistical and budgetary problems I outlined before. Hypothetically, the adminstration would need to support faculty who choose to go down this path and reward them both visibly and materially. These faculty need to be encouraged for their experimentation with the hope they will want to share their positive experience with others (this is part of what Suw discusses). The idea is that instead of seeing information literarcy as another expectation placed on faculty (from administrators, from corporate demands, etc.), it emerges from within disciplines and individual intellectual practice.
Practically speaking, I think this is the only way you could actually raise information literacy. Faculty start to adopt these practices in their research and service, then move to the classroom as they become confident. Practices spread among individual faculty and then from department to department.
The only question then is if it will ever happen quickly enough to keep up with technological developments.
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