What They Know...And What They Need to Know

This session focused on the research and information skills of first-year college students.


During the first part of the presentation, Linda Neyer, Health Sciences/Science Librarian at Bloomsburg University, and Allison Burrell, Librarian at Southern Columbia Area High School reported on the results of a survey completed by academic librarians about their perceptions of the research skills of incoming freshmen as compared to the skills that the librarians identified as most important for these students to be successful.A quick poll of the forty or so attendees confirmed findings of the survey that "evaluate information critically and competently" was the most important information literacy standard. In fact, the consensus of the survey was that the most important skills were the least in evidence, and the attendees agreed.

Terry Mech, King's College Library Director, used the second part of the presentation to discuss the results of an information literacy assessment tool that over the past seven years has collected responses from 3,800 students at six different institutions. Data gleaned from these assessments corroborated the responses to Linda and Allison's survey--incoming freshmen do not know how to "evaluate information and sources critically. Terry then looked at what factors might have contributed to the variation in test scores and found that students' high school curriculum may be a major factor.

For more information on this topic, go to the Google Site created by Linda and Allison: PA info lit learning community

When Students Go Mobile: The Effects of Smartphones on Information Literacy and Academic Library
Featuring Kristen Yarmey-Tylutki, Digital Services Librarian, Weinberg Memorial Library, The University of Scranton and moderated by Erin Dorney

Smartphone – phone with computing ability

Over 50 thousand apps for iPhone as of last year

In 2008 smartphone sales in North America grew by 63%

Lost of apps are student-designed

Mobile librarians and libraries – Joe Murphy

How do these impact the research process? Information literacy?

It’s hard for students to find big blocks of time for research – mobile helps them break it up into chunks

Looking at 2000 ACRL standards for information literacy – 5 standards

What did mobile phones look like in 2000? Cell phones called people, stored contacts, could text but many people didn’t. A lot has changed since then!

Standard One: “The information literate student defines and articulates the need for information”

• Free apps vs. authoritative, more costly apps (in terms of reference resources)
• Talk to vendors about providing mobile interfaces
• Think about subsidizing cost of authoritative mobile apps
• Devices can be used to both collect and analyze data
• Can confuse students – new set of formats (print, electronic, mobile, website, app, device specific?), third-party developers w/ somewhat sketchy documentation.
• Cost and benefit – students pick free over pay, website over print, w/smartphones, they will probably choose mobile over computer-based.
• It needs to be affordable and accessible to students in order for them to use it

Standard Two: “The information literate student accesses needed information effectively and efficiently”

• New ways of searching – the ACRL standards assume word-based searching, but now we have different input types – pictures, barcodes, audio keywords, location
• These options can make searching easier for students, but we need to know how to help them and incorporate this into information literacy
• No extra typing – fewest keystrokes possible = no long search strings, Boolean, etc.
• Mobile raises expectations – traditional services won’t be enough
• On a smartphone, we only see the first 3/4 results in a Google search – will students scroll down or click to the next page?
• Extracting information – lots of note taking tools out there and microphones built in (i.e. Margins, tools to convert spoken notes into written notes)
• iPhone can’t run different applications at once – this is a problem but should be fixed (Palm Pre does it)

Standard Three: “The information literate student evaluates information and its sources critically and incorporates selected information into his or her knowledge base and value system.”

• Ebook apps – more time for reading in their lives, but is it “deep reading?”
• All in one devices are fabulous but also distracting
• Students are going to want to use things that are designed well
• Mobile research look at more items but spend less time on/with them
• Discussing research with peers

Standard Four: “The information literate student, individually or as a member of a group, uses information effectively to accomplish a specific purpose.”

• Syncing mobile and computer applications
  

Standard Five: “The information literate student understands many of the economic, legal and social issues surrounding the use of information and accesses and uses information ethically and legally”

• Privacy issues, personal information – outward flow of information, educate students about what they post to the web and how it can impact their future
  
• “Collaboration has become a fact of life” – Kristen YT

Standards hold up well, but there are some new themes relating to smartphones

Is dividing literacy between information and technology helping or harming our students?

Continuous partial attention – we need to be informed – education, psychology, sociology

What’s next? Plans to talk with students about how smartphones are being used by students. Looking for collaborators!

Q: Tools for libraries to mobilize? SMS is first step, in terms of resources, haven’t seen it written about yet

Q: Multi-literacies? Kathleen Tyner

Q: What about faculty using smartphones? Mixed bag, some embrace, some still don’t want to talk about Google. New generation of faculty will help with this transition. We don’t have to push it, but some will be interested.

Avoiding Certain Doom: Integrating Information Literacy Through Collaboration
Alison Gregory, Assistant Professor, Snowden Library, Lycoming College

I had the good fortune to be the moderator for this session of the 2009 PaLA Conference on Monday, October 19. This topic was of particular interest to me since I recently became the Information Literacy Coordinator at The University of Scranton. To begin, Alison highlighted several of the articles on the extensive list of recommended readings in her handout that address why librarians should collaborate with faculty and how they should do it.

Before she shared how she collaborated with faculty at Lycoming College, Alison asked attendees to write down an assignment from their institutions that they considered to be “doomed” and then had us share this assignment with a neighbor.

Alison’s first example of collaboration was from an entry level political science course. The professor’s goal was for the students to increase their critical thinking skills. Alison collaborated with this professor to develop a problem-based learning assignment in each of three content areas for a total of six classes that met in the library. The majority of this class time was spent doing research. When students asked a question, Alison often answered them with another question. Rather than providing the students with the name or the call number of a specific book in which information could be found, she would suggest types or categories of resources that might be useful. Instead of a one-shot, “sage on the stage,” Alison said, “It became very Socratic,” and as a result one-third of the course was devoted to library research.

The second collaborative endeavor that Alison shared involved a faculty member in the History Department who had previously “banned” Wikipedia as a source. She worked with this professor on an assignment that required students to contribute to Wikipedia. They selected topics that were either missing or were stubs (a term used by Wikipedia for incomplete articles). Students were required to use primary and secondary sources to write their entries, and the professor had to approve the entries before they could be posted. Students came to the realization that others might cite the information from one of their entries. Their classmates were not “experts” on these topics, yet their entries might be treated as authoritative by someone. As a result of this assignment, the students in this class had a better appreciation of why not to use Wikipedia as source material for a paper.

After sharing her experiences, Alison then suggested ways for those of us in the audience to collaborate with faculty at our institutions:

1. Be reasonably familiar with a variety of pedagogies so that you can knowledgeably discuss them.
2. Let faculty know that your priority lies in improving student skills.
3. Be willing to be a sounding board and be willing to put in your 2 cents, for example, “I heard about an assignment that might meet your goals for this project…”

Then she came back to those “doomed” assignments that we had shared. She gave us the task to think about some potential alternatives, not for the assignment that we had written down, but for our neighbor’s “doomed” assignment. Some of us then shared these alternative ways to improve a specific assignment. This active learning assignment gave us all something concrete that we could take back to our own libraries. I know I did!