If information sets you free, then information literacy is the shovel you need to dig your way out.
The American Library Association defines info literacy as the ability to "recognize when information is needed" and "to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information." But why is information "needed" in the first place? A reasonable question to which the Association of College & Research Libraries (in its "Information Literacy Competency Standards," reviewed here) offers no clear answer, perhaps because it's all too obvious: We need information to get by, get smart, find our way, move ahead and grow, develop, and prosper as individuals. In fact, to be alive is to be an information processor (of sorts) and hence the absent truism that anchors information literacy guidelines is that we can hardly escape information and so should find every means possible to understand it, use it, and make it work FOR us unless it be used AGAINST us.
To do otherwise, one presumes, is to be both ignorant and ignorant of one's own ignorance. To do otherwise is to be (or to choose to be?) information il-literate -- a distinction-thru-negation of enormous significance to today's literacy bureaucrats.
And really, information literacy competency standards must assume that we inherently "need" information in order to get on with the difficult duty of justifying the need for information literacy skills, which are themselves a kind of information (or meta-information) that must be mastered in order to make it, as an "information literate individual," in higher education and beyond. Having access to information is not enough; a set of complementary abilities is also required in order to use, manage, and evaluate information effectively.
Also assumed are the dangers of information itself, which in today's "environment of rapid technological change" and "escalating complexity" pose a potential threat to people trying to succeed "in their academic studies, in the workplace, and in their personal lives." Students should be wary of information for two important reasons: (1) it is abundantly available and thus potentially overwhelming; (2) it comes in "unfiltered formats" and is often unreliable, invalid, or inauthentic. In short, the "uncertain quality and expanding quantity of information pose large challenges for society," and information literacy, as a "cluster of abilities," helps us meet that challenge.
Information literacy, therefore, gets the *science* of information right, saving us from the errors and inaccuracies of information pseudo-science in the wilds of "proliferating information resources." Information literacy screws in the necessary instrument for all our students' information needs, and as the "basis for lifelong learning," enables learners to "master content and extend their investigations, become more self-directed, and assume greater control over their own learning." In brief, information literacy enables mastery and control over content and learning.
Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education, in turn, are the master conventions and control mechanisms designed to regulate student information mastery and learning control. Where information literacy helps us filter "unfiltered" information, information literacy competency standards help us filter unfiltered students. Indeed, "[a]ll students are expected to demonstrate all of the competencies described in this document, but not everyone will demonstrate them to the same level of proficiency or at the same speed." Five key standards -- five keys turning the locks in the prison-house of information competency -- make this possible. The information literate student:
1. determines the nature and extent of the information needed;
2. accesses needed information effectively and efficiently;
3. evaluates information and its sources critically and incorporates selected information into his or her knowledge base and value system;
4. uses information effectively to accomplish a specific purpose;
5. understands many of the economic, legal, and social issues surrounding the use of information and accesses and uses information ethically and legally.
As scare tactics, info-literacy competency standards are perhaps nothing more than the dead letters, or suicide notes, of a knowledge economy overwhelmed by digital realities in the late age of print. We've seen it before: the need for filtering mechanisms has as much to do with a fear of the tainted and impure as it does with a supposed literate individual's "need" for information. Hence the veiled excitement about "proliferating information resources" set against the pseudo-religious discomfort with "unfiltered formats" and inauthentic / invalid information sources (e.g., Wikipedia).
We might do well to ignore, as much as possible, information literacy standards and get on with the work of learning how to read, write, design, produce, and publish (in ways useful, no doubt, to student success as much as planetary survival). Such standards do damage, however, in their fetishizing of effectiveness, efficiency, proficiency, critical thinking, and understanding in the interest, finally, of skillful DEMONSTRATION. It makes little difference, in other words, whether the "information literate individual" can self-recognize both her "need" for information and her ability to get the information right, as long as she can demonstrate her competencies in accordance with the standards. So much for intellectual self-direction and "greater control" over one's "own learning."
In the end, most learners, whether short-term or lifelong, take hold of the information literacy shovel precisely because that is what they need to get out, not information. We individuals, and groups of individuals, may need and want to know things, maybe so we can do things requiring a certain knowledge or information, but that's a very different thing than needing information (and needing to learn to need information) under the rubric of information literacy skills.
The meta-discourse of official mainstream info-literacy, therefore, leaves me aching for an asymmetrical literacies design platform that is, among other things:
+ non-invasive, non-coercive, and non-hierarchical (no sly gatekeeping measures masquerading as high-hoped "expectations")
+ surveillance-free, standards-free, rubric-free
+ built from the ground up (learner-imagined, student-directed)
+ open source, free trade, renewable and sustainable
+ both hands on (practical, real world) and hands-off (teacher-free)
+ collaborative, local, context-sensitive, and situated in the present (tense) of information "needs"
+ skeptical and self-critical
+ unafraid of the "inauthentic"
An asymmetrical literacies design platform can have no "competency standards" because it rejects the idea of "competency" outright, particularly where human abilities and disabilities, in accordance with expectations, serve rules designed for demonstrations, rather than the other way around.
Asymmetrical literacies -- a set of actions, activities, happenings centering on productin and publication -- designs the standards out of education by anchoring learning in what individuals do and produce, not in what they can be expected to (need to) do.
The outcome of asymmetrical literacies practice is not a demonstration but an EXPOSITION.
We need strategies for action and interaction...
... not tactics for scaring the wits out of "information il-literates."
Posted by bmarsh at September 15, 2007 02:36 PM