Leadership and practice help

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my last column, I argued that showing students the magic is the key to getting past resistance to information literacy instruction. Essentially,

this means turning information literacy tasks into meaningful and fun quests in which information itself is a tool rather than something to seek as an end in itself. That’s a new philosophy for many information professionals.

We’ve all been blown away by the rapid transition from analog to seemingly unbounded digital information, a process that’s taken only a bit more than 20 years. Many people, even many of us directly caught up in the change, have failed to grasp the revolution it has caused. We now look at information differ- ently. Let me try to detail several results from this shift.

THE REIGN OF THE EXPERT KNOWER There was a time in which the keepers of the knowledgebase were like gods.

Why? Simply because knowledge was contained within a few brains or a few copies of the learned society’s books. The knowledge keepers held the keys, and those who sought knowledge found it only with the keepers’ permission. Thus, among other things, was born the lecture in its various forms, from campfire oral tradition to the early universities of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance.

The widespread use of the printing press, which opened up knowledge to any- one who could read, represented the first significant attack on the power of knowledge keepers. Theoretically, this should have made everyone an expert, but barriers, ranging from a lack of literacy to the expense of books to insufficient people with enough education to understand the contents in the books, fore- stalled this development. The continuing formalization of higher education cre- ated subject disciplines (with expert knowledge keepers populating them) and official means of credentialing students. Compelling students to go through the university process for their credentials made it possible for them to receive the correct education at the hands of professional knowledge experts. But it involved only a chosen few.

Even into the 1980s, the knowledgebase remained limited because the content packages were physical—books and journals—each limited by location. Academic knowledge, in particular, was expensive and only accessible to people who attended universities. Thus, the role of knowledge experts remained rela- tively intact. Most students don’t do well at getting their own education simply by reading, so the knowledge experts remained valuable disseminators and inter- preters of the information crucial to each discipline.

>infolit land William BadkeTrinity Western University

Information as Tool, Not Destination

IN

There was a time

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JUL | AUG 2010 53

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THE KNOWLEDGE EXPERT IN DANGER The rise of the web created an instant, easy, and plenti-

ful source of information. It gave ordinary people the abil- ity, through access to electronic data, to bypass human knowledge experts. Information now goes directly into the hands of users, which is a phenomenal change. “Wait a minute,” you might be saying to yourself. “What’s so dif- ferent from the analog age? The best academic informa- tion is still in books and journals. Even in electronic form, universities generally hold the keys to the best stuff, locked behind passwords.”

Three factors have changed everything: 1. Information has become one of the cheapest commodi-

ties on the planet. 2. Academia has made only a half-hearted effort to hold

students to using only vetted academic sources. 3. In a world in which sight bites and sound bites are nor-

mal fare, the idea of a droning 50-minute lecture, espe- cially when you can read it on a website or even find a similar lecture on YouTube, is becoming very old school.

What if average instructors, of any topic, were no longer valued for their knowledge? What if knowledge were acces- sible through any number of means and online merchants of education found ways to deliver accredited education without the need for any more lectures? Wait a minute. We already have all of that in online education.

What good are knowledge experts if their expertise can be replicated in numerous ways? What if one knowledge expert could pass the knowledge to thousands of learners at the same time, thus virtually eliminating the need for residen- tial universities and classrooms? We might argue that resi- dential universities are holding their own, but online education is growing, with more and more students bypass- ing traditional means of getting a diploma. The knowledge expert has become an endangered species.

THE RISE OF THE DISCIPLINARIAN What is the essence of expertise? It’s less what we know than

what we can do with what we know. All too often we view our knowledgebase as our expertise, but it’s really what we can do with our knowledgebase that makes the difference.

How does a cancer researcher succeed? A good knowl- edgebase is essential, but the key is seeing through that knowledge to devise the right experiments and discern the best answers in the results. What makes a historian an expert? Not just knowing names, dates, and events, but walking among names, dates, and events with a historian’s eye, seeing connections and understanding reasons.

What makes a student a researcher? It’s learning to be a disciplinarian, learning how to move through the subject matter with understanding and finesse.

What makes a student resist training in doing research well (information literacy)? It’s giving that student the impression that it’s all about the subject matter when it’s really about the finesse. It’s letting the student believe that

this is an exercise in compiling information (which is cheap, after all), when it’s really a means to solve problems and advance our journey in this world.

Academics are so concerned with what we know, or what we could know, that we have neglected how we know or come to know. The true academic expertise is that of the disciplinarian, the person who knows how to walk through the data until the answer emerges. We don’t assign students research projects because we want them to reproduce what they could have found in 30 seconds in one of the better Wikipedia articles. We do it because we want them to learn how to walk confidently within the discipline, to problem solve through the data with a disciplinarian’s eye.

At least, that’s what I hope we’re seeking. Yet I fear that much of what we do in today’s educational environment is working at total cross-purposes to that goal. We are too accustomed to filling heads with facts when we should be teaching students how to do what we do. Having given them the customary lectures or even richly active learning expe- riences, we set them off to do research projects without telling them why, let alone showing them how.

I often ask students in my information literacy courses, “Why do we do research?” The most common answer is, “To find out something we don’t know.” Rarely do I get the response, “To solve a problem or confront an issue.”

SHOWING THEM THE MAGIC Information literacy isn’t merely about explaining how a few

databases work. Information literacy needs to be foundational to the direction education is now starting to take—away from the information dump and toward learning the discipline by discovering how to walk through the data with wisdom.

Students resist research not just because it’s hard to do and they have minimal training, but because they don’t see

““ Academics are so concernedwith what we know, or what we could know, that we have

neglected how we know or come

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expertise is that of the

disciplinarian, the person who

knows how to walk through the

data until the answer emerges.

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the point. Research is busywork, invented by an increas- ingly irrelevant educational system, to make sure students have yet another way to affirm that they know something.

I admit that what I’m saying is a caricature. In real life, a lot of professors are trying to put learning in the hands of students. Many professors break research projects into stages, critiquing each of them before the student moves on to the next step. But we need to show students the magic of research.

STEPPING UP TO THE MAGIC Let me suggest a few crucial steps: 1. Set a goal. Research is not about a topic. It’s about a

problem. It’s not a compilation exercise but a hunt for a solution. It’s not information as an end but information as a tool. Thus, we need to help students to identify a goal and then crystallize it with a question to be answered or a thesis to be confirmed with evidence.

There are good questions and bad questions. The worst have a vague goal—“What can we learn from WWII?”—or multiple goals—“What causes social problems like home- lessness, drug abuse, and family violence?” Often, such questions are masquerades for information compilation exercises. For example, causes of social problems (and there are many) can be culled from existing research results with- out much additional thought. To test a question to see if it uses information as an end, ask, “What problem or issue are you trying to resolve?” You’ll often find that the stated ques- tion was just a means to gather data for the real question, which has not yet been stated.

Good questions get at the real goal—“To what extent was the subprime mortgage crisis a foreseeable economic disas- ter?” or, “Given the side effects of lithium as a treatment for bipolar disorder, does the benefit of this drug continue to make it a viable choice?” Such questions often reveal con- troversies based on multiple points of view. They don’t lead to easy answers. But that’s what genuine research is about. A quest with a clear goal builds interest. It introduces magic.

2. Set a plan. Pulling key concepts out of the research question is the best way to create a research plan, a road map of what information is needed to answer the question. For example, to the question, “Given the side effects of lithium as a treatment for bipolar disorder, does the benefit of this drug continue to make it a viable choice?” the con- cepts of “bipolar disorder,” “lithium treatment,” and “side effects” could form a plan like this: • Bipolar disorder • Benefits of lithium • Side effects of lithium • Evaluation

With even a minimal plan like this, the student has an agenda for the information needed and a means of avoiding what’s not needed.

3. Optimize the tools. We know our students are focused on Google-style searching and have little interest in com-

plex search tools. But they are also feeling frustration at not getting the best results. When students are developing interests in problem-based projects, the time is right to show them that Google search skills are playground stuff. Now they need the kind of sophistication that will target the right information for their narrow goals.

In Robert Heinlein’s famous novel, Stranger in a Strange Land, the author introduces the concept of “grok”—the ability to totally understand another person. Until search engines grok our queries to the extent that they deliver only the most relevant data from the simplest search terms (something I don’t believe will ever happen), we need com- plex search tools. We need controlled vocabularies, field indexing, and the ability to narrow results intelligently.

The more the research matters, the more likely it is that we can convince our students to learn how to do real searches.

4. Teach evaluation. The average student has trouble distinguishing an essay in a book from a journal article, or a journal article citation from a book citation. With the multitude of other venues and formats for information today, information literacy has to go far beyond search skills and into the evaluation of search results. Issues of quality and relevance are not terribly important if a research project is simply a compilation exercise. But if it involves problem solving, the use of valid and high-quality evidence is essential.

THE ESSENCE OF THE MAGIC Magic doesn’t happen if research is merely the dreary task

of reading lots of material only to synthesize it into some- thing you could easily find on some semi-academic web- site. It only happens if we can shape research into a quest—a search for truth, however we define it.

All of this says that informational literacy programs need to get beyond the remedial and actually become founda- tional to the educational enterprise. Accomplishing this is going to be a struggle, but it has to be done.

William Badke ([email protected]) is associate librarian at Trinity Western University and the author of Research Strategies: Finding Your Way Through the Information Fog, third edition (iUniverse.com, 2008).

Comments? Send email to the editor ([email protected]).

Steps for Showing the Magic of Research

1. Set a goal. 2. Set a plan. 3. Optimize the tools. 4. Teach evaluation.

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