bangersandmash

I’m a couple of chapters into Christine Bruce’s Informed Learning and I already feel the need to talk about it. The focus on information seeking and use being a disciplinary act is wonderful. This quote pretty much sums up what makes this book so wonderful:

We need to emphasize both discipline and information-use outcomes in our learning design and implementation; discipline mastery is achieved through the processes of creative and reflective information use. Once we recognize what information is and how we are using it, we can be more in charge of the information environment and how we encounter, source, control, engage with, and use information. We cannot assume that learners are aware of these processes or that they are able to implement them. The learning experience that prepares today’s students for tomorrow’s professional practice brings such practices into the curriculum and encourages reflection upon them … The idea of informed learning comes from recognizing that information use and learning are close companions; in formal learning environments, discipline content and effective information use need to be learned together as interrelated phenomena. (p. 3-4)

I’ve been struggling to articulate what she communicates with such ease. I’m going to reserve further comment until I’m finished the book but I wanted to get something up here as it looks like much of my work over the coming year is going to focus on the relationship between discipline, information seeking, writing and information literacy. It is exciting to know that the little nagging idea that has been rolling around the back of my head has some basis in reality.

Wan, Z., Y. Wang, and N. Haggerty. “Why People Benefit from e-Learning Differently: The Effects of Psychological Processes on e-Learning Outcomes.” Information & Management 45.8 (2008): 513-21 [UTL]

The article reports the results of a study into the psychological processes related to successful learning in an e-learning program. The study uses social cognitive theory. The investigators considered three types of information communication technologies (ICT) — information seeking, computer mediated communication and online socialization — influenced “virtual competence,” and how virtual competence in turn affected both success and satisfaction with e-learning.

Virtual competence has three dimensions:

1. virtual self efficacy
2. virtual media skills
3. virtual social skills

It is interesting that the data did not establish a connection between experience with ICT and e-learning outcomes. They did, however, establish a connection between high virtual competence — especially the information seeking and computer mediated communication skills — and successful e-learning outcomes.

Their basic recommendation is that pretests be developed to help users assess their own levels and choose the appropriate method of instruction.

This is kind of experimental. I’m just going to start linking to interesting articles that I find. I’ll try to provide two links. Clicking on the title will bring you to the publisher’s page. Clicking on [UTL] at the end will link to the University of Toronto’s online collections. You’ll need a password for these.

One of my favourite tricks for teaching students how to search the library catalogue is to prepare a list of common subject headings to help students begin navigating through a topic. The subject headings that I use are closely mapped to their essay topics so it is easy to raise the relevance of the session while also having a constructive conversation about headings in a discipline are constructed and how well these subject headings work for a given topic. Here is an example from a recent Canadian Politics class (the essay questions are not included. The student did have to do some intellectual work to figure out which headings went with which of the 50. In some cases an essay topic might require a student to use multiple headings, thus helping them to better understand the scope of their research)

The old catalogue interface supported this quite nicely. The result of a subject search was a list of subject headings that you could browse through. In the new interface the result of a subject search is a list of titles that contain the searched terms in their subject fields. One must click through the detailed record to see exactly what these headings are. There is no ability to browse the headings.

The new interface makes teaching subject searching more difficult because it lacks a browsing feature. I have to fall back on the techniques that I use for teaching subject searching in journal indexes but the two systems are not the same. Indexes usually have abstracts which tends to make them more forgiving when it comes to term selection. The catalogue lacks this nicety.

The new library catalogue interface brings a lot of nice features to the table but the loss of the ability to browse through subject heading hierarchies is a disappointment. I'm trying to figure out a way to use the subject facets to fulfill the same purpose but for now I am not sure that the impact will be the same. Being able to browse the headings allowed people to explore categories of information without being distracted by title lists. There was something powerful in being able to show students that knowledge could be organized and that the system of organization could help them build their understanding of the topic. I'm still not sure how I'm going to fill the void that's been left in my meagre repertoire.