I was interested to read, last week, funktious’s comments inspired by a Times Higher Education article on spoon-feeding in Higher Education. In principle, I whole-heartedly agree with the sentiments expressed in both articles. But I want to take issue with something funktious says:
“Everyone is so concerned that final year students will rate them badly on the NSS that they go out of their way to keep them happy; …giving direct links from Blackboard to e-journal articles that are required reading (I don’t even like putting Reading Lists on the catalogue…) … None of this helps the student in the long run.”
I disagree. In the context of promoting independent learning, I disagree very strongly. The book or journal article from the reading list is not, in itself, a package of independent learning. The students can only develop their independent learning by reading the material, forming their own opinion, and then, perhaps, engaging in further reading or discussion to develop their thoughts. All of which requires time. By providing convenient links to reading materials within modules on the virtual learning environment, I am maximising the amount of time the student will spend actually engaging with their subject. I am providing them with precedents, which encourage them to seek out further reading. I am ensuring that students who are less able, have additional needs, or just have more important things to worry about this week, are not left behind. And I can spend my time teaching information literacy, helping students to find, evaluate and use those further reading resources, rather than providing un-ending training on the Library Catalogue.
We must be very careful not to value process above principles. Because, let’s face it, the skills of getting good results from a Library Catalogue, remembering to reserve books over a month in advance in order to photocopy a single chapter, and negotiating a complicated, publisher-specific, multi-stage login procedure to access journals from off-campus are skills only useful to those students who wish to go on to become Librarians. More important is that students learn the value of resources to inform their learning. Which they are never going to do if they struggle to access them in the first place…
Hello Georgina, I meant to leave a reply here when you first posted this, but then work ate my life and I never got around to it.
Thank you for being the very first blog to link back to a post of mine, it made me feel like a proper blogger! And I’m not at all surprised you disagree with that particular point, I expect that a lot of others do as well. You make very valid points and I understand that my priorities as a customer services librarian (largely trying to keep a building full of undergraduates happy and quiet) are different to those of a subject librarian.
There is just one point that I would partly disagree with though, and that is that the skills you discuss in your final paragraph or only useful to those who go on to become librarians. I see your point in that many students will go into careers that will not require this sort of information seeking again. But some will; for example, two law librarians commented on my post that they often see new trainees in their law firms who are unable to understand the difference between a journal article and a case report, or are unable to find legal material online. I worked in a law firm for a short amount of time myself and experience the same problems. Lots of law firms have librarians or paralegals to help with research and they are obviously able to help trainees with these issues as well, but it really isn’t unreasonable to expect a law graduate to be able to look up a case or journal article for themselves. This is the sort of skill they should be learning at University. I also worked at a Construction Consultancy Company for a year and again, witnessed the same problems of graduate employees being unable to find the information they needed online. They were lucky in having access to a (teeny, tiny) library, most of our rival firms didn’t have one.
So I would argue that information seeking skills are useful to a lot of careers and while I agree that some areas of arcane and inexplicable library knowledge are only useful to those noble few who will go on to join us, I also believe that more students should be encourage to search for their own information, because the skills they learn in doing so may be useful to them one day.
Sorry this got so long, I’m working this evening and the Helpdesk’s very quiet as everyones revising!
Thanks again for the linkback
Sian
Thanks for your reply, Sian. As with all these things, the correct answer is “it’s a bit complicated…”. Obviously there’s no one-size-fits-all anyway, and we would try to do different things with 1st years and final years. Totally agree about teaching all students the principles of information seeking (like the fundamental differences between journal articles and case reports!) but I was thinking of the specifics of each individual system, which they won’t see replicated anywhere else. And if we’ve spent too long focussing on our own systems (make sure you click here, look for the wierd-local-jargon here) then we may find we don’t have time to look at the more transferrable skills. It’s all about thinking hard about what we do and striking the right balance. Easier said than done!
(Wow! A real live conversation on a blog – you’re making me feel like a proper blogger now, too!)
Hello! Thank you for this excellent and thought-provoking conversation. Actually I’d like to agree with you both : ) as I think you’re making the same point about information priorities. The flashpoint is the identification of ‘library’ with ‘information’.
Funktious is absolutely right in saying that being able to find, recognise and use appropriate types and formats of information is vital to being able to do a job. Yes, the law grads DO need to be able to distinguish between case reports and journal articles, and locate relevant and current information in both formats! BUT this is both a broader and a higher-level aspect of information literacy than using library-specific pathways to information. The issue is not so much around searching for information anymore as about each individual learning to map his/her information landscape, becoming aware of all the channels through which information is available, and developing the critical faculty that will allow him/her to make informed decisions as to their value.
Within this information landscape the library and its resource pathways may loom fairly large for students, but it’s important for us all to remember that it’s now just one provider of information among many. As Badke (2010) points out, “An information literacy approach … might not even in every case take the student to a library”. Rather than focusing on teaching students the esoteric ins and outs of library systems, as though they comprise the whole information landscape, we need to be giving them the abilities to decide which information channel will best suit their needs for a particular task, and generate strategies for using that channel accordingly.
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