Art of Information

Engaging students in classrooms has become increasingly complicated. Online school is even more so. The environment that provides the flexibility and accessibility of online learning also introduces distraction from the learning process. Unlike a traditional classroom, where physical presence can sometimes translate to mental presence, the digital space offers shopping and friends and constant notifications. A student might be attending a lecture while simultaneously browsing social media, checking emails, or watching videos, rather like being in the back of the classroom. Students logging in from home might be facing yet more distractions that aren’t typical of a classroom setting. These can range from household chores, family members, pets, wine, bed.

In a physical classroom, educators can pick up on non-verbal cues—like a student’s posture, eye contact, or facial expressions—to gauge their level of engagement. These cues often help instructors modify their approach in real-time, perhaps by asking a direct question or changing the pace of the lecture. Online, many of these signals are lost or muted, especially if cameras are turned off. One of the subtle yet powerful aspects of classroom learning is peer interaction. Seeing peers engaged can act as a motivating factor for other students. In an online setting, especially during asynchronous sessions, this collective energy might be missing. Students might feel isolated, leading to decreased motivation.

To counter these challenges, educators need to employ innovative strategies. interactive tools, opportunities for group work, encouraging camera usage, periodic check-ins, and requiring occasional synchronous sessions in an asynchronous class — a field trip to the teacher’s Zoom.

It is important to start acknowledging this and building classes that require engagement, so students are learning, not just existing.

The internet tells me that I am thinking of anti-intellectualism, but it isn’t that. I have recently experienced a couple of examples of ignorance in the face of expertise. Seeing individuals completely disregard others’ expertise, choosing to rely on their own opinions can be exhausting as well as enlightening.

There is a cognitive bias that pertains to the inclination of people with limited knowledge or skills in a particular domain to overestimate their abilities while underestimating the competence of experts. Those who know the least often presume they know the most. But that is different from deliberately ingnoring or forgetting that someone has vast experience beyond one’s own experience with them.

One factor of this bias is the erosion of trust in experts and institutions. This loss of trust can push individuals to reject expert advice entirely, even when it holds potential benefits in various scenarios. But to ignore someone’s life experience is a special kind of erosion of trust.

I have experienced this personally, in that many people seem to think I have been in the same professional role…forever, I guess. Which is so farfetched as to be humerous. Recently, I have witnessed this behavior towards other people. The pastor at my church, who has years of experience running churches, has been dismissed with “she just doesn’t understand” or “she can’t possibly know” by congregants who should know better.

I don’t know what to call this. It feels a little narcissistic but it isn’t just that. What would you call this?

Information literacy is the ability to access, evaluate, and use information from various sources effectively. It involves knowing how to find relevant and reliable information, critically assessing its quality and credibility, and properly attributing sources. Information literacy also entails being aware of the context and potential biases of information, understanding ethical considerations when using it, and being able to organize and apply information to solve problems and make informed decisions.

In 2000, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) had devised and published a set of standards for information literacy in higher education . Librarians basically claimed information literacy for themselves, despite the difficulty everywhere of getting faculty to include them in lessons, or make room for those standards in curriculum. The standards have been modified into a set of Frameworks, but the challenge of trying to be the only one on campus teaching information literacy continues…because frankly, we aren’t. The Frameworks could, and should be used more as as assessment tool, but librarians cannot be solely responsible for ensuring that students know the various literacies of their profession.

I am one single, quiet, voice in the world of information literacy, but I feel that it is important to understand the faculty roll in the process.

My thoughts are that faculty members play a crucial role in promoting and sharing information literacy practices, even as they share professional practices.

Research is a fundamental aspect of higher education, and information literacy skills are crucial for conducting effective research. Faculty members can teach students how to formulate research questions, access relevant resources, critically analyze information. By sharing information literacy practices, faculty members empower students to become proficient researchers. And through better research faculty can instill a sense of academic integrity in their students. Information literacy practices go hand in hand with academic integrity, as they emphasize the importance of properly attributing sources and avoiding plagiarism. Faculty members can educate students about the ethical use of information, proper citation techniques, and the consequences poor research

So we needed to define information, because next up, we need to talk about information literacy.

Does the definition of information matter in the long run? I think, yes. When we are discussing information in a classroom setting, we aren’t much interested in the noise factor that interested Claude Shannon. We are interested in all the information that gets shared, whether it be classified as noise or not. We aren’t interested in removing that feature.

A look at everyday life information sharing can provide an example (See Hartel 2010 for more information about everyday life information). When I am sharing knitting information with my online knitting buddies, there is noise. There can only be so many times one can hear “stockinette stitch curls” before you can’t hear it anymore. It is noise…to me and many others…but not to everyone. For Shannon, noise was disruptive, in the social cultural world, noise still has meaning, just not to everyone. It is contextual. And that is why we care.

Hartel, J. (2010). Managing documents at home for serious leisure: A case study of the hobby of gourmet cooking. Journal of Documentation, 66(6), 847–874. https://doi.org/10.1108/00220411011087841

Marcia Bates (2006) borrows from Susantha Goonatilake (1991) in defining information. For my purposes, the important part of the definition is that of neural-cultural information. This refers to that information that has been generated or transmitted through our nervous systems — not limited to humans, but we have more enacted, or reproduced, information from humans. Not so much from gold fish, for example.

Neural-cultural information includes knowledge, beliefs, ideas, etc. We are able to share such information over time and space. Language, beliefs, values, knowledge of science, history, and more. We share technology and social norms. We share cat memes and pictures of cats in sinks.

And we share art and creativity. The neural-cultural building blocks that make up art education, and the creation of new artists, are ancient. They are also extremely human.

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Bates, M.J. (2006) Fundamental forms of information. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 57(8).

Goonatilake, S. (1991). The evolution of information: Lineages in gene, culture and artefact. London: Pinter.

Information has been defined widely by such disparate scholars as Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener and Urban Dictionary’s agilman (https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=information). No single definition of information is useful or practical without context. One cannot examine a phenomenon without having clear definitions of the underlying concepts. In the case of my own current research, the definitions of information as put forth by Marcia Bates and Michael Buckland, provide an understanding of information in practice, as a process, rather than a static, or purely technical, meaning. 

Shannon’s information theory was very much based in the need to transmit data. It is concerned with noise, more akin to the game of telephone — and he was working in Bell Labs at the time.

Information is not all about technology however. Marcia Bates defines information as a pattern of organization, and allows that it is given meaning by living beings.

I am interested specifically interested in neural cultural information that can be transmitted through communication. More on this later.

Thanks to Daisy the Great, I have the perfect description of what working on a phd is like. Nobody I know in person is particularly interested in what I do. I mean, I can explain it, and people say “oh that’s interesting” but it rarely comes up and I don’t talk about my work in general because the conversation just ends there.

Luckily, I meet regularly with people from my program, and we do discuss theory and practice and those conversations don’t falter. But I recently met with some other information professionals and I realized how far I am from tenure track people who have to publish to stay employed. I am much closer to students and the day to day business of running a library. I didn’t feel like I had much in common with them…even though I should.

Oh well. Last week I took my daughter to see Daisy the Great. They didn’t play this song, but it didn’t matter. It is always in the back of my head.

Summer off and I confess I got nothing done. My adhd has been overwhelming, despite medication. I have too many irons and too many fires and I don’t organize myself as well as one might expect, given that I am a librarian.

I am back in school with an instructor who has TWO PhDs. Goodness. It is a little disheartening, but I am reminding myself of what I have been doing for the past 20 years. I gave up working when it became obvious that my oldest child was autistic. I started working full time again when I divorced. Since then I have been working full time and raising children full time and knitting all the sweaters.

I didn’t mean to start a PhD program, but when I began my current position I felt that I didn’t have a good understanding of my student population and when I looked for research, I found nothing. So I figured I would write it myself.

I still don’t have anything written.

Back at it, indeed.

I have been reading a lot about writing, largely out of fear. I have a lot of writing to do in the next few years and I feel like I don’t have a handle on my habits yet. I just finished Air & Light & Time & Space by Helen Sword and my biggest take-away from the text is that I need to be a better reader first. I think the two are linked and one follows from the other.

I read a lot. But I don’t necessarily read deeply. I have learned to read academic articles in pieces: abstract, results, discussion, maybe methodology, maybe literature review. To be a better academic writer I have to start to read articles in more depth. I need to be able to see the structure of the literature review. I need to be able to analyze the methodology. The results and discussion are meaningless if I can’t form my own opinion about the process.

Literature reviews can be surprisingly interesting and occasionally dramatic. The more I read them, the more I think it is an art I must master. I am definitely not there yet, but since finishing the book mentioned above, I have started paying more attention to the structure of the reviews and I think it is paying off.