Information Literacy 2.0 -- Part 1: Annotation

In Bad Habits of Life Long Learning, I talked about an online course I had started called Learning 2.0 that introduces 23 web-based tools for sharing and collaboration. I’m up to lesson number 11, and look forward to little breaks during the week when I surf over to the course website and try out another one or two “things”. As I’ve worked through them, I’ve been thinking about new skills involved in using some of these new technologies, such as annotation, tagging and story boarding. Annotation skills are increasingly important due to the ease with which one can cut and paste or pop a hyperlink into a paper or webpage, ostensibly addressing the topic but potentially failing to provide information that adequately explains the context. I see this problem in a lot of websites, but also—perhaps increasingly--in student papers. If you look at Gene’s discussion of the Learning 2.0 program in Introducing Life-Long Learners to Web 2.0 and compare it to mine in Bad Habits, you’ll see he is kinder to his readers and explains his context and references more fully. I knew better, but was in a rush and didn’t bother explain that “learning 2.0” is a derivative of “Web 2.0” which refers collectively to emerging social and collaborative technologies. Nor did I bother to look up the acronym PLCM so I could explain that it stood for the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County in North Carolina. Annotation is a skill that seems especially important when a project integrates information, images, or other media from other sources, but it’s also important for successful collaboration, whether on-line or off. A faculty colleague, a graduate assistant and I are using a Google Notebook to collect benchmarking information from other program’s websites. Without effective annotation of the clippings we are gathering from other program’s websites, we are likely to have trouble coordinating our work and making good use of the data. I'll say more about tagging and storyboarding in upcoming posts.

Tools

Instructional technologists like to say "technology is just a tool." With good reason, they don’t want to be perceived as promoting "whistles and bells" with no clear educational purpose, but I think some of them have bought into the line a little too deeply. I gave a talk at a conference once that presented empirical evidence that, in some fields of study, technology has profoundly influenced not only the means of instruction, but also the very purpose of some courses. An instructional technologist came up to me after the talk to tell me I had it wrong because technology is just a tool.

Last week, a friend e-mailed me about a presentation she gave at the ELI session on assessment in Boulder that was based on presentations we had given together at EDUCAUSE and AIR. Ironically, minutes before, I had received an invitation from a graduate student in my Curriculum in Higher Education class to visit a wiki he had created for the class. In a blog-like entry in the wiki, he had asked “Where does the wiki fit in curriculum?” He wrestled with trying to classify my wiki assignment within one of five “perspectives” on the purpose of the college curriculum proposed by Posner, whose work we had read and discussed in class. Good question! Over time, I usually develop some intended outcomes and guidelines for my assignment options, and—when I’m really on top of things--I even use different grading rubrics for each assignment, which I make available to students at the beginning of the term. I’ve also taught classes on assessment to community college faculty, so I don’t think anyone would say I’m an assessment laggard.

And yet, there’s nothing quite as exciting as the first time I offer an assignment option and someone takes me up on it. I don’t really know what they’ll get out of it, but something tells me “this could be really good.” I simply have to trust them to make something worthwhile out of it, and they simply have to trust me to focus on the learning process and not the product if things don’t go well. Bereiter & Scardemalia, in their book Surpassing Ourselves: An Inquiry into the Nature and Implications of Expertise, talk about a type of expertise they attribute to artists that they call the expertise of promisingness (or something like that)--that is, the ability to sense the promise of a particular creative pursuit without having planned out the product in advance. I think when we talk about the “art” of teaching, this is largely what we mean: the expertise of promisingness. Assessment is part of the craft of teaching, and as such it can be a great tool, but it’s just that: a tool. In the age of the internet and rapidly multiplying means of social computing, saying that technology is just a tool that I use to accomplish some end without recognizing it also as part of the context that makes up my reality is a little like saying that the dream is just in my head but I am not in the dream. It might sound right, but it’s not how many of us experience it any more.

[Originally posted at http://www.bloglines.com/blog/CBriggs, September 30, 2006]

Food Drop for Avatars

I'm concerned my Yahoo avatar isn't getting enough to eat. I plumped her up a tad using the "plus size" button, but I'm still concerned she's only a size 4 (if that!). If you know of similar cases of avatar malnurishment, please contact Yahoo. If that doesn't work, perhaps Bono, Oprah, or the Bill and Malinda Gates Foundation can fund a food drop.

Bad Habits of LifeLong Learning

The other day I stumbled onto the PLCM's Learning 2.0 "23 things" course and clipped it into my Google Notebook. Today I returned to see what I could learn from the 23 online lessons designed to introduce librarians to new web technologies for collaborative learning and work. Creating this blog is "thing" #3 out of 23. Thing #2 was listening to a slideshow about lifelong learning called 7 1/2 Habits of Highly Successful Lifelong Learners . The first habit was:

"Begin with the end in mind: GOALS"

Geez, now that's a habit I'm pretty good at when I want to be, at least in my head, but if I followed it all the time I probably would never have found the Learning 2.0 website in the first place. It may be "effective" but I doubt it has much to do with making anyone a *lifelong* learner. Seems like just the opposite might be true. When I think about my own learning habits, I'm reminded of Gene's post How Mack Ended Up in Skinny Jeans (aka Gene's post about Mack's post about Jill's post about Steve's post about Stephanie's post--or something like that!).

The goal oriented stuff sounds like descriptions of "adult learners" that college faculty have been taught to take into account, but not without some concern that it might achieve "effectiveness" at the cost of depth and breadth of exploration, and instrumentality at the cost of genuine love of learning. Lifelong learners obviously keep on learning throughout adulthood, but are adult learners, by definition, lifelong learners? I dunno. I'm thinking of a guy I know who was picking up trash on the UIC campus one day and settling into his own faculty office at Harold Washington College the next--he's my archetype for both the "adult learner" and the "lifelong learner"--and I think I'll ask him what he thinks of "begining with the end in mind."