The Journal of Information Literacy (JIL) and Communications in Information Literacy (CIL) both celebrated 10-year anniversaries this year–something I only figured out through a very confusing conversation with Kevin Seeber wherein I congratulated him on having a book review published in the 10th anniversary issue of JIL (it’s actually published in the 10th-anniversary issue of CIL). With the last two days of my ridiculously ambitious project (which I’m nowhere near finishing), I’m going to deviate from my pre-planned reading list to talk about some of the articles from these anniversary issues.
Let’s start with the Journal of Information Literacy. I’ll talk about CIL tomorrow. Glancing at the contents for the inaugural issue of JIL in 2007, I was struck by the number of articles about online learning. The articles I browsed referred to cutting-edge technology like Blackboard, Flash, and Captivate. To me, the article that best represents its time is “Show Them How to Do It: Using Macromedia Captivate to Deliver Remote Demonstrations.” tl;dr–they created tutorials that students didn’t use (nothing changes, does it?).
Patalong and Llewellyn’s article made me laugh out loud, in the sense that comedy equals tragedy plus time. Theirs is a disastrous case study in how things can go totally sideways with online tutorials. Significant time and energy were invested in creating a suite of tutorials for business students as part of an online module–but the tutorials were buried in the “Resources” section of the LMS. Although over five hundred students were enrolled in the module, the tutorials were used only a few dozen times. They discovered hundreds of clicks on course documents the library knew nothing about–specifically, Word files and Powerpoint files about accessing the library, search strategies, and plagiarism located in the more prominent “Content” section of the course.
Fun fact: the phrase “instructional design” does not appear once in Patalong & Llewellyn’s article, but the words “inadvertently sabotaged” appear on page 34.
In her introduction for the 10th anniversary issue of JIL, Emma Coonan notes that Mark Hepworth contributed to two of the articles in the first issue and was intended to be an invited scholar for the anniversary issue, but he passed away in December 2016. I feel it’s important to note that the anniversary issue is dedicated to him.
When I look at the list of contributors, I see several names that mean a lot to me, including Barbara Fister, Alison J. Head, Margy MacMillan, and James Elmborg. A bit of context about my reverence for these folks:
Jim Elmborg began his graduate degree in English at the University of Kansas in 1982.
Margy MacMillan finished her MLS degree in 1986.
Barbara Fister began working at Gustavus Adolphus College in 1987.
Alison J. Head was a lecturer at the San Jose State University School of Library & Information Science in 1989.
I was born in 1986.
I cannot overstate how much respect I have for these folks, their wisdom, their passion, and their contributions to librarianship. The work they’ve done for the past thirty years makes my career interesting and meaningful every day. I count all of them as role models; I can only hope to have a career even a fraction as fruitful as any of theirs. If this post is your introduction to their work, you are so very welcome.
Jim Elmborg uses his identity as a literacy educator to reflect on his career, first as a writing teacher and then as a librarian. His article contextualizes many big themes in information literacy and academic libraries, including the integration of constructivism in modern IL pedagogy, the disparaging distance between the evolution of rhetoric/composition studies and information literacy, and the pernicious rise of neoliberalism in higher education. (His takedown of MBAs as University Presidents is hot.)
I regularly refer to Alison J. Head and her work with Project Information Literacy, especially when I’m asked why I don’t (generally) believe in providing database demonstrations, checklists for source evaluation, or quizzes about library vocabulary. Her research investigates what workplace and lifelong information literacy actually looks like for our students after they graduate. Guess what? They’re not using ProQuest to search for articles about buying their first home or how to get a raise. Her article gives a summary of PIL’s findings about the expectations of employers and new graduates in the workplace, and the implications for IL pedagogy. I especially like the emphasis on cultivating curiosity in our students. Being able to ask and answer questions will serve our learners much better than mastery of Boolean operators.
Barbara Fister’s autoethnography is simply gorgeous to read. The long arc of her career traces the transitions from bibliographic instruction to information literacy, the “Information Age” to “fake news”, the Standards to the Framework, from holding a planning document at the beginning of her career to questioning how to frame her achievements as she approaches retirement. Reflecting on the messy, incomplete nature of her work, she closes her article with this lovely line:
This is our work. It is made of fleeting moments. It is never quite right. It matters. (Fister, 2017)
Margy MacMillan’s contribution to this issue is, like her, humble and understated. She is one of several co-authors on the conference review of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL) conference in Los Angeles in 2016. But, if you are a close reader, you will note that Alison Head also thanks Margy for her help and feedback with Head’s article. If you don’t know Margy (yet), that’s her way. If you offer to help her, she’ll ask how can she help you. If she follows you on Twitter, she likes all of your tweets. If you say that you’re inspired by her (as I often have said), she says she’s inspired by you. When I saw her present at Library Instruction West in Salt Lake City last year, she commented that she was close to retirement but still went to work every day filled with curiosity about students and their learning. What. A. Babe.
One of the things I love about reading is that there are no rules about where to start. In her introduction, Coonan said that they endeavored to create a “landmark” issue. I think they’ve done so. So start here in 2017, or go back to 2007 and start with volume one, issue one, or anywhere in between.
References
Elmborg, J. (2017). Lessons from Forty Years as a Literacy Educator: An Information Literacy Narrative. Journal of Information Literacy, 11(1), 54-67.
Fister, B. (2017). The warp and weft of Information Literacy: Changing contexts, enduring challenges. Journal of Information Literacy, 11(1), 68-79.
Head, A. J. (2017). Posing the million dollar question: What happens after graduation?. Journal of Information Literacy, 11(1), 80-90.
Jefferson, C., MacMillan, M. E., Manginelli, A., McClurg, C., & Winterman, B. (2017). ISSOTL 2016: exploring opportunities for librarians. Journal of Information Literacy, 11(1), 227-231.
Patalong, S., & Llewellyn, O. (2007). Show them how to do it: using Macromedia Captivate to deliver remote demonstrations. Journal of Information Literacy, 1(1), 31-34.
Featured image includes head shots of Barbara Fister, Margy MacMillan, Jim Elmborg, and Alison J. Head.
Zoe Fisher 