Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Foundational Assumptions In Threshold Concepts And Information Literacy, Patrick K. Morgan

Faculty Presentations

This is a critique of the threshold concepts at the heart of the new ACRL Framework.

Models are only tools, and like all tools, will inevitably perform well in certain contexts and poorly in others. Threshold concepts are exactly and only a model/tool, and far from useless.

In a late-January post on the ACRL blog, Lori Townsend and her colleagues responded to some of the negative press threshold concepts had been receiving; in it, we were reminded how productive threshold concepts-based approaches have been in a variety of learning contexts.

My objections can be roughly corralled into two broad criticisms: …

Liminal Librarianship: Transgressing The Threshold, Patrick K. Morgan

Faculty Presentations

Librarians have lately become enamored of threshold concepts. This enchantment is so compelling that the inchoate update of the ACRL information literacy competency standards--in which "standards" have apparently been replaced with a more flexible, concept-oriented framework--depends on them heavily. The appropriateness and feasibility of the ideas behind these terms, however, have been only weakly addressed. Certainly, it makes sense to take information literacy instruction beyond a focus on skill acquisition and into the realm of the conceptual, at least if teaching librarians want their work with students to be meaningful beyond the limited confines of producing "academic artifacts" of little …

Leveraging The "Google Mentality": 1search And The New (Inter)Face Of Library Discovery, Todd J. Wiebe, Jessica Hronchek

Faculty Presentations

1Search is a "discovery tool" that allows users to explore a large and diverse range of library content (e.g., books, e-books, full-text articles, other digital collections)—all from a single search box. Librarians plan to leverage the simplicity of 1Search as a library gateway to open up new opportunities for teaching information literacy.

Anarchy And Hope, Patrick K. Morgan

Faculty Presentations

Among the tensions inherent in teaching information literacy within the context of another instructor's classroom is that of balance. Teaching librarians are frequently forced to choose between focusing on practical, contextually-dependent skills of limited value to students (such as database navigation) and on more conceptual, portable themes. This paper presents an argument for granting pride of place to the latter, and provides one experiment as an initial foray into how this might be accomplished.

Information Literacy And Epistemological Inquiry, Patrick K. Morgan

Faculty Presentations

Information literacy is frequently invoked as leitmotiv in college-level library instruction, a fact which by no means implies a unanimous sense of its “meaning” among teaching librarians. Even a cursory perusal of the library literature demonstrates the importance of the concept, both as an educational paradigm and theoretic stimulus. Notably, despite rising acknowledgment that information literacy grows ever more vital for today’s students, little consideration of its place and purpose within other fields is found in academic publications outside information science. Likewise, information literacy instruction, while acknowledged in core curricula, is frequently marginalized in practice: cramped sessions within other …

Show Me The Article!: Helping Students Understand The Library's Role In Accessing Scholarly Information, Todd J. Wiebe

Faculty Presentations

A fundamental concept that students need to understand about performing research at the college/university level is that, contrary to what they may believe or have been accustomed to thinking, the entire sum of human knowledge is not openly accessible to anyone for free via the Internet. Often times, students need to "see it to believe it" –or, more importantly, grasp it–by experiencing first-hand how the library and free web intersect. We should not assume that the divide between what is available freely on the Internet and the content provided by, and only accessible via campus libraries is automatically or commonly …