With our powers combined...

Group work has a nasty reputation. Perhaps it is one school project too many where you do all the work and a bunch of slackers take the credit (or conversely, where a bossy know-it-all takes over everything and isn't open to alternative thoughts or the suggestion that there's more to life than a presentation about the food pyramid or whatever). Everyone has a horror story or two.

What makes it so difficult?

 With collaboration of any kind, you're forced to examine how you work: your thought processes, how you make decisions, how you define and divide tasks, what your priorities and goals are, and your procedures and timeline for completing the work. These are usually unconscious, but in a group setting, you have to confront them because everyone else's will be different. This is where the conflict comes in: in trying to accommodate different assumptions, methods, goals, and work styles. What makes things even more difficult is that most people give very little explicit instruction in how to negotiate, compromise, work out a plan, and find ways to use the strengths of all group members. Furthermore, even group leaders who want to specifically design plans around the strengths of their group members have difficulty because most people don't know what their strengths are, and if they do, they often have trouble articulating them. So the entire process tends to be fumbling through, on a deadline, working toward an ill- or hastily-defined goal that (all too often) no one really would have chosen in the first place.

That said, I like collaboration. I really do. I have had some fantastic collaborative experiences, both in school and in personal writing projects. During good collaborations, I feel alive with possibilities and more confident that good ideas will rise to the top because two or more people had to approve them, and they had to be explained clearly enough for at least one other person to understand. I focus more on the process than on the product, more on the ideas than on how people will judge me based on the final product. I have to think about why I want to do a particular thing and justify to another person why the end result will be better for it. This has eliminated a lot of self-indulgent, lazy, and just plain silly ideas on my part.

While there is some truth to the waggish quote about meetings, the fact remains that we are stronger together. Go Planeteers team!

Perks and trade-offs in online learning

It's very strange to think that I will be graduating in August with a degree I earned exclusively by taking classes online. When I talk about the program I'm in, I always have to explain that it's a distance education program, because people still tend to assume that graduate-level programs take place in traditional settings. Their first question is usually, "So how does that work?"

Depending on how interested I think they are, I either just say that all the classes are online, or I start to talk about the different tools professors have used to structure the classes ("Some teachers have recorded lectures, sometimes there are discussion boards or blogs, sometimes they just post assigned readings and you do them on your own time..."). After listening for a while, they usually give me one of three reactions:

1. You must be very disciplined.
2. It must be nice to set your own schedule.
3. It must be weird and kind of hard not to ever meet anyone.

I would laugh #1 off, except that I think I actually have gotten more disciplined (go figure). #2 is a mixed bag--yes, it is nice to have the flexibility, but it also means (for the most part) that there's no set schedule telling me when to be in class and when learning is "supposed" to occur. If I want a structure like that, I have to create it. Mostly, though, I've just let my education casually entwine itself in my life. Yes, it can be difficult sometimes to not have a clear differentiation between my school life and my personal life, but it just means I've needed to learn to set my own limits. (Maybe that's where the discipline came in. Sneaky!) I have had to learn to navigate different class setups and schedules and decide when I was going to work on assignments for each class, given a set of due dates. It helped me understand how I work like no other experience has.

So far, so good. Point three is the kicker, though. It is difficult not to meet anyone. It's hard to get to know people in an online environment, even though I am comparatively tech-savvy and have a lot of experience with online communication. I still have to go out of my way to meet other people in any kind of social setting, much less a physical one. I keep in touch with some classmates over Google chat. I go to conferences. Even so, many of the people I meet are not nearby. I envy my roommate (also currently in grad school) who brings her friends from school over to the house. She confided in me that she had considered the SLIS program here, but had decided not to enroll because she needed the structure and social environment of a traditional classroom.

I am very happy with the academic aspect of my education. I just wish I had gotten to know a greater number of people as more than words on a page.

Grade Crusade

Grading was probably my least favorite part of being a teacher because it underscored how much I didn't know what I was doing.* It also highlighted the fact that I had several inchoate and incompatible philosophies of teaching that I hadn't merged into any coherent theory. (I pictured it would be something like a cross between Stand and Deliver and Dead Poets Society.) Basically, I couldn't articulate what I was looking for. So my students didn't really know what I was looking for either. And I would then have to give them a grade based on... what, exactly? How well what they actually did measured up to a nebulous idea in my head? I also had trouble sometimes with giving lower grades, even if the work deserved it, because it seemed a value judgment on the person somehow, and I remembered my own perfectionism as a student. Suffice to say, I tended to procrastinate on grading, the papers piled up, and everyone wound up terribly unhappy.

Looking back, what I really wanted was for them to think, to engage meaningfully with the issues they were reading about and come up with their own ideas. (This means NO PLAGIARISM!!!) And I didn't know how to assess that. So if the students thought about their grades at all, they probably focused on superficial things, because that wound up being what was easiest to grade, there in the trenches. Based on what they said, I think they thought I wanted my own ideas parroted back at me. This was sad, and actually the last thing I wanted. It upsets me that this is what they had gone through school believing was important--just find the answers and fill them out. If I had realized earlier that this was a problem, maybe I could have broken them of this habit of ignoring their own thoughts, of assuming that I would be upset at them for having an original idea that disagreed with mine.
 

*To clarify exactly how much I didn't know what I was doing, I was hired as basically the 10th grade English teacher one week before classes started. I had no previous training, unless you count half a semester's worth of an education class in college. There was no preexisting curriculum or lesson plans for me to draw from. I had the English standards, a lesson plan template, and a dream of making a difference. That's about it.

Majoring in the Universe

Saying you want to teach information literacy is a little bit like saying you want to major in the universe. You're trying to teach people how to find, interpret, understand, and use information (a.k.a., pretty much everything). In my headache-addled brain, the instruction manual looks something like this:


Step 1: Declare your intention to teach information literacy.
Step 2: ?
Step 3: PROFIT! (Paid in the form of smart people instead of money.)


The trick is narrowing the focus to something manageable. I was struck by what Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe said in Understanding by Design about the need for creating essential questions. What are the questions that boil down the essence of the field? What are the questions that even experienced practitioners struggle with? Creating a learning design around questions seems to be the best way to avoid an undue number of assumptions.


With that in mind, here are my candidates for key essential questions in the field of information studies:

• What is information?
  
• Where does information come from?
  
• Why is information important?
  
• Is some information more important? If so, when and why? Who decides what information is most important? Why?
  
• How do you know when you need information? How can you figure out what information you need?
  
• What are sources of information? Are some sources better than others? If so, when and why? Who decides what sources are best? Why?
  
• Who decides what information should be kept? Why?
  
• How is information stored and organized?
  
• What are useful strategies for interacting with sources of information and information retrieval systems? What should you do if there are barriers to the information or it cannot be located?
  
• What makes information correct? What makes information meaningful? Are these always the same? Why or why not?
  
• What happens when pieces of information conflict? Why might different sources conflict?
  
• Who uses information, and how? How should information be used (or not used)?
  
• When and how should information be shared? Is it always right to share information, or are there times it should be contained? Who should decide this? Why?

Wikipedia and Information Literacy

What is information literacy? Cite ACRL or AASL standards all you want, but for many teachers and librarians, the definition is secretly, "Teach kids not to use Wikipedia."

Some level of concern is certainly warranted. After all, when dinosaurs in a webcomic point out credibility issues with this particular source, it may be wise to consider broadening one's horizons. But Wikipedia is far from the only source that has ever provided inaccurate information. Actually, it has become far more transparent about how accurate its information is, noting when a section of an article needs additional footnotes or clarification, or when it may not be grammatical or objective. Wikipedia arguably forces people to question where information comes from and think critically about it in a way that traditional encyclopedias do not. So why has it become the shibboleth for declining information literacy skills?

A great deal of the backlash against Wikipedia has to do with assumptions about what information is the most useful, reliable, and important. The academic community in particular still privileges print, the individual, and "the expert." It values being able to trace an idea, expressed in written language in a stable form, back to its source: the individual who worked hard to become an expert in that field. Plagiarism is the greatest sin, a form of identity theft--blurring one's own thoughts and ideas with those of another individual or assuming the individual's intellectual identity outright. The stability of print allows the individual to claim the right to his or her ideas and oust the pretender. Naturally, an environment with these ideals and norms would look with suspicion on a Web-based encyclopedia that is constantly changing and lets anybody--anybody!--contribute to it in a collective fashion. Why, you have no idea who said what, or when, or if they had the proper qualifications... It can't be authoritative if there's no source of authority!

Ironically, this distrust may be the perfect seed for growing critical thinking skills. But for students, the distrust may expand outward to more hallowed institutions. What makes a person who writes a book more of an expert than a person who writes a blog? True, the former may benefit from editorial oversight, but the latter has to face the immediate, public responses to a post, many of which can be critical and force the writer to elaborate on or correct the original post. It is misguided to say that one form is inherently more "authoritative" than the other. But it is perfectly acceptable to ask students to consider where the information comes from, how it was created, who created it, the benefits and limitations of its particular form, and whether it all adds up to something appropriate to use to solve an information need in the current context. Should you cite a Wikipedia article on The Sound and the Fury in a literary research paper? Of course not. Is it a good place to start if you're going on a date with a Faulkner buff in half an hour and you don't want to sound stupid? Well, why not? And who's to say which information need was more important in the long run?

Learning in "The Cornhusker Vortex"

I watched an interesting episode of The Big Bang Theory the other day that neatly encapsulates many of the problems with traditional models of education. In "The Cornhusker Vortex," Leonard, a physicist, wants to learn about football in order to fit in with his girlfriend's friends when they watch the football game. He begins the process by watching recorded games and pausing them for analysis, looking up confusing terms in the index of Football for Dummies. ("Scrimmage... scrimmage...") Eventually, his roommate Sheldon (a theoretical physicist who was unwillingly subjected to football as part of his East Texas upbringing) becomes frustrated with Leonard's slow progress and offers to serve as a gatekeeper into the rarefied world of football.

By game day, Leonard has mastered basic knowledge of the rules of the game, but the viewing experience does not go as planned. First, he mistakes a championship game replay for live footage, and then he makes social blunders like overexplaining concepts with which other viewers would already be familiar and analyzing the plays using unnecessarily sophisticated vocabulary.

To what degree has Leonard "learned" football?

He certainly has a theoretical grasp of the game's rules. He is able to explain it and analyze the plays. He has not learned the skills necessary to play it himself, but arguably, neither have any of the other viewers. Yet the humor in this episode derives from the fact that, despite all his knowledge, Leonard has not actually learned what he needed to fulfill his objective: how to fit in socially while watching a game of football.

Why is this?

Situated learning theory would suggest that Leonard failed in his objective because he tried to divorce the information from the social context that would give it meaning. He approached watching the game through books instead of through experience--and many of the social cues he needed to understand could only be observed, translated, and internalized by watching a game with others in a natural setting. His vocabulary came across as artificial because he learned using an academic model rather than through accumulated years of experience watching football games, as the others had.

Ironically, Leonard already possessed many of the skills he needed. Despite his protests, he does understand the concepts of competition, trash-talking, and empathetic identification with a team, as evidenced by his previous experiences with the Physics Bowl, dueling robots, and kite fighting. Yet he did not see those skills as related or transferable. Ultimately, he was not able to connect his new knowledge to his previous experiences or integrate it meaningfully into his life--and therefore, this attempt at learning was little more than a failed experiment.

Deconstructing anti-teaching

I had an interesting idea the other day. When tutoring, I'll sometimes ask students how they learn best, and I'll get a confused or surprised look. Often they just don't know or have never considered the question. Perhaps it would be easier to ask them what methods aren't helpful. In a larger setting (like a high school classroom), perhaps it would be even more effective to get them to show you.

The scenario would play out thus: Students would be asked to brainstorm things they know a lot about. From this list, they would choose something to explain to the class. The catch: they need to teach it badly, so that no one (except perhaps those equally familiar with the topic) would understand it. I imagine this would elicit a parody of poor or unhelpful teaching techniques, some of which a teacher may not be aware of. After a few presentations, other students could be asked to analyze common themes in the presentations and explain why they had trouble following the ideas. What could have been done to explain the topic more clearly? From there, the teacher will be able to deduce what kinds of techniques will and won't be effective with this particular group of students.

(Note: This isn't my official post for Unit 1, although it is something that got dislodged as I tried to think about the question: "What is learning?" Sometimes you have to think about what it isn't first.)