The
Librarian As Essential Key to Connecting Open Educational Resources
and
Information Literacy in the Academic World
Nan Singh
San
Jose State University
Abstract
The
librarian today, caught up in the growing seas of information, is
challenged to rise up and give meaningful direction to the
information seeker. The digital divide question goes deeper than the
simple description of the problem that pits those who have access to
technology against those who don’t. The parameters of the
divide must be explored in depth in order to begin to close the
divide. The librarian holds key possibilities for helping to close
this divide and bridge the gap. This paper will focus on the
contributions that Open Educational Resources movement can make
towards the development of information literacy from yet another
angle, the contribution of the librarian. New opportunities for more
effective collaboration between librarians, students and instructors
can promote greater engagement of the student, resulting in mastery
of the literacy challenges presented by the changing world of
technology. The educational climate is experiencing a paradigm shift
that is familiar territory to the librarian. The librarian as a key
initiator in connecting patrons with resources is in a unique
position to give leadership to the Open movement, which includes Open
Educational Resources, Open Access and Open Source. This paper will
explore the contribution the librarian brings to OER and the Open
movement.
New
Literacies
Focus
has been given to the structural world of libraries and literacy as
described by the terminologies of information, computer and digital
literacies. According to Semali, L. (2001) “‘new
literacies’ refer to those literacies that have emerged in the
post-typographic era. To highlight the different effects of
electronic and visual communication, various writers have used the
term ‘post-typographic’ to mark an intellectual and
cultural shift in the way information is designed, communicated, and
retrieved.” This shift in thinking is expressed in the Open
movement. To break away from familiar modes of instruction and
learning into the era of new structures of information presentation
marks the tasks that are before us, already begun but still in stages
of transition. Few know better than the librarian the immense
landscape of the retrieval of information. Who is better fitted,
then, to give needed leadership into the new territorial waters of
current representations of information in the Open movement than the
librarian?
The JISC Market Research Team (2008) released a
survey that reveals that a key concern for the future of
librarianship involves managing the increasing volume of information.
The
research, supported by SCONUL3, the Society of College, National and
University Libraries, found that in both the higher (HE) and further
education (FE) sectors, the perceived shift away from print to a
dependence on e-resources creates other challenges such as how to
manage the volume of material, how users can access it and how
libraries and learning resource centres (LRC) can provide or promote
such resources. It also highlights financial issues such as potential
funding sources for the increasing amounts of new technology,
electronic materials and subscriptions likely to be needed by the
learning institutions of the future.
Rather
than being pushed aside by the sweep of the constant technological
advances that suggest the idea that the book is out and technology is
in, the librarian is challenged to connect the more familiar
historical landscape of established library resources typified by the
storage and retrieval of traditional printed resources on the one
side, to the rapidly changing world of the Open Educational Resources
movement on the other. The librarian today is challenged not only to
be aware of the constantly changing landscape, but also to be skilled
in finding the right information at the right time in order to
effectively respond to the information needs of patrons.
The
Philosophy of Librarianship and OER
Today's
librarian stands in a unique position to capitalize on the philosophy
of librarianship defined by key historic elements. To begin to define
librarianship is in itself a challenge. Joseph Nitecki (1993), who
coined the term “metalibrarianship” writes
Recently
there has been a noticeable shift of interest away from the
acquisition of data, toward access to them, and from the preservation
of recorded messages to their utilization. Yet the basic role of
librarians as mediators, linking the sources of information with
their recipients, although not changed, is not yet fully understood
by many librarians and most library patrons. (1.4.1 Focus of the
argument, para. 5)
He
describes the evolving nature of librarianship and refers to the all
but vanished stereotype of
the librarian as the time “when
librarians struggled for a professional self-identity, by combating a
stereotype of a librarian presented as a glorified clerk, dedicated
only to the physical processing of books, and encouraging their
reading in a perfectly quiet library.” (9.1.1
Introduction). Nazli, A. (2008) writes on the importance of
developing philosophical thinking, stating that librarians need a
clear sense of purpose. “There is a close relationship between
librarians' realization of PT [philosophical thinking] and their
credibility in society. Librarians can build their reputation in
society by making use of theory, and with the self-confidence they
gain from knowing what role they play and why.” (section Why
does PT matter today? Para 12). The librarian who is able to employ
philosophical thinking to the understanding of the role information
plays in gaining and utilizing knowledge will bring new energy and
vision to the library as place and will recognize the contributions
of the Open movement.
OER
and Life-long Learning
The
librarian who has integrated Open thinking will recognise a
learning culture where there is increased desire in pursuing and
achieving mastery of the many aspects of information available to us.
Lynch, C. (2008) refers to the difference between learning and
gaining an education: “access to education is not the same
thing as access to information, although the two are intimately
related and might often reasonably be viewed as two endpoints of a
continuum.” (Para 2) He continues by recognizing that while
libraries contain or have access to inexhaustible information the
library is uniquely different from the classroom insofar as learning
is concerned. This begs the question of just how learning takes
place. Does learning happen because an instructor organizes materials
to present, even using a variety of methods, maybe even utilizing the
latest in technology, applying requirements and deadlines for
students to meet? Lynch raises further questions of how learning can
be acquired in an age where there is so much information to access.
He states that while social interaction is an essential part of
learning where technology plays a key part, the challenge to evaluate
information has become even more complex. He recognizes that ongoing
education is now a part of our culture. We can expect the need to
incorporate ongoing education, often termed as becoming a life-long
learner, in every area of expertise and aspect of living in today's
world (Lynch, C. 208).
The
advent of OER presents just one piece of the Open movement that gives
direction to
our response to the challenge of creating and becoming life-long
learners. Lynch sees increasing involvement of teachers, educators,
and scholars who “will likely form the nexus of new teaching
communities that want to exploit these information resources in their
own teaching. Similarly, those authoring Open Education Resources
will likely offer to manage and moderate teaching communities forming
around these resources.” Lynch (sec. Meeting the Needs of
Learners). The need for increased modules of learning raises more
questions about certification and degrees to give evidence of
learning.
Open
Educational Resources and the Open Course Ware Movement
are
Changing the Way We Experience Education
Open
Educational Resources and Open Course Ware are part of the trend to
make software, educational materials, and entire courses, freely
available and accessible via the Internet primarily to
under-resourced nations or individuals, but also to any individual
who wants free access to information. The Hewlett Foundation provided
significant funding and support to make this happen. For example, MIT
(2008), funded by the Hewlett Foundation, reached 1800 undergraduate
and graduate courses freely available on the Internet by 2007 and is
adding or updating courses at about 200 per year. The Hewlett
Foundation reports that nearly half of their 12,000 hits per day are
coming from outside North America. [Hewlett brochure].
A
recent publication by the Centre for Educational Research and
Innovation, (CERI, 2007) showed that 300 universities around the
world provide more than 3000 open access courses, freely available
online. Universities include MIT, Rice University, John Hopkins
Bloomberg School of Public Health, Tufts University, Carnegie Mellon
University, University of Notre Dame, and Utah State University.
(Giving Knowledge for Free, 2007, ch. 3). The movement is growing
with new universities joining in and courses being added regularly.
According the MIT's Open Courseware website they have now reached a
record of 2 million hits per month (MIT 2008).
Collaboration
for Information Literacy
Today
academic librarians have become increasingly involved in a variety of
collaborative efforts with professors and students to develop
information literacy skills. They are collaborating with
professors/instructors and students by accessing, evaluating and
utilizing information resources that develop information literacy.
Reed, M., Kinder, D., & Farnum, C. (2007) in their study on
collaboration at One Ontario University cite Lindstrom & Shonrock
(2006), and concluded that in order to develop students with
information literacy skills there must be a “strong
collaboration between university librarians and teaching faculty,
where librarians and faculty are jointly responsible for curriculum
development, assignment development, teaching, and follow-up with
students following student assessment” (Reed, introduction, ¶
7).
Further
study of the actual experiences of collaboration between librarians
and faculty give mixed results. Some schools and universities have
made great progress not only with giving librarians faculty status
and regarding them as research co-horts while others remain in past
traditional models of regarding the library as support staff that
fill many menial to complex functions according to academic needs
determined by the institution. Owusu-Ansah (2004) describe a common
scenario this way
Librarians,
doubting their ability to achieve any far reaching results and
conceding the lack of institutional, human, and monetary resources to
proceed with any ambitious programs, often attempt limited solutions
or, wors[t] still, continue to debate the purportedly unresolved
nature of information literacy. Administrators struggle with what it
is they really hope for. Faculty marches on as though no concerns
existed. (¶ 3)
Open
Educational Resources present opportunity for faculty and librarian
to move towards collaboration. The Open movement is new. Unless the
librarian is aware of resources and opportunities and how to access
them it is not likely that busy professors will access and use them.
As librarians develop working connections with faculty to approach
developing information literacy from a team effort, particularly in
developing critical thinking skills in evaluating resources for
course assignments, awareness of Open Educational Resources and Open
Access journals will increase. Awareness is a key factor in the Open
movement.
Technology
Impacts Literacy
The
National Council of Teachers of English, (February, 2008) presented a
comprehensive analysis of 21st century literacies that recognize the
interwoven aspect of the threads of literacy. They recognize that
today’s students need to:
Develop
proficiency with the tools of technology
Build
relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively
and cross-culturally
Design
and share information for global communities to meet a variety of
purposes
Manage,
analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information
Create,
critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts
Attend
to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex
environments
The
Open Educational Resources and Open Course Ware movements are marked
by a bottom up approach to learning and creating knowledge as
compared to the top-down format of passing on information from the
learned to the unlearned, which has been the staple of our
foundational understanding of education. Steven Downs (2007), of the
National Research Council of Canada, and a proponent of the Open
Educational Resources Movement, describes the paradigm shift in the
changing landscape of the way technology is impacting how we
experience education. He begins with five steps of the educational
process as related by Hanley (2005);
1.
Discovery
& Research for Teaching
2.
Designing
the Learning Experience
3.
Teaching
4.
Learning
5.
Feedback,
Assessment, & Evaluation
He
states that “[w]e need to rethink the workflow just described.
Rather than think of each of these five steps as something that is
done for learners, and supported through some sort of sustainable (or
commercial) program, we need to think of each of these five steps as
something that learners do for themselves.” This implies a
shift in educational philosophy that is exemplified by the learner
who is a self starter, who sees the value of learning, and also has a
well developed work ethic.
Collaboration
to Close the Generational Gap: Co-creative Learning
The
Internet provides opportunities for collaboration not done before
in the established halls of
learning. To move into mastery of resources involves not only
gaining awareness of those resources and expertise in handling
them, but also gaining the ability to close the gap and bridge
the digital divide. To see the challenge from a different
perspective helps. Perhaps for the first time in history we are
presented with an opportunity to close the so-named generational
gap as never before. Not only can we learn from the abilities of
the so-called millennial generation through new levels of
collaboration provided to us by increasingly adaptable and
available new technologies, but we can also become co-creators
with them in remixing and repurposing of essential knowledge in
the discovery of new answers to old problems facing our world.
This philosophical approach is expressed in Web 2.0 technology,
or the interactive social/learning environment. Adler, R. and
Brown, J. (2008) refer to the emergent quality of learning in
their discussion of Open Learning—they refer to Learning
2.0—by talking about how group learning ignites the
student's passion to go deeper into a subject, not only learning
“about” the subject but learning “to be”
through peer-based learning. “These communities are
harbingers of the emergence of a new form of technology-enhanced
learning—Learning 2.0—which goes beyond providing
free access to traditional course materials and educational tools
and creates a participatory architecture for supporting
communities of learners. (sec. The Long Tail in Learning)
The
librarian needs great diplomatic skill and vision in order to give
supportive leadership to an educational system mired in traditional
views of education into this new experience of learning broadly
described by Web 2.0 technology. The inspiration for change arises
from the awareness of today's student, who are referred to as digital
natives. However, the librarian by nature of his/her understanding of
the world of information is in a better position to make the shift in
thinking about education than the typical faculty member who may have
to attend numerous workshops in order to understand and incorporate
the advantages of interactive education.
Teaching
Students to Evaluate Information
Initially
educators have taken a negative stance on students' reliance upon the
internet to cite information gathered in research. The movement to
develop information literacy has grown
out of the need to help students evaluate the quality of information
they find. Often they are content to turn in anything they find that
appears relevant. Tomaiuolo, N (2005) writes about
research done that measures faculty satisfaction with student use of
the Web for research purposes. It was found that overall faculty felt
that students did not make adequate use of library databases and
tended to rely on Web resources that lacked authority. He concludes
The
findings have implications for library instruction as well as
subscription database budget allocations. Possible mitigating
measures that librarians may wish to accentuate include intense
promotion of subscription resources while integrating examples of
appropriate open Web use as a complement to subscription resource use
during library instruction, and finally reducing the number of
subscription database offerings to bare essentials.
Social
Learning Contributes to the Development of Information Literacy
Interactive
learning or social learning, while becoming a philosophy much under
discussion and clearly associated with the Open Educational Resources
movement, has been around in other forms for a long time. Libraries
have remained a stable part of our communities while at the same
time, if given the respect and consideration they deserve, can be
leaders in the change process by the very nature of their existence.
It is the librarian who brings the library alive. He/she is in a
key position to contribute important connections to the social
learning environment. The librarian is in a position to contribute
information and assist faculty in implementing new ways of acquiring
information literacy through an interactive medium such as College
2.0. Young,
J. (2008) describes the latest version of educational technology he
refers to as College 2.0 as another step in letting go of the
familiar top down traditional approaches to education and introducing
new versions of the interactive educational experience. One program,
Google docs, is an example of how a document or spreadsheet can be
worked on collaboratively by students because it is stored on the
Internet.
The
students all contributed to a shared document using Google Docs,
which anyone
in
the group could edit online from anywhere. All of the students were
essentially logged in to the same computer (in this case off at
Google somewhere), one adding a paragraph at the end, another
changing the font, and another rewriting the title. There was no
longer any need to worry about getting everyone in the same room at
the same time (Young, 2008).
In
the literature focused on the Open movement a question rises that is
only alluded to in most of the articles. Where is the librarian in
the picture? Mention is made of the library, often as a relic of
another age, but a visit to libraries today reveals them to be a
significant part of the community, either public or academic; they
are busy places where learning is a tangibly felt activity.
Wikipedia, in their discussion of Library 2.0,
describes the change in focus technology brings to traditional
library services
With
Library 2.0, library services are constantly updated and
reevaluated to best serve library users. Library 2.0 also
attempts to harness the library user in the design and
implementation of library services by encouraging feedback and
participation. Proponents of this concept expect that ultimately
the Library 2.0 model for service will replace traditional,
one-directional service offerings that have characterized
libraries for centuries. With
information and ideas flowing in both directions – from the
library to the user and from the user to the library –
library services have the ability to evolve and improve on a
constant and rapid basis. The user is participant, co-creator,
builder and consultant – whether the product is virtual or
physical.
Additionally,
knowledge of technology tools encourages the integration of
individual and social learning. For example, blogging offers an
online interactive writing experience that, when engaged,
fulfills the social need for the establishment of voice, while it
also fosters the development of writing skills. Social written
expression can be refined grammatically by clarifying ideas,
first by writing freely with simple practice, and, as knowledge
increases, which then contributes to more scholarly expression.
By writing in a social context the student may be motivated to
improve his expression as opposed to writing strictly to meet the
expectations of an instructor. When librarians are familiar with
these technologies, and have an open door to collaborate with
professors in creating learning activities that increase
information literacy skills, achievement becomes an exciting
reality that fosters more learning and greater knowledge.
The
Librarian Brings It All Together
While
learning resources continue to increase and more universities follow
the example set at MIT in 2002 and contribute to OpenCourseWare, a
nagging question must be addressed.
How is the connection made between resources, instructors or learning
facilitators and students? Who brings it all together? Where
education has been institutionalized and held together by campus
life, change is often approached as one more thing to be harnessed,
analyzed and controlled through endless meetings and discussions of
theories and the mechanics of education, after which classes continue
to operate more or less as usual. This is not the climate where OER
will flourish. It may receive a passing glance or sections, learning
modules, may be incorporated into the curriculum, but generally it is
likely to be business as usual. It is not hard to recognize that most
textbooks cover much more information than can be covered thoroughly
in a given semester. It will take the deliberate effort of the many
to bring OER into the center of a solution that brings new life to
students, educators and librarians. The librarian is in a unique
position to give the Open movement the necessary thrust to bring its
various components and resources into the mainstream of the
educational experience of both students and educators today.
Conclusion
In
a global economy impacted by accessible information via the Internet,
independent, self sustained learning is rapidly becoming more common
and enhanced by the Open Educational Resources and other aspects of
the Open movement. While we consider becoming a life-long learner a
goal for our students, technology has opened the door, creating
endless possibilities to facilitate the achievement of this goal, by
giving us tools that foster learning as a way of life, rather than,
or perhaps in addition to, the lofty goal of education achieved with
supporting degrees. The resourceful librarian with vision, who stays
abreast and remains open to the changing trends in the educational
world, who is knowledgeable of available resources both print and
online, and also gains experience with changing technologies, becomes
an essential partner in the collaborative educational efforts of both
instructor and student. The academic library remains a place where
student and instructor are patrons by choice, engaging with
information and experiencing education. The librarian is both leader
and servant, a co-creator with students and educators in the social
learning community.
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