Literacy & Content Creation

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Forgive me if I’m behind the times, but I don’t always get to things that I see in Educause right away. I just read an article by Joan Lipnicott called “Student Content Creators: Convergence of Literacies” (PDF) that argues that information & technology literacy skills can be combined through a more rigorous or proscribed curricular integration of content creation mediated by technology. Lipnicott says,

I suggest using a framework that focuses on higher education’s need to prepare students to be content creators within their disciplinary or professional specialties. Delineating the skills that students need in order to create content within the disciplinary context could be a more meaningful way of encouraging the integration of a wide variety of skills into the curriculum.

One one level, I think she’s right. She’s right because students’ use of information within disciplines is often different. That being said, I’m not sure I really understand how creating contect via some technological medium is different than the skills that the ACRL lays out in its Information Literacy Standards for Higher Education. Specifically, I’m looking at Standard 4 which says “The information literate student, individually or as a member of a group, uses information effectively to accomplish a specific purpose.” And, one of the performance indicators of this standard is “The information literate student communicates the product or performance effectively to others.” As the outcomes for this performance indicator suggests, content creation, is as much a part of information literacy as anything else. After all, once you find information you have to do something with it - whether that be internalize the information for your own self or write a paper or produce a documentary that you upload to YouTube. Whether she or others call it technological literacy or media literacy, it’s all the same to me and falls under the heading of information literacy.

She says in her article that students need the skills because new graduates are often looked at by employers as those who can help them create digital content. And, she quotes a few scholars like Elizabeth Daley who says “those who are truly literate in the twenty-first century will be those who learn to both read and write the multimedia language of the screen.” Or, Henry Jenkins who says that new media literacy should be taught alongside traditional written literacy. I don’t disagree with either of those scholars who feel that the Internet and multimedia technologies need to be used and taught in schools. I think that they’re just as important as writing a paper was and still is.

I guess the thing that I don’t get is why they are separated and she acknowledges this in the last paragraph of her paper. “it is difficult to separate out where media literacy ends and where technology literacy begins—or where information literacy begins and where technology literacy ends.” Further, she says,

It is time to frame the discussion of literacies in the context of academic work products rather than in the context of organizational structures (e.g., library, computing, English department, media department).

That basically is a reiteration of what I quoted at the beginning of this post. These skills are not just library skills or English skills, they are everyone’s skills. Everyone is responsible. As a librarian, I know that I’ve never wanted information literacy, which I feel encompasses all of the literacies she describes, to be in the sole possession of the library or librarians. Serving on the information literacy sub-committee of the general education committee here at CSU has only reinforced the notion that teaching students to be information literate in all its forms and manifestsions is not the library’s responsibility. It is the academy’s responsibility.

I’m reminded of the DIKW (Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom) hierarchy that we discussed in library school and I think it’s appropriate now as an illustrative tool.

As you can see, we want information literate students to have the wisdom to do the right things, to make smart decisions regarding all of the information that is bombarding them. That means that they can research and write a paper using the many resources that are available to them. It also means doing a project using a digital video camera (as Lipnicott suggests, being a content creator) if that is the best way to convey the information that they want to get out there whether that be for a professor or for a job that they have after they graduate.

In sum, the skills necessary for becoming an information literate student may depend and differ based on the discipline that one is in and that’s fine. However, I think that if we have a common understanding of what students need to learn (or at the very least things we have introduced them to) by the time they graduate so that they can be successful in whatever career path they may choose, that’s what we should be striving for. You can’t give them all of the information in the world and tell them to internalize it. You can, however, build the skills and abilities necessary to find, evaluate, and use information that they can employ after graduation (i.e., become lifelong learners or giving them DIKW skills). That’s information literacy in a nutshell.

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Tags: DIKW, higher education, information literacy