Week 3

For this week I chose an article about information literacy, one on transliteracy, and one that ties the concepts together.  Originally, I wanted to do all articles on transliteracy, unfortunately, the term is so new that not many articles have been written about it.  The word is especially new in the library world and doesn’t even really exist in the archive world.  Spell check doesn’t even recognize it!

Introducing Transliteracy: What does it mean in academic libraries?

By Tom Ipri

From: College & Research Libraries News 71 no 10 532-3, 567 N 2010

This short article was one of the few I found on the subject transliteracy.  Because it is a fairly new term it still has a working definition rather than a concrete one.  It’s so new that not many library professionals understand or even know about the term.  Ipri explains that transliteracy is the relationship between people and technology specifically the social technologies. It’s about expanding how people communicate across various media—facebook, chat, instant message, etc.  This is a difficult concept for academic libraries to understand because it originally developed outside the library field, however, it is an important one.

Our Information Literacy Heritage: From Evolution to Revolution

By Cory Laverty

From Feliciter; 2009, Vol. 55 Issue 3, p88-91

This next article, Our Information Literacy Heritage: From Evolution to Revolution, develops the idea that information literacy has evolved over the years since the introduction of technologies such as the internet.  As Laverty explains that the most widely used definition, "To be information literate, a

person must be able to recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information" (ALA, p. 1) was constructed in  1989.  That was before everyone had a computer and the internet was a common thing; therefore, the definition may not encompass all aspects of information literacy. Since students used tools such as Google, YouTube, and Facebook the definition continues to evolve.  As Laverty concludes “…paper captures something of where we are now, but not where we need to go.”

 Millennial Students' Mental Models of Search: Implications for Academic Librarians and Database Developers

By Lucy Holman

From: The Journal of Academic Librarianship Volume 37, Issue 1, January 201, pages 19-27

The final article ties the concepts of information literacy with the concepts of transliteracy.  While this article doesn’t specifically come out and use the term transliteracy it states problems that deal with it.  Students, now, use different modes to acquire information—it doesn’t not all come from a single source.  The article talked about the different ways library students collect their information—Google, library databases, online encyclopedias, online data bases, etc.  While Holman goes into detail about mental models (She defines it as “A mental model is an internal cognitive representation of a tool or system that helps one master it”) of search mechanisms that isn’t my main focus of the paper.  I wasn’t interested in specific numbers of how students searched and their problems with spelling in searching.  I wanted to know how this all connected to transliteracy and informational literacy.  As Holman writes, “Academic librarians who teach information literacy will face the need to reexamine how college students today search for and retrieve information and rethink the way they teach younger students search strategies and resource evaluation.”  Based on all the definitions discussed above I come to the conclusion that because we live in a world of transliteracy the way librarians teach information literacy needs to change.

In our last class we looked at Youtube and the screencast of good and bad videos.  As a class we came to conclusions what we liked and didn’t like about a few select videos.  I found this part of the class extremely helpful as I prepare for our screencast assignment.  I’ve never made one before and I was pretty nervous, however, after going over the pros and cons of each youtube video I had a better idea of what to do.  For example, my screencast should have an ending, not much background noise, good volume, etc.  Plus, I am glad that Kristin recommended a specific tool because I wouldn’t have had any idea what to use.  I am finding that Jing is pretty easy to use, however, unless required to I probably won’t make screencast in the future.