Information and the gaining of understanding

It is suggested that, in addition to data, information and knowledge, the information sciences should focus on understanding, understood as a higher-order knowledge, with coherent and explanatory potential. The limited ways in which understanding has been addressed in the design of information systems, in studies of information behaviour, in formulations of information literacy, and in impact studies are briefly reviewed, and future prospects considered. The paper is an extended version of a keynote presentation given at the i3 conference in June 2015

Defining a self-evaluation digital literacy framework for secondary educators: the DigiLit Leicester project

Despite the growing interest in digital literacy within educational policy, guidance for secondary educators in terms of how digital literacy translates into the classroom is lacking. As a result, many teachers feel ill-prepared to support their learners in using technology effectively. The DigiLit Leicester project created an infrastructure for holistic, integrated change, by supporting staff development in the area of digital literacy for secondary school teachers and teaching support staff. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how the critique of existing digital literacy frameworks enabled a self-evaluation framework for practitioners to be developed. Crucially, this framework enables a co-operative, partnership approach to be taken to pedagogic innovation. Moreover, it enables social and ethical issues to underpin a focus on teacher-agency and radical collegiality inside the domain of digital literacy. Thus, the authors argue that the shared development framework constitutes a new model for implementing digital literacy aimed at transforming the provision of secondary education across a city

Being fluent and keeping looking

The complexities of the many concepts and models around information literacy are considered, and some personal views given as to how they may best be clarified, both theoretically and practically. A slightly adapted idea of the concept of information fluency can serve as a main general purpose for the promotion of information literacy, expressed as a more specific meta-model for the prevailing technological environment, and as still more specific components for a particular context. The focus of this relatively stable general formulation is on understanding, rather than skills or competences. It can incorporate the need for education, advice and counseling, as well as information provision, and with domain-specific literacies, as well as supporting personal information literacy

Diving deep into digital literacy:emerging methods for research

Literacy studies approaches have tended to adopt a position which enables ethnographic explorations of a wide range of ‘literacies’. An important issue arising is the new challenge required for researchers to capture, manage, and analyse data that highlight the unique character of practices around texts in digital environments. Such inquiries, we argue, require multiple elements of data to be captured and analysed as part of effective literacy ethnographies. These include such things as the unfolding of digital texts, the activities around them, and features of the surrounding social and material environment. This paper addresses these methodological issues drawing from three educationally focused studies, and reporting their experiences and insights within uniquely different contexts. We deal with the issue of adopting new digital methods for literacy research through the notion of a ‘deep dive’ to explore educational tasks in classrooms. Through a discussion of how we approached the capture and analysis of our data, we present methods to better understand digital literacies in education. We then outline challenges posed by our methods, how they can be used more broadly for researching interaction in digital environments, and how they augment transdisciplinary debates and trends in research methods

Libraries and open society; Popper, Soros and digital information

This paper examines the role of libraries and information services, in promoting the ‘open society’ espoused by Karl Popper and George Soros. After a brief discussion of the nature of an ‘open society’, the paper covers the role played by provision of knowledge and information, of new technology, particularly the Internet, and of critical thinking and digital literacy in the development of this form of society. Conclusions are drawn for the role of libraries and librarians, with seven general principles suggested: • provision of access to a wide variety of sources without ‘negative’ restriction or censorship • provision of ‘positive’ guidance on sources, based on open and objective criteria • a recognition that a ‘free flow of information’ though essential, is not sufficient • a recognition that provision of factual information, while valuable, is not enough • a need for a specific concern for the effect of new ICTs, and the Internet in particular • promotion of critical thinking and digital literacy • a need for explicit consideration of the ethical values of librarie