I found this sitting in my drafts from way back in Week1 or 2 of this course and either did not deem it finished or wanted to add more, but on re-reading what is here, there are some good points and questions.
Chapter 3 of Case’s book, Looking for information: A survey of research on information seeking, needs, and behavior, is devoted to a review of some of the more salient definitions of the concept, ‘information,’ which seems vital to the work of a teacher librarian, but to which I had not given much consideration. While it is possible to operate as a teacher librarian without academic reading and deep consideration of the concept of information, it is certainly beneficial to identify and reflect on whatever definition exists in one’s practice and pedagogy. I found that in thinking beyond the concept in whatever nominal way it exists, largely unexamined and outside of a particular sphere, I found patterns in how I use the term as an educator and acting, but unqualified, teacher librarian. The concept, something which figures heavily in day to day programming and teaching, has grown out of constructivist principles and aligns with established schools of thought on the matter.
While I have not considered my own working definition of information, the tenets of social constructivism are always active in the pedagogy of primary educators. Students bring their existing understanding of the world into learning. Information must find a way to belong. Some information will make sense based on pre-existing understanding, while some information requires manipulation and even confrontation in making sense and being adopted which is entirely aligned with what Cole shares about Dervin and Ruben and the ‘sense making school of thought’ (Case, 2006).
Floridi’s (2007) predictions of a frictionless infosphere is a vision of a world where the barrier between infosphere and existence itself is blurred or nearly non-existent. With developments in how information has come to exist digitally, and accessed so easily, he predicted an integration between the carbon based and offline ‘analog’ and the online and silicone based ‘digital’ previously unimaginable. An incomprehensible amount of data collected by objects all around us, informing us and predicting our needs seems something far beyond the scope of a school library. Information, in this sense, becomes something which seems to require no cataloguing, but existing in a constant flow of interactions. It would seem that information at this scale, data collected, collated, interpreted by articial intelligence in real time will transcend all notions of information to be shared and understood. Should this considerable personal data become available to us, will information literacy or fluency come to involve people accessing and analysing their own massive data footprint?
Case, D.O. (2006). Looking for Information—A Survey of Research on Information Seeking, Needs,and Behavior. Academic Press.
Luciano Floridi (2007) A Look into the Future Impact of ICT on Our Lives, The Information Society, 23(1), 59-64, DOI: 10.1080/01972240601059094
