Since starting my new job as an academic instruction librarian, I have taught two information literacy sessions for an English Composition 101 class. (You’ll notice that the title of this post employs the terms “Library Instruction” to describe the skills librarians are teaching students in order to survive in college. The truth is that Library Instruction is clearly having an identity crisis: what you may refer to as Bibliographic Instruction is also what someone else refers to as Library Instruction or Information Literacy. That said, and as another sidenote, it’s a wonder I’ve been able to effectively communicate the essence of Information Literacy skills to students. Oh yeah: and here’s another term you may have heard that is new to me and pretty much the most wretched-sounding: “Information Fluency.”)
I digress. Clearly.
Anyway, the class I was teaching was an English 101 class which is the first of two required undergraduate English Composition courses. It is my intention to build and maintain a standard instruction curriculum while also respecting the need to leave enough wiggle room for innovation, improvisation, and teaching philosoplhy and style. I highly value this space for creativity in the classroom and feel like now that I am a librarian-teacher it is my responsibility to honor those spaces that have not been “scripted” and take some risks to keep classes fresh and relevant. And by fresh and relevant, I don’t only mean electronic classrooms and technologies. I am clearly rambling now and opening up a much larger discussion.
To bring back the focus, I thought that using Flickr to teach catalog and database searching would be one way to make information literacy courses relevant to students, particularly undergraduates. I was interested in emphasizing the importance of choosing key words to describe a subject (“key” being very key here.) Basically, what I did was take photographs of things inside of the library and ask students to form groups and tag the photos. This activity was brief and gave me the chance to try something new and relatively spontaneous (The muse always comes when I’m in bed at 2:00 a.m. the night before I teach.) It also was a great way to break up what could have been an hour-plus long session with me yammering endlessly about information needs, database selection, storage and retrieval, and search strategies.
I think that the activity may have been but could be more effective in demonstrating the concept of controlled vocabulary and key word searching. It was a new way of having students participate in the process of creating and naming information. This activity enabled students to see that an image of a book is described by different people in different ways and these differences in language and interpretation complicate our ability to categorize and locate information.
On another hand, students can speculate on the advantages of a standardized system of language–especially in catalogs and databases. Maybe it is here that we see how folksonomies and taxonomies can coexist and even compliment each other. Rather than replacing one system with another, we can convey the importance of understanding the differences between and the purposes behind each system. In addition to seeing the complimentary relationship between folksonomies and taxonomies, I think it’s also a possibility to show with this Flickr activity the downside of user-created vocabularies: here is where librarians can reassert themselves as caretakers and as agents in the information retrieval process. I don’t expect students to aspire to become catalog-loving librarians by any means. (Just because I’m a weirdo doesn’t mean you have to be.) But there may just be a way to employ tag clouds and 2.0 applications to show how they fail somehow, at least where the catalog succeeds, in uniting subjects under a common language (albeit outdated and euphemistic).
