Digital dieting. Please read this book!

I encourage you to read Digital Dieting if you are a teacher in higher education. Or work in a library and/or work with information literacy. Or if you're simply interested in the combination of technology and education. Tara Brabazon writes in a language that will appeal to you. I promise! (Sort of ...)

This blog is a sorry chapter in my online presence. What started out as good intentions, ended up with just that - good intentions. It's been two months since I last wrote anything useful. Which is not good enough, I tell myself. But the truth is, I probably won't do any better this year. My workdays are far too busy to allow much reading or writing. And in the evenings, I'm usually too exhausted to be creative. But fortunately, Christmas is perfect for reading, so I managed to finish this book - which I started early in the autumn.

Brabazon is a professor of education at Charles Sturt University in Australia. I've never seen her live, but there are plenty of material online from vodcasts, lectures and presentations, all showing her as passionate and deeply engaging teacher/speaker. She writes as she speaks - with fervour and passion, but clear and rational.

Digital Dieting wants us to stop and think about the technology we use in our teaching. Brabazon does not want us to stop using technology, but to limit it and make informed choices when we do use it. Some might say she exaggerates a bit. She rages against the iPad for instance, against our society of waste and devices we don't need, against PowerPoint, against bad teaching and lazy students, and not the least, against HE managers without the necessary competence.

One of her important messages is to maintain the quality of higher education on a level which produces the best possible students and citizens. Which means not dumbing down to make students’ lives easier. Which means maintaining a clear divide between education and leisure, between education and entertainment. Education should not be like Facebook, where everything is about mundane status updates and clicks and likes. Education must make students struggle, meet challenges, break barriers. That is when learning occurs. Students need to be told this. And teachers need to teach accordingly. I couldn't agree more!  

I don't necessarily agree with everything she writes, but that's not the point. Being technology friendly myself, the book has made me reconsider some aspects of my own information literacy teaching, and hopefully this will benefit the students.  

Brabazon, Tara (2013): Digital Dieting: From Information Obesity to Intellectual Fitness. Ashgate, Farnham.

 

Everyday is silent and grey?

I have just read the book Humor and Information literacy by Joshua Vossler and Scott Scheidlower. The book is directed at librarian teachers, and contains many good suggestions on how to make your lectures more appealing to students. It is easy to read and have lots of examples and reading it is not a complete waste of time. This little blog post is not about the book, however, it is about what seems to be the fundamental idea behind the book: Information literacy/library instruction/librarians is/are so boring we need to include a handful of jokes.This is exemplified by the following passage: "I cannot imagine that anyone who walks into a library instruction session expects an ideal performance. They are too busy dreading the coming hour of boredom". The authors cite someone else here, so this is not necessarily their viewopint.

I agree with the fact that some library instruction can be dreadfully boring. But so can chemistry, business or art history lectures. But I have yet to meet a lecturer in chemistry who thinks his subject is boring. What have we librarians done to get this reputation, and not least, to think these thoughts about the profession we have voluntarily chosen to work in for a longer or shorter part of our lives?

I don't find my work boring at all. I think I have a truly interesting job which I am very passionate about. I work with the dissemination of knowledge - what could be more exciting than that? When I teach information literacy I teach students how find, use and evaluate information. I try to make them think critically about what they read and write. I try to make them learn more and better. If I actually found these topics boring I should not be allowed to go near a classroom to teach.

My point here is not that I think students find our classes fantastically fascinating. I know they are bored. But they are bored in almost any classroom. I am frequently bored myself when attending lectures, usually because I'm too tired too pay attention. My point is that we as librarians must have another attitude to our job. We apparently need more confidence and more enthusiasm. Without these we shouldn't be teaching. It's as simple as that. An enthusiastic teacher can make anything interesting.

Back to the book: please don't hesitate to bring humour into your teaching, but not because what you're saying is intrinsically boring, but to make your lecture EVEN BETTER.

Vossler, Joshua and Scott Scheilower (2011): Humor and information literacy : practical techniques for library instruction. Santa Barabara: Libraries Unlimited.