Posts Tagged ‘knowledge’

12
Feb
2021

Online HE about learning

categories: academic library, online learning

Why online HE should be about learning, not teaching

https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20210126142422302

The gate is now wide open

Teachers used to be the gatekeepers to information, to knowledge. The successive inventions of writing and reading, print, the library, and then the World Wide Web, mean that we teachers are no longer the gatekeepers.

Schools, universities and teachers to some extent remain the gatekeepers to knowledge, the definers of what comprises valid knowledge. We do this, of course, through holding the ultimate educational power – the power to assess.

But it is not clear how long we teachers will, or should, hold this power. Increasingly, students, and employers, nations, cultures, many groups in our societies, rightly want a say in defining what is valid knowledge, a valid curriculum.

Knowledge isn’t enough

Each year, vast amounts of new knowledge are produced. Also, each year, vast amounts of current knowledge become wrong, or redundant, or both. Knowledge dies. In some subjects, a significant proportion of what was taught in the first year will have died by the time the students who learned it graduate. So, what is education for?

Machines are doing more and more of the work

The bad news is, we are getting squeezed out of work. The good news is, we are getting squeezed up, into ever more interesting work. We will be able to stay ahead for a long time; because there are always still more difficult and important and exciting things for us to do, increasingly with the support of our increasingly capable machines.

Employers want graduates to be job-ready. They also want graduates to be fluent in the five Cs: Creativity, Communication, Collaboration and Criticality as well as Competence. Not all university education currently develops the first four Cs. Very little university education currently gives high priority to their development. Rarely are they formally assessed.

Changing outcomes, changing pedagogies

The architecture of a university expresses its views about pedagogy. This remains true with the great leap online. The old pedagogic architecture – of teaching as (mainly) telling, of learning as (mainly) listening and reading, of access in and through the library to specified stored knowledge, and of assessment as (mainly) recalling, repeating back what has been learned, perhaps with some application or interpretation – has for the most part been recreated in digital form, with varying degrees of success

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more on online education in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=online+education

30
Jun
2017

knowledge information

categories: information literacy

Information literacy: An exploration

https://www.academia.edu/33257496/Information_literacy_An_exploration

My notes: this is a 1997 article
the explosion of information is not accompanied by understanding of information.

p. 337 However, if one accepts a definition of information as a process rather than as a thing, then such policies can at best form a framework for the creation of mean- ing by the individuals or groups who are creating information by bring- ing their knowledge to bear on the data available to them

Data acquisition, maintenance and delivery are a vital part of organisational life, but problems arise when we fail to recognise the necessary links to knowledge.

p. 338 However, just teaching users the practi- calities of applications has been seen to be deficient. It leads to an exces- sive focus on ‘how’ to use a particular application rather than on ‘why’ it should be used 13.

p. 379 Information literacy is a stage above computer literacy, the latter usually implying the ability to use a personal computer . My note: some librarians assume that “computer literacy” is the same as “digital literacy” and were trying to convince me that information literacy is succeeding digital literacy, where it is the other way around

p. 380 There are those within the LIS community who warn that librar- ians should not stray into areas that are not appropriate. Behrens points out that the future is likely to see an increased emphasis on a part- nership between librarians and educators. My note  another glaring discrepancy between myself and the librarians at SCSU

p. 386 The phrase information literacy has some value in expressing what might need to be done if the aims of information policies are to be made concrete. It points to the need for an emphasis on the awareness of the individual using data of a range of issues. These are not, it has been argued, to be limited to issues of storage and retrieval but have, centrally, to be concerned with issues of definition and meaning. These issues might be tackled in this order: what are the issues in this field surround- ing the nature of knowledge (i.e. how do we formulate questions); how might data be best acquired, stored, etc. in order to answer these ques- tions? (this might well best be paralleled by training in computer literacy); and what factors, both social and individual, place constraints on our ability to use the data?

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more on information literacy in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=information+literacy