Introduction

We can no longer think just in terms of 2.0. Its transformation into social media and merger with mobile devices require librarians to look right across the information landscape for the literacies that are required in the future. This has been a journey of discovery for me: for the first time many things have begun to make sense, and I want to share that vision with you. I hope that you last the whole journey and do not lapse into sleep and swerve dangerously into the ditch on the way!

I believe we have to survey the whole information landscape if we are to understand the complex blend of literacies that we, as educators, and our students, as learners and 21st-century citizens, have to experience. Many writers have attempted to do this. As we go through some of these explorations we may see occasional shafts of light through the trees and clearings along the way, before we grasp that what we see keeps subtly changing and will always depend on the context.

A confusion of literacies

In recent years there have been a number of attempts to create maps of literacies, and this has sometimes implied that information literacy (IL) is no longer the central literacy for the 21st century. Twenty-first-century literacy is ‘the set of abilities and skills where aural, visual, and digital literacy overlap’ (New Media Consortium, 2005). As we have seen already, literacies can be divided into three main types: generic, situated and transforming. From the first type, Bawden (2001) traced a variety of skill-based literacies that fitted the requirements of the more varied information environment with its new technologies. This included the development of computer and, later, ICT literacy, which initially was frequently confused with IL. I will now briefly outline some of these literacies.

Digital literacy (DL)

This is ‘the ability to understand and use information in multiple formats from a wide variety of sources when it is presented via computers’ (Gilster, 1997). Gilster's view of DL went wider than the internet, which he saw as only one major digital source. It was more about literacy in the digital age. Discussions about IL and DL have not impinged much on the library practitioner (Bawden, 2001).

Web 2.0 has become social media and is here to stay. The opening up of the web to everyone, and the authoring and sharing capabilities inherent in this, have been embraced by libraries. We may not be speaking about Library 2.0 any more, but the possibilities opened up for libraries have by no means been exhausted. Take-up has been variable and the opportunities for marketing have sometimes obscured the educational possibilities exemplified by IL.

In the past, IL has too often been seen as a higher education (HE) concern. We should see it as a process, from childhood, through school, college, university and into lifelong learning. This only begins to make sense if we always view IL as conditioned by its context: the social conditions, the discipline and the language used within its discourse. IL is a social construct, and what it means to be information literate will vary according to the context. It will even vary according to the individuals within a group, because the participants will be creating their own meaning. The concept of informed learning (see Chapter 6) is helpful here because it explains how students can use information to learn, and then reflect upon their own learning. The curriculum can allow us to use information to develop individual and collective exploration of information, to enable learners to develop their own experience. It is no longer about rote learning, or being directive in terms of the ‘best’ way to do things: we do not write prescriptions, we encourage and guide.

IL is not just for librarians: yet amongst librarians is mostly where it is discussed, and it is rarely discussed outside the library silo. Other players have actually been interested in IL for years, but they call it different things – critical thinking, workplace skills, learning to learn and so on. IL is far more than bibliographic instruction, user education or how to use a library. In our policy documents we may speak about IL, but in our marketing and delivery we adapt our language to suit the consumer. We need to take a broad view, work with colleagues from other departments and be as unafraid of veering into their territory as they often are when they venture into ours. IL is far bigger than librarians, but we are extremely well placed to help with the multifaceted challenge that is 21st-century IL.

We could easily have coined the phrase ‘Information Literacy 2.0’ when we wrote our first book. There was very little usage of this term at that time, but we have no regrets. To use such a label then would have threatened hours of creating a definition, satisfying no one! Since then, Špiranec and Zorica (2010) have interpreted Information Literacy 2.0 as a subset of information literacy (IL), and we shall return to this later. It was an exciting time, and I believe it was useful then to concentrate more on how the tools could be used to deliver IL. We could, however, have spent more time considering the effects it would have on what it meant to be information literate. That is the aim of this chapter!

What is IL?

In the past the seemingly endless debates about what information literacy is and whether it is a good label have been a huge bore. It is so easy to say that we must define something before we can do anything about it. Most practising librarians who are involved with educating their users just get on with it and don't agonize over the niceties. It concerns me that much of the research in IL never really permeates down to practitioners, not least because of the portentous language used in the name of scholarship to make it appear appropriately impressive. How many paradigm shifts have you read about? Should I be concerned about the ontological and epistemological positions of my praxis?! Julien and Williamson (2010) are similarly concerned about the disconnect between researchers and practitioners, but for rather different reasons. They are concerned that researchers criticize the IL standards approach but, with some exceptions, are not replacing it with anything based on sufficient observed behaviour.

When necessary, we have to provide IL documentation for institutional learning and teaching plans or reviews, and these tend to refer to generally recognized frameworks like the Big Six or SCONUL Seven Pillars. This can be extremely useful to aid discussion and understanding among colleagues from outside the library. The danger is that they become the blueprint for our IL initiatives day by day. Such frameworks too easily become a series of tick-boxes for skills development. Markless (2009) questioned whether we should ‘continue to present students with generic IL frameworks, models and processes’: IL has always been more complex than this.

I have delivered many presentations suggesting that the IL and Web 2.0 connection might be overplayed (Godwin, 2009a). How much evidence is there that libraries and librarians are really viewing the information landscape as different, requiring Web 2.0 to be included and used to teach IL? How much impact is it having on student learning?

Luo (2010) conducted a survey of IL instruction librarians who were members of the Information Literacy Instruction Discussion List sponsored by the Association of College and Research Libraries. Fifty valid responses were received, which were then followed up by eight interviews which revealed some great ideas of how librarians have employed blogs, wikis, social bookmarking sites, YouTube and Flickr. Luo separates his respondents into those who use Web 2.0 for their own purposes, those who use them for facilitating delivery of IL to students and those who use the facilities of certain Web 2.0 tools to enhance the teaching of specific aspects of IL. An example of the latter was where the respondent had used Flickr to get the students to collect some digital images and apply attribution, in order to explain Creative Commons, and then doing a similar exercise with Wikipedia. Luo concludes that ‘it is indisputable that Web 2.0 is becoming more and more prevalent and its value to facilitating IL instruction is recognized’ (Luo, 2010, 39), but more research is needed, particularly around assessing how the students react to it and how it affects learning outcomes. There is still a feeling that students regard social media as their own province and resent their use for academic purposes.

It is possible to get some clues regarding take-up from Tripathi (2009), who surveyed university libraries: 82 in the UK, 151 in the USA, 37 in Canada and 7 in Australia. Of the 45% that had blogs, 20.53% used them for search tips and 8.53% for IL. Most of the 11% that used podcasts and the 6% that used vodcasts did so for some IL purpose. Tripathi also notes that the 300 University Grants Commission-recognized universities in India had yet to start using Web 2.0 tools. In the Philippines, Lapuz (2009) enthusiastically and successfully championed their use in library schools, but found school teacher-librarians much less receptive.

Information Literacy Meets Library 2.0 was something of a journey into the unknown. The Web 2.0 ‘characters’, as I often referred to them in my talks, were new, and to some, exciting. It was a fun time to write a book and we didn't think there'd be a sequel: despite requests from Facet Publishing, we would not emulate the Hollywood blockbusters and spawn another offering. So what changed my mind? One evening, while I was ambling home from the bus stop, reflecting gently to the strains of Telemann (or was it Siouxsie and the Banshees?) via an iPod, the possibility of a book seized me. A few days later I visited Jo Parker, my fellow editor, at the Open University and very tentatively suggested a sequel. To my great surprise she agreed to come on board – and here we have it.

Web 2.0 has affected the delivery of information literacy (IL), and somehow seems to have also affected what it means to be information literate. There has been much IL research questioning its nature, and I suspect that most of this has not reached the majority of practitioners. Indeed, I suspect there is something of a disconnect between IL research and IL practitioners. They often produce the MEGO (my eyes glaze over) effect on me, and I suspect that I am not alone! This is on the one hand understandable, due to the complex language used in some research articles, but on the other hand regrettable, because important insights are being gained that all practitioners should know about. My selection of these is bound to be incomplete, and I apologize in advance for any MEGO effects caused by my own writing! In the first chapters of this book I shall set the scene with a detailed discussion of what has happened to information literacy and Web 2.0 in the past three years. What was Library 2.0? Was it over-hyped? How did it connect with the so-called web generation? Then we will look at how social media have become mainstream and where there have been successes and failures. We will then examine what effects Web 2.0 has had on information literacy.

Introduction

The speed of change fascinates me. With the coming of the internet everything changed, and with Web 2.0 it has changed yet again. YouTube took up more bandwidth in 2007 than the entire internet in 2000. Many mobile phones now have more computing power and internet capability than the average home computer of 2000 (Thomas and Brown, 2011). However, education changes slowly. Institutions are changing far more slowly than are modes of learning, which are becoming more participatory and collaborative (Davidson and Goldberg, 2009). Think of your own workplace and your own colleagues and friends. Real change is slow. In this chapter I will cover some important likely trends and what they may mean to us, as IL practitioners, in the future.

Streams of information and coping with the flow

Information overload is going to increase. This is not just the amount of information being added to the web every day, and its being searchable via Google. It is about coping with the flow of information: the flood of RSS feeds, blog posts or tweets. We need to be able to ‘sample’ the flow (Rheingold, 2010). The tools we use to do this will change, evolve and interrelate. The challenge will still be to channel the right stuff and to control it. Web 3.0 could bring search engines that bring together results into a synthesized report – but many of the promised improvements in search have not yet occurred (Herring, 2011). So we can still say ‘Information overload is not the problem. It's filter failure’ (Shirky, 2008). Boyd (2010) places us all in a stream of networked content that we grab as it goes by, as opposed to broadcast models of information and entertainment. In Chapter 4, Phil Bradley and Karen Blakeman have shown how search engines now take our location, occupation, interests and social media activity into consideration when presenting results to us. How many of our users (or our librarian colleagues, for that matter) realize that different results appear for the same search in different locations? In a world where Google is so trusted, it is important that someone should inform people that the results they get will vary: from person to person, from place to place, at the same time and at different times.

When Information Literacy Meets Library 2.0 was written in 2008 it was still ‘cool’ to use the 2.0 epithet. We did not attempt detailed definitions and skirted over any distinctions between Web 2.0 and Library 2.0. Now that the general enthusiasm has died down and scepticism about its merits has surfaced, we need to examine what it was all about in the first place and how it has turned out in practice. We shall see that there has been widespread adoption of certain elements of the 2.0 bandwagon, particularly in awareness, if not in the practice of all librarians. The importance of 2.0 in connecting to the so-called Net Generation was overplayed. The CIBER reports (2008) have demonstrated that the ‘geeks’ were in the minority. Now that the bubble has burst, we can begin to appreciate that social media (aka Web 2.0 tools) are here to stay. They have now become mainstream.

What was Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 about?

In 2004 something fundamental happened to the world wide web. It became a place for collaboration, more personal and driven by us, the users. The web itself, not extra software that had to be downloaded, became our platform and made it possible for us to share our thoughts, photos and videos and build or take part in building websites easily. The availability of the easy-to-use web tools for creating blogs and wikis and engaging in social networking seemed especially appealing to the young. This led university staff too, including librarians, to realize that it could be advantageous to start using them, both for plugging into their users’ wavelength and for their marketing and educational potential. Then Michael Casey in his blog Library Crunch came up with the term Library 2.0, seeing it as a user-centred environment that helped people to learn and to fulfil their information needs and that also encouraged them to both create and share content (Sodt and Summey, 2009): ‘Library 2.0 will look different for each library, based in part on users’ diverse needs’ (Casey and Savastinuk, 2007, 37). Library 2.0 was about constant change brought about through evaluation to see whether we were meeting our expected outcomes. It was about user participation, feedback and reaching out to new and existing users (Casey and Savastinuk, 2007). Brian McManus (2009) uses Web 2.0 and Library 2.0 interchangeably, and this has usually been my own approach.

Introduction

Libraries are increasingly developing services that take into account the massive impact of mobile devices on their users. This chapter looks at what this might mean for information literacy.

Some databases and library catalogues have mobile versions. Growing numbers of our users have the devices to access these. When a library user is as likely to search for information on a mobile phone, tablet or hand-held gaming device as on a fixed PC in a physical library, this could change the concept of what it means to be information literate. How will mobile search change the discovery, evaluation and reuse of information? We will first consider whether we need to develop a new lens through which to view the literacies required by our clients. From these theoretical considerations we will then proceed to a quick review of experience of mobile devices gained at two UK new universities: Bedfordshire and Huddersfield.

Libraries could presently be in their greatest period of change: we have moved on from the hybrid library, we are facing a public perception of electronic delivery of all content, and Web 2.0 has given everyone the potential to author and to share. Now add to this the phenomenal spread of mobile devices the world over. Information is becoming mobile and social. It also appears that the economic recession that has affected large parts of the world may not slow these developments. Librarians must spend more time over coming months conditioning their services to the mobile environment.

How does mobile technology affect information literacy?

The image of young students who are continually wired into the online environment, texting and multi-tasking, has been overdone. It has been easy to exaggerate the differences of the web generation. The CIBER reports (Rowlands et al., 2008) have done much to debunk the hype that used to surround them. The truth is that we have all become part of the web generation, to a greater or lesser extent. Consider mobile devices: their adoption is across the whole of society. But what will it mean when searching is done on the move and with an expectation of immediate access to information? It is likely to involve an extension of existing trends whereby search is carried out at speed, with lack of reflection on the results and less reading of the actual content.

The pervasiveness of mobiles gives a great new opportunity for librarians to reach their users. Within the context of the changing landscape mapped by Google generation reports (CIBER, 2008), information literacy (IL) remains a crucial deficit area. The use of mobiles for IL could be seen as an extension of Web 2.0, e.g. podcasts and screen casts. These are becoming mainstream for the new librarian. Adoption of mobile devices in libraries is in its early days because of the limitations of the technology and the variety of devices owned. There are serious limitations, and it is time to experiment. This chapter discusses the potential, looks at present practice and suggests ways forward.

The mobile background

By the end of 2008, there were over four billion mobile subscriptions worldwide, representing 61% of the population, and there were 335 million broadband subscribers. By contrast, just under a quarter of the 6.17 billion world population use the internet (International Telecommunication Union, 2009). Mobile devices are so widespread that the most common items we carry around with us are keys, money and the mobile phone. The ECAR study 2008 in the USA (Salaway et al., 2008) found that 66.1% had internet-capable mobile phones, and of these 25.9% accessed the internet once a week or more. In 2007, 14% accessed the internet on a mobile device on a typical day and 32% had never used the internet on a mobile at any time. This had changed in 2009 to 23% and 38% respectively (Pew Internet & American Life Project, 2009). As McIntosh (2008) said ‘it's about time schools sharpened their focus on how they can help students power up their learning with their mobile devices, rather than have them power down at the school door.’ I believe the same is true for libraries.

Another way of engaging?

Much has been written about finding ways of engaging with the web generation. The CIBER report has transformed this debate and brought the realization that we are all part of this generational change and exhibit some of its so-called major characteristics, such as preferring to learn via small chunks of information (CIBER, 2008). Crucially, it found that not all users are equally technically proficient – geeks are in the minority, and the lack of IL is a real concern.