Crossing the Threshold:

From Old to New IL Standards

Colleen Burgess, Whitney Kemble,Sarah Shujah, Silvia Vong, and Jenaya Webb

The ACRL Standards

The Standards required revision to address:

● students as content creators, consumers, and evaluators of information.

● changes in learning environments.● the need to position Information Literacy as a set of

concepts & practices integral to student learning. ● the changing information landscape.

The 2000 ACRL Standards

Standard: 2.1 The information literate student accesses needed information effectively and efficiently

Performance Indicator C: Investigates the scope, content, and organization of information retrieval systems (ACRL ILCSHE p.9)

Limitations The 2000 ACRL Standards:

● don’t address knowledge creation as a collaborative

effort.

● don’t emphasize the necessary dispositions required for

learning at all levels.

● promote the concept of information literacy as

piecemeal bits of skills and knowledge.

The New Framework...

● provides a holistic framework for IL.

● promotes the skills, dispositions, abilities, and knowledge practices required in today’s decentralized information environment.

● encourages faculty and librarian collaboration toward

effective IL education.

New to the Framework: Threshold Concepts

...Threshold concepts are the core ideas and processes in any discipline that define the discipline...They are the central concepts that we want our students to understand and put into practice, that encourage them to think and act

like practitioners themselves (Hofer, Townsend, and Brunetti 2012,

387-88)

The Threshold Concepts

● Authority Is Constructed and Contextual

● Information Creation as a Process

● Information Has Value

● Research as Inquiry

● Scholarship Is a Conversation

● Searching Is Strategic

Authority is Constructed and Contextual:Dispositions

Learners developing IL abilities:

● motivate themselves to find authoritative sources, recognizing that authority may be manifested in unexpected ways.

● question traditional notions of granting authority and recognize the value of diverse ideas and worldviews.

● are conscious that maintaining these attitudes and actions requires frequent self-evaluation.

Authority is Constructed and Contextual:Knowledge Practices

Learners developing IL abilities:

● recognize that authoritative content may be packaged formally or informally.

● acknowledge that they themselves are developing their own authoritative voices in a particular area and recognize the responsibility this entails.

● understand the increasingly social nature of the information ecosystem.

Authority is Constructed and Contextual: Self Assessments

● Have students look at a blog, a video on YouTube, a collection of tweets regarding a contemporary event. Ask them to describe how they would analyze and evaluate the authority the author(s) of the information.

● Ask students to create a citation "web" using a citation analysis database, and conduct a content analysis of the linked authors by affiliation

and now...

the fishbowl discussion!