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Pedagogy 1.2 (2001) 425-427



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Roundtable

Technology, Collaboration, and Dialogue:
A Librarian's View

Helene Williams


Computer technology has brought about an unprecedented number of dialogues in education--within ourselves as teachers and with colleagues, administrators, and students--and The Dialogic Classroom provides a useful discussion of the issues inherent in adding electronic elements to an already complex curricular equation. Allison Fraiberg poses some valid questions about scalability and support and how to gain the attention of campus administrators with dialogic projects aimed at small audiences. Given the fiscal and political realities of higher education today, it is difficult for individual software creator-teachers to promote their pedagogical goals in a larger venue. However, the key to larger success may well be the same as what made these smaller projects work: collaboration and dialogue.

Collaboration is evident in all the projects described in Jeffrey R. Galin and Joan Latchaw's book; at the very least, the teachers and students in the dialogic classroom collaborate "to make sense of an increasingly technological world" (ix). Several of their projects are collaborations between colleagues within and across departments or campuses. Collaboration with librarians, however, is noticeably absent. Michael Day does mention pairing up with a librarian for Internet orientation sessions (153), but librarians can provide much more substantial support.

In the introductory essay Galin and Latchaw discuss the goal of incorporating technology into courses: to create better teachers and stronger students. They add that these students then "engage in critical inquiry and become inventive investigators who think insightfully, creatively, analytically, and critically" (10). The editors are describing students who are what we in the library world call information-literate. According to the standards adopted [End Page 425] by the Association of College and Research Libraries and endorsed by a number of groups, including the American Association for Higher Education, information-literate individuals can "determine the extent of information needed"; "access the needed information effectively and efficiently"; "evaluate information and its sources critically"; "incorporate selected information into [their] knowledge base"; "use information effectively to accomplish a specific purpose"; and "understand the economic, legal, and social issues surrounding the use of information, and access and use information ethically and legally" (for the full text of the Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education see www.ala.org/acrl/ilcomstan.html).

Librarians have been concerned with information literacy issues for years. We began to incorporate computer technology into our teaching in the 1980s with the advent of on-line catalogs and CD-ROMs. The 1990s saw an explosion of full-text resources and yet another access point in the World Wide Web, where standard editing and publishing procedures are no longer followed. We have now reached the stage at which new information in some fields (in many of the sciences, for example) can be accessed only with electronic technologies, since print versions are no longer being created. The pedagogical issues discussed by the contributors to The Dialogic Classroom are similar to ours: How do we get students to see past the glamour of the technology and get them to think about content? How much time should we spend teaching them which keystrokes to use, since the software changes so quickly? Many academic librarians have also spent hours programming hypertext, and now Web, tutorials, and by far the most successful are those that were created in collaboration with other units on campus, such as English departments, computing centers, and instructional design offices.

Information literacy is now being discussed in the larger arena of higher education. Faculty can learn from librarians' experiences in teaching with new technologies as well as take advantage of the opportunity to collaborate with people already involved in interdisciplinary, cross-administrative programs. When trying to gain recognition and support for small projects that have long-term results, instructors can effectively use librarians' big-picture perspectives as well as their political neutrality. The projects described in The Dialogic Classroom may be geared toward specific courses or readings, but their benefits and learning outcomes can be parlayed into lifelong information literacy skills. Furthermore, projects that receive input...

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