Education for Information

Due to the large number of students, instructors teaching high enrollment courses often rely on traditional assignments such as scantron exams and research papers. While these types of assignments are functional and satisfy a purpose, they are typically not meaningful or pleasurable for students. In an introductory information technology course, the final paper was redesigned to focus on visuals rather than on written words. The redesigned visual learning experience – a digital infographic – gave students the opportunity to rely primarily on images rather than text to communicate their message about an emerging technology to an external audience. Throughout this creation process, where students had to analyze and synthesize complex information, they gained new understanding about their topic as they were thinking and making. Further, this experience had personal significance to the students – one that gave them a sense of pride and accomplishment. The students also recognized that their unique digital artifact had a life beyond the classroom, and they wanted to share their creation with others.

Storytelling, as a practice and process, is a longstanding tool and non-textual pedagogy in the field of library and information science. Storytelling is also the topic of a graduate course taught for the past eleven years by the author as a tool for all forms of professional communication. This article explores the non-textual (and selected textual) pedagogies involved in teaching storytelling as an interactive communication practice. This pedagogical approach defines storytelling as involving a dynamic triangle of telling, listening, and story, drawing on both folklore and storytelling performance scholarship. Three themes weave throughout the syllabus: ethics, applications, and technologies. Storytelling brings the teller and audience into a reciprocal process of listening and telling, from which a fresh story of professional meaning and purpose can emerge.

This paper demonstrates a dynamic, collaborative, and dialogic strategy for guiding students (and experienced researcher teams) through rudimentary forms of visual analysis using draw-and-write datasets. The approach identifies five sequential stages of the visual analysis process and further delineates twenty activities therein. Akin to the instructional “calls” spoken during square dancing, a leader with a script verbally prompts participants through a series of observational and analytical exercises and poses discussion questions along the way. The interactive experience unfolds stepwise and engenders in participants a feeling of intimacy with the images; introduces an array of analytical lenses; gives rise to discoveries about the concept being studied visually; kindles esprit de corps; and is fun. To encourage the adoption of this approach – called (i)Square Dancing – a blueprint for a student-geared, draw-and-write study and the leader’s script are provided for educators and scholars alike to borrow and customize to their own courses, research questions, and disciplines.

This paper reports on an experiment of using a hybrid pedagogical approach to tackle the challenge of teaching “Information and Communication theories” to students enrolled in Master of Communication and Digital Content at the School of Communication and Journalism of Aix Marseille University in France. The hybrid pedagogical approach combines the classical textual/verbal approach with an arts informed pedagogy, augmented by creative writing and storytelling activities. The fact that the arts-informed approach was not used in isolation but in combination with the traditional textual/verbal approach and creative writing and storytelling activities offered students a wide choice of learning modalities through which they could express themselves. Our preliminary findings suggest that using a hybrid pedagogical approach rather than one single pedagogical approach improved students’ understanding of the abstract concepts implied by the communication theories discussed during the lectures. Students illustrated their understanding of these theories by recasting them in various real life or plausible situations during the creative writing activity which we call “Communication Stories” or cStories.

Audiovisual archiving education programs prepare individuals to care for film, video, and digital media collections found in cultural heritage institutions, such as libraries, archives, and museums. These programs combine traditional graduate education with significant experiential components to train students for work with moving images and sound material in archival and museum settings. Audiovisual archivist training requires a three-pronged approach that combines competencies drawn from the cognitive, affective, and psychomotor learning domains, blending conceptual, historical, and theoretical knowledge and soft skills such as communication and project management with training in hand and other sensory skills. Audiovisual education programs tend to be less explicit about requirements in expert handling and repair work (often referred to in the conservation profession as “hand skills”), sensory skills, and soft skills, however. While cognitive competencies are often stated directly through program documents such as course descriptions and syllabi, psychomotor and affective competencies tend to not be directly stated or are deprioritized in favor of development of cognitive competencies. This perceived gap establishes the need for making affective and psychomotor educational objectives more explicit in program curricula and requirements. In particular, learning objectives in the psychomotor domain have been neglected, which is problematic for a field that requires professionals to possess significant manual dexterity and sensory skills. This paper also makes the case for the design of a field-wide competency framework that accurately reflects the roles of the three learning domains and makes them equally essential for professional preparation in the audiovisual archiving profession.

Every discipline has an existing canon – seen in textbooks, scholarly journals, conference proceedings, etc. – that explicitly outlines existing practice and thought. Recognizing the inadequacy of these canons, the current paper outlines an approach to classroom instruction that helps students move beyond these texts as they create and discover noncanonical knowledge. This noncanonical approach focuses on turning classrooms into Communities of Practice (CoP). There is myriad literature on the utility of such groups for knowledge creation and learning in organizations, yet this paper is unique in introducing it to classroom instruction. By turning classrooms into an adapted CoP, instructors are situated to move beyond the texts or canons of their disciplines. This occurs as they a) invite unique student contributions to create ideas and knowledge that go beyond existing texts, b) develop trust and community among students that goes beyond simple icebreakers and standard group work, and c) engage consistently in action that recognizes the practical utility of what is learned. This is essential to any discipline, yet it has a special place in the field of Library and Information Science (LIS) which – long a discipline of the text – is itself moving outside of this as it focuses on knowledge creation [1]. In addition to its theoretical foundation, the paper provides practical steps instructors can take to turn their classrooms into CoPs that move beyond the existing text.