The advent of Web 2.0 completely transformed the methods and possibilities to filter and share information.
Whether managing information by social bookmarking or RSS reads and feeds, or communicating with a community via blogs, wikis, podcasts, YouTube, or Facebook, students, researchers, librarians and information professionals have entered into digital conversations.
Widgets, portals, apps, feeds and aggregators and more now provide users with a plethora of options for information organisation, curation and maintenance.
The importance of the information professional as teacher, educator and instructor is fundamentally linked to effective and responsive information categorisation and dissemination in environments within and beyond academic or corporate institutions.
Use of Web 2.0 tools has become embedded in good practice, and information curation has extended beyond the library or research institution catalogue to information management systems for bibliographic and media resources, and various organisational tools that live beyond an institution’s tangible walls in online environments, such as Libguides, Diigo, Live Binders, wiki, Delicious, Google tools, RSS, media tools, netvibes, iGoogle, and many many more.
However, as Shannon Bomar argues in a recent article in the journal Knowledge Quest, when a focus on technology subverts a students’ or researchers’ conversation and development of critical thinking skills – and equally their ability to evaluate and analyse the information in front of them – the mental processes that change knowledge from information to concept are not learned.
With the continued development and adoption of Web 2.0 tools, the importance of nurturing information literacy skills and strategies has shifted to become a meta- or hyper-literate approach to engagement with information. In other words, the keen student or researcher examines information to determine its currency, accuracy, bias, and comprehensiveness – they take their thinking to a deeper level with critical questioning
For example, when tackling food science and technology, students and researchers need to examine and question the perspectives being presented to them and why and how those perspectives have been shaped. Information is not neutral and fact-based – it is a perspective no matter how well presented as objective.
This is exactly why information professionals and librarians are having to re-think what ‘collection’ of information means, thereby supporting personalised and collaborative information seeking and knowledge conversations.
The new principal information research tools include:
- Research tools for online information management, writing and collaboration, e.g. Zotero, Endnote, EasyBib, Bibme, Mendeley, Refworks
- Microblogging tools for information sharing, e.g. Edmodo, yammer, Google+, or Twitter
- Online storage, file sharing and content management, across multiple platforms and computers, e.g. Dropbox, Box.net, Skydrive
- Social Bookmarking and tagged collections, e.g. Diigo, Delicious, PearlTrees, Flickr, Vodpod
- Collaborative writing, editing, mindmapping and presentation tools, e.g. Google docs, Exploratree, Voicethread, Mindmeister, Wikispaces
- Information capture in multiple platforms and on multiple devices, e.g. Evernote, Scrible
- Library catalogues, bibliographic databases, and open-access repositories – all used for information collection, RSS topic and journal alerts, and compatible with research organisation tools
- Aggregators, news readers, and 'start pages', e.g. iGoogle, Netvibes, Symbaloo, Feedly.
These tools have allowed for a re-interpretation of data collection as highly flexible and collaborative information and knowledge conversations, while also facilitating information organisation.
Content exploration and learning demands a mix-and-match approach:
- Search strategies
- Evaluation strategies
- Critical thinking and problem solving
- Conversation and collaboration.
Best practice for students and researchers going forward? Make sure you are involved with and engage in new methodologies and new information strategies when working. Make sure you have a comprehensive understanding of information literacy and information fluency as this will underpin all that you do.
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