Monday, May 02, 2005

Last(ing) Thoughts about Human Information Behavior as a Science

Human information behavior is young and its curious newness has attracted those in education, information science, information technology, library science and the social sciences, some with great fervor. No voice has been more dominant in theorizing with some of its clever acronyms and its pseudo-scientific social observations.
Take a look at some of the diagrams and some of the charts and some of the measurements. This is definitely the softest of sciences and it uses the oldest of scientific instruments, human observation.
But human observation is at best, unreliable, so how can a “science” today be built on “human observation” as HIB continues to be?

Libraries today struggle with painting their walls and filling their shelves, except when it comes to videos and DVDs. We have become a more visual culture in the last 30 years. This coincides with a decline in reading skills. Are libraries still catering to a public that no longer exists, or are the functions of the library evolving to continue to meet the needs of their individual charters?

The library is at a crossroads between being a building and being a service. Human information behavior is studying the patterns that determine its institutional future.
If human information behavior is performing a vital function in understanding the ways people seek information and that activity is vital and constant, then the knowledge coming from the studies could be applied to schools and libraries policies. With an adequate budget, any information source can survive, if it understands its constituencies, and principles of marketing.

Mrs. Morrow Stimulated the Soup

Brown, J.S., Collins, A., and Duguid, P. (1989). Situated cognition and the culture of learning. Educational Researcher, Jan/Feb, 32-42.

It is really no relief that Alfred North Whitehead wrote The Aims of Education almost 80 years ago, and there is still an almost criminal amount of useless knowledge being passed on from teacher to student from year to year. Why haven’t we learned that decontextualized learning just doesn’t stick? And if we have learned that, especially as information specialists (an offensive term, I think) we either believe that all of the theoretical concepts we have read and written about will suddenly become clear, or connected to some experience, or even become useful. But, then again, probably not. The curriculum goes on teaching abstract concepts as self-sufficient things, like carrots.
Knowing and doing cannot be separated. Its corollary also makes sense: using the tools of a profession without being inside the culture makes no sense.
The language is a tool, and learning it is a natural process. The best way is immersion. Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated has some of the best examples of language learned directly from a dictionary rather than social experience. In other words, language is totally context-dependent. The article is built on the central metaphor that all tools are like language, and are acquired through situated use and practice.
How can classroom activity approach authentic activity? How can library practice approach authentic activity?
As long as there is education there will be education reform, and this article points to the lethargy of a system that does not work but has been situated for a long time.