Introduction
LILAC 2024 was held at Leeds Beckett University from 25th to the 27th of March. It was my first time at LILAC and I feel very lucky to have been invited to enjoy three days of fascinating lectures and workshops, meeting people from across the UK and beyond, and exploring the beautiful city of Leeds. “Shame about the weather” someone said on day one, but I loved the wild and dramatic transition from heavy rain, to bright sun, to rainbows, that marked most days of the conference (I like to imagine the conference was intentionally chosen to be in early spring – a few weeks before lilacs bloom – as a clever botanical metaphor for learning and development). The conference hosted sessions on a wide variety of topics including: AI and information literacy; playful learning; COVID-19 and information literacy; class and information literacy; accessibility; information hierarchies and knowledge from marginalised communities; academic libraries and neurodivergence, information literacy for LGBTQIA+ allyship, and much more. Here are my thoughts and reflections on the three keynote sessions, a couple of favourites out of workshops that I attended, and my trip to the Leeds Museum.
‘Selling’ information literacy to the business school through alignment with the employability agenda in higher education – Laura Broadbent
I’d been sat in my first LILAC session for a couple of minutes when someone used the phrase “existential threat to higher education”. But this wasn’t in regard to AI. This was in reference to “the employability agenda”, something that Laura Broadbent (Subject Librarian, University of Huddersfield) persuasively argued is the greatest threat to higher education – far greater than AI, in my opinion. In fact, concerns over ChatGPT and plagiarism seem trivial when compared to the way the UK government – and neoliberalism more broadly – have been shaping and reshaping the way we view higher education. Increasingly, we are encouraged to view education in a transactional sense, where students are customers purchasing a product, which can be ascribed a specific market value in the form of graduate earnings. While, of course, the role of higher education is to equip students with the skills, knowledge, and confidence to pursue (ideally, lucrative) career opportunities in the future, it is also to produce social and cultural value through the arts. Laura illustrated rhetoric in the media that typifies the prevailing, more utilitarian, view of higher education. In particular, she highlighted a spate of headlines from across the world (including the UK, the US, China, and Nigeria) on the topic of graduate unemployability that voice concern about graduates leaving universities without the skills to work (and include former prime minister Rishi Sunak’s comments about “rip-off degrees”). This comes in the context of the Auger Review, a 2019 report that addressed the issue of “low value” degrees and frames higher education in terms of value for money for students. While the report acknowledges the value of culture and the creative arts, the report largely considers the value of higher education in economic terms. Laura found that the rise of this rhetoric with regard to higher education had direct implications for how her teaching was valued. Laura’s information literacy sessions were cut back to make more room for employability and career-adjacent course content in student’s timetables. In order to claw back some of her teaching time, Laura had to effectively “sell” information literacy to her university; she had to make a case for the value of information literacy and frame it in terms of how it fits into the employability agenda. Her approach was to tailor her teaching to each individual group of students by ensuring that there was constructive alignment between a module outcome and how she approaches teaching information literacy. For example, if producing an analysis is a key module outcome, then her information literacy sessions focussed on analysing. A typical example of one of these sessions would involve CRAAP testing a range of sources. In the context of teaching business students, she described commercial awareness as a form of information literacy and highlighted how this kind of information literacy allows students to understand businesses and thereby sell themselves to potential employers accordingly. These information literacy sessions explicitly aimed at employability included conducting company and market research, finding and utilising SWOT analyses, and source analysis. The sessions aimed to blend information literacy and employability knowledge by teaching students how to gain both company knowledge and broader industry knowledge. At the end of the session Laura re-iterated the value of information literacy and the threat posed to higher education, asking: ‘is employability displacing higher education?’ (Marginson, 2023, 3). What I found particularly fascinating about Laura’s session was how a difficult situation required her to articulate the value of information literacy and to make the case for information literacy as a core competency that students develop at university. In many ways, information literacy is the primary skill students learn at university; it is learning how to continue learning effectively, in higher education and beyond. Undoubtedly, ‘information literacy is for life, not just for a good degree’ (Inskip, 2014, 1).
Keynote 1: Panel discussing Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Information Literacy
The first keynote session at LILAC 2024 was a panel discussion on the topic of AI and information literacy. The panel was chaired by Erin Nephin (Library Academic Support Team Manager, Leeds Beckett) and included Josh Rodda (Learning Development Librarian at the University of Nottingham), Masud Khokhar (University Librarian and Keeper of the Brotherton Collection, University of Leeds), and Martin Wheatley (Deputy Head of Digital Innovation + ilearn, Leeds City College). The panellists considered a range of views on AI, including those from advocates, sceptics, to those agnostic on the topic. In fact, a certain AI agnosticism provided a particularly interesting perspective as the panel discussed the view that AI presents “the same challenge, but faster”. The panellists noted that while debate around AI is often framed as “academic enhancement versus cutting corners”, most fundamentally, AI produces content that replicates the biases in academia and knowledge in general. In this context, the challenge of AI is the same challenge of information literacy more broadly: to be able to ascertain the veracity of information. It was felt that, just as the concept of information literacy has grown to incorporate forms of media literacy and digital literacy, now it must encompass AI literacies too (Maha Bali’s session provided a fascinating insight into how critical AI literacies can be taught). Our information literacy teaching should now include training students to be prompt engineers and to find the references and sources the chatbot is drawing on. We must “become comfortable living in a messy world”, as one panellist described it, and recognise that the evolving nature of librarianship practices, policies, and competencies will require new approaches, new training, and an acceptance that there won’t necessarily be quick or easy answers to the questions and dilemmas posed by evolving AI technologies. Another aspect of AI the panel discussed was the ways in which AI can be used to enhance accessibility. The idea that “AI is the great leveller” was disputed. On the one hand, inequalities created by unequal access to digital technologies are only magnified by some having access to AI while others do not. On the other, AI technologies have huge potential to enhance accessibility in a range of ways, not least through acting as an ever-available personal assistant. The panel agreed that, when it comes to our roles as librarians, working to build equality through digital literacy must come first and that we could potentially scaffolding teaching literacies, building up to AI. The panel concluded that as we become “AI-augmented humans” we could utilise AI in a more local way. As a personal tutor, trained on specific, personal inputs, AI represents something enormously valuable: a far greater access to teachers. It represents information being made more instantaneously available and in some ways this works against the Google business model (which is designed to be helpful enough that you use Google, but not so helpful that you immediately leave with the information you wanted before you’ve had a chance to encounter advertisements or sponsored content). AI was considered to be at its best when it’s a conversation partner; a personal tutor, answering enquiries through the specificity of a dialogue. So too when automating aspects of research, such as cutting down on human labour by creating metadata, translating articles, and writing up findings into reports. In the near future, the form of AI most used in the library is likely to be the local language model, allowing library users to enter into dialogues with databases, the library catalogue, and ebooks.
Keynote 2: Maha Bali – Teaching Critical AI Literacies
Thunderous applause followed Maha Bali’s (Professor, the American University in Cairo) keynote talk – and for good reason. Maha’s session was on the topic of teaching critical AI literacies and provided a fascinating exploration of how our relationship to AI is tied to how we perceive it. Maha began by establishing the context for AI, underscoring that it is not inevitable: AI can be contested, it is controversial, it has possible benefits, and potential risks. She advocated approaching AI using adrienne maree brown’s concept of “intentional adaptation” which involves not just reacting to change and transforming without thought, but changing in a positive way, that is mindful of our values, goals, and vision. Maha’s view is that we must respond to AI in a proactive way rather than a reactive way. With this in mind, she first noted how AI technologies can be enormously beneficial to the visually impaired. For example, the Be My Eyes App (which connects the blind to sighted volunteers through videocalls who can then describe things for the app users, from surroundings to video or images) now has an AI version called Be My AI. Be My AI performs the same service using ChatGPT and thereby operates as a permanent assistant of sorts. Users can submit pictures that are then described by ChatGPT and users can then ask further questions or be connected to a volunteer if necessary. The description provided by ChatGPT is incredibly detailed – in a picture Maha took of some items on a table, the chatbot even described her shoes that she’d inadvertently captured just inside the frame. In order to intentionally adapt to AI, Maha explained how it’s essential to be aware of the biases of AI. She noted that AI is less good at information from the global south in general and underscored this with an example of the AI game Quick, Draw! in which users draw sketches and AI guess what the drawing is. When drawing a hospital the AI doesn’t recognise a building marked with a crescent as a hospital, only buildings designated with a cross. This is due to bias in the datasets that the AI has been trained on, which tend to feature content from predominantly white, western, English-speaking people. It is for this reason that AI perpetuates biases and oppressions found across the internet and western culture in general. What’s more, AI is extractive in nature: it takes user’s data to teach itself without their permission. This means that AI continues to grow with grossly unequal representation between datasets due to the fact that it is predominantly used by wealthier western nations. It is inaccessible in some locations too (for example, ChatGPT was not initially available in Egypt). Maha’s approach to teaching critical AI literacies is informed by her research into the role of the metaphors we use to describe AI in fostering a nuanced understanding of it (Bali et al., 2024). Her research suggests that this process of reflection aids in understanding AI’s influence on cognition and behaviour and suggests it might be useful for educators and researchers in advancing critical AI literacy. In particular, her work looks at the extent to which students describe AI using metaphors that are ‘anthropomorphizing, and to what extent such metaphors imply that AI is sentient’ (Bali et al., 2024, 37). The kinds of metaphors we use to describe something colours our understanding of it. In this case, the more anthropomorphised the AI, the more unknowable it may become, whereas describing it in more passive terms may allow it to be viewed as a tool which can be used. Maha invited delegates to consider the metaphors they would use to describe AI and how this influences our perceptions of what it is and what it can do. We were asked to consider these metaphors in terms of the binaries activity/passivity, critical/uncritical, and human/nonhuman and to plot each metaphor on a chart where the X-axis was the ‘anthropomorphic dimension: human metaphors, semi-human metaphors, non-human metaphors’ and the Y-axis was the ‘multiliteracies dimension: rhetorical view of AI, critical view of AI, functional view of AI’ (Bali et al., 2024, 46). We were then encouraged to explore these metaphors through a number of prompts. ‘What feelings does the metaphor evoke? How does it help us understand AI? What kind of perspective does it push the listener to imagine about AI? Where is the metaphor helpful and harmful? Is it a generally positive or negative view of AI? In what ways does the metaphor showcase accessibility or equity issues related to AI? How does the metaphor portray the relationship between humans and AI?’ (Bali et al., 2024, 45). We considered the extent to which each metaphor was anthropomorphising, whether or not it presented a critical or functional view of AI, and the implications of each metaphor. Ultimately, this exercise was designed to make students and delegates aware of their own feelings towards AI, to recognise how this shapes our understanding of it, and to ultimately better understand the benefits and limitations of AI. This exercise was shown to have educational application as educators can use metaphors to understand and potentially transform students’ understanding of AI. This can lead to fun and engaging teaching sessions where teachers collect AI metaphors from students, analyse their implications, and encourage the creation of new metaphors. I found Maha’s session to not only be pedagogically valuable, but to be a useful way to think about how I perceive technology more broadly and how this relates to the metaphors I use to describe it. Returning to the idea of intentional adaptation, but staying with the theme of metaphors, Maha encouraged us to imagine AI is helping us to bake a cake. We should be asking how much of our cake needs to be baked from scratch and when do we need to just add some flavour. If we just want to add some flavour then shop bought ingredients will do, but if we’re going to the trouble of baking a cake from scratch then we are likely to want to make it our own. AI can be very useful for adding flavour in a variety of ways, but we should be encouraging students to question when it’s appropriate, or desirable to get AI to create something in its entirety. This should ultimately be cause for reflection among academic staff with regards to assessment methods. If AI can produce all of a piece of coursework, then perhaps the coursework is too vanilla? “If we ask students to perform robotic tasks”, Maha exclaimed, “then robots will do!”.
Keynote 3: Andy Walsh – Playful and Compassionate Approaches for Inclusive Information Literacy Instruction
Andy Walsh (Development Manager, Academic Libraries North) was having fun giving his talk on playful and compassionate approaches to teaching information literacy. Through his cheerful demeanour and relaxed approach to addressing the delegates, Andy embodied the values of playfulness that he championed. Andy uses games in his information literacy teaching, principally to enable play. He described how games are activities with goals, rules, and a feedback system, but crucially, play is the action that games enable. In this way he drew a distinction between playing and gaming, characterising gaming as playing within concrete rules and with the objective of winning, whereas playing would change the rules to fit with play and enjoyment. Andy listed various attributes and characteristics of play: diminished consciousness of the self, the desire to continue playing, the potential for improvisation, freedom from time, the voluntary nature of play, and the fact that play is apparently purposeless – it is done for its own sake. These attributes of play form a core part of “compassionate pedagogies”, teaching philosophies that challenge pathologising accounts of neurodiversity, celebrate diversity, and empower students to be who they are. This paradigm aims to create safe environments where students feel listened to and valued, and ultimately to empower students to be different and to learn differently. Andy considers creating just such a psychologically safe environment to play to be central to centring playfulness in teaching, asking: “can we even play without love and compassion?”. Play requires empathy and a mutual understanding of each other. Andy highlights the applicability of play to information literacy by drawing attention to how there often exists a gap between what students want and what their needs are. Play in this context can help students discover what their information needs actually are. He described how play in teaching can: shift power dynamics between teachers and learners; increase inclusivity; allow people to see things from other points of view; and encourage creativity – all things shown to enhance learning potential. To this end, Andy encouraged us to get involved in the session by writing our thoughts and ideas in two books that were circulating among the audience (one asking how we could show compassion to our learners and the other asking how we are playful in our teaching). I came away from Andy’s session with the thought that there is no one correct way to be information literate and that we must teach information literacy in a way that reflects this. In his closing remarks, Andy highlighted how other ways of thinking are beneficial to society and gave the example of how someone with autism might not recognise hierarchy and authority and thereby have a more realistic relationship to power.
The opportunity of narrative inquiry for information literacy research: narrative thinking and storying data – Rebecca Scott
I was fascinated by Rebecca Scott’s (Information Manager, School of Health and Social Work, University of Hertfordshire) project that approached research into information literacy from the perspective of narrative inquiry. Narrative inquiry is a qualitative research method that represents a way of understanding experience by making sense of the stories people tell. Rebecca described experience as a “storied phenomenon” as we understand our lives and the world through stories. Stories are how we make sense of things, from interpreting reports in the media, to explaining natural phenomena through science. In fact, so central are the stories we build about our lives to our sense of self that medical anthropology has coined the phrase “biographical rupture” for the anguish we feel when our lives are not going to plan. Narrative inquiry is designed to listen to people’s experiences in their own words and to provide context for them, rather than subsuming them into a broader narrative. Rebecca used narrative inquiry to explore the experiences of four academic librarians as they approached research into information literacy. Her research was comprised of a series of online interviews in which she tried to elicit stories through single open interview questions. These were unstructured, active interviews, where the interviewer’s role is to try and take the participants to a place where they tell a story. In this way, these interviews were collaborative processes that aimed to foster a reflective introspection. Rebecca provided an example of an interviewee who explained that an idea for a research project came from volunteering work on their summer holiday, but how the time constraints of the working week meant that it never came to fruition. This began to provide insight into both sources of motivation for information literacy research and barriers to it. Rebecca described how “storying data” as an approach to analysing data involves looking at individual word choices for meaning (a kind of close textual analysis) and that she chose to express this data as poetry. In this “poetic transcription”, Rebecca aimed to use the participant’s words and even their speaking pattern to accurately present their meaning in the form of poetry. I was struck by how different this approach to research is from anything I’d encountered before. Building poems from experiences is a creative way of presenting the experiences of those in information literacy research that seeks to capture their voice, their essence, and their experiences (including their joys, inspirations, and frustrations) in ultimately a much more authentic way.
Conclusion
LILAC 2024 was a fantastic experience that left me with a renewed excitement for librarianship and for the rich diversity of our profession. In particular, I’ve continued to think about how the concept of information literacy continues to grow and evolve and how our teaching needs to encompass a range of digital literacies. Information literacy is a proficiency that is central to the lives of most people, one way or another, and I feel that we can best engage students in our teaching by highlighting its importance in a range of ways, from employability to effective use of AI technologies. Over the course of the conference I made some discoveries outside of the scheduled sessions too. In one of the breaks I learned about Keenious, a recommendation tool that scans the article that you’re reading and recommends other relevant articles. This is designed to overcome the problem of learning about a new topic when you do not know enough to effectively generate search terms. Keenious is designed to compliment searching, rather than replace it, and could provide a useful means of discovering information in a way that isn’t limited by our own knowledge of the subject area. I made a new discovery of my own while exploring Leeds. I visited the Leeds Museum where I blundered into a room and abruptly came face to face with the “Leeds mummy”, who’s full title is Nesyamun, True of Voice, Scribe of the Temple of Montu. Startled, and more than a little curious, I decided to search for information on the topic of Nesyamun. I discovered that he was the focus of the ‘Voices from the Past project’, in which his body was scanned and a replica of his larynx was 3D-printed, allowing researchers to emulate his voice (Howard et al., 2020, 2). Needless to say, this research is fascinating, strange, and subject to ethical outcry – all interesting reading if you know how to find the information.
References
Bali, M. et al. (2024) ‘Assistant, Parrot, or Colonizing Loudspeaker? ChatGPT Metaphors for Developing Critical AI Literacies’, Open Praxis, 16(1), pp. 37-53.
Department for Education (2019) Review of Post-18 Education and Funding. CP117. Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/post-18-review-of-education-and-funding-independent-panel-report (Accessed: 3 July 2024).
Hamilton, L. and Petty, S. (2023) ‘Compassionate Pedagogy for Neurodiversity in Higher Education: A Conceptual Analysis’, Frontiers in Psychology, 14, pp 1-9.
Howard, D.M. et al. (2020) ‘Synthesis of a Vocal Sound from the 3,000 year old Mummy, Nesyamun ‘True of Voice’’, Scientific Reports, 10(1), pp. 1-6.
Inskip, C. (2014). Information Literacy is for Life, Not Just for a Good Degree: A Literature Review, London: Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP), Available at: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1448073/ (Accessed: 1 July 2024).
Marginson, S. (2023) ‘Is Employability Displacing Higher Education?’ International Higher Education, (116), pp. 3-5.