Re – Aloudget rid of info as skills – it is more info as tools (application), info as participation (engagement), etc. Skills is understanding the information and applying it within the conceptualization.
participation is learning the community; collaboration is negotiating and sharing information, extending knowledge.
inspiration has a property of resonance.
Teens engage in information practices to become legitimate peripheral participants in digital content sharing communities, the process of experiencing information to participate in these communities leads to one becoming information literate within this particular socio-cultural context. Teens experience information through participatory activities such as observation, posting, and commenting. They use the information they experience as inspiration, and to utilize tools and improve skills while they enact the creating practices of copying, modeling, composing and responding.
Not all interaction is collaboration; sometimes it is about using people as tools. Distributed knowledge?
You are supposed to write a theoretical memo when a thought strikes you. Unfortunately I had a couple of thoughts while I was in the hot tub which is not conducive to writing theoretical memos. Actually a lot of my thoughts come in the shower or the hot tub – this causes some difficulties.
Anyways I made a few notes and I want to try and explore those thoughts.\
The first note relates to what is a practice and what is a process? I had been thinking of the relative concrete practices of gathering, thinking, and creating as practices. But in considering how those might interact with experiences of information; and what should come first in defining; and if I could organize a chapter in which I define the experience and describe how the “practice” works within each experience it occurred to me that really I am defining process, and in defining the process I am not conceptualizing how the environment, the culture, the site of creating impacts the practice. And that in defining how information is experienced and how the processes work within that experience I might actually be getting closer to the idea of a practice, rather than a process. So the process of creating content within the experiences of information as impacted by the affordances of those experiences is the information practice. This is where I think I need to go.
Thought #2 – The processes are somewhat hierarchical. For example you can gather without using but it is difficult to use without gathering and thinking, and when you break it down even further into properties of gathering – serendipity, focused browsing, and direct searching and consider that you cannot muse without encountering information and this usually means serendipitously or through focused browsing – primarily the former, and you use direct searching for information needs as you plan, and you need to plan before you model or compose an avenue for theoretical understanding as a building block process begins to emerge. Also needs further exploration.
If you think I have gone away I haven’t. I have been a) writing an article which took most of my writing energy; b) thinking – I cannot stress how important this is; and c) working – last semester kicked my butt. But I am back! Here is the latest:
I have emerging in my research an issue around how teen content creators experience information. This is a fascinating piece of the research and it takes me into a new area – one that challenges the definition of information, or more appropriately the connotations of information and how we talk about it. This is an old, and somewhat controversial, discussion that I am nowhere close to understanding. I haven’t even really done a literature review. I say all of this because what follows is a brainstorm and therefore open to change, and demonstrates a very surface level understanding, although it emerges directly from data.
It is inevitable with the participants that if I ask what information they needed to create content that they described textual information primarily related to skills. If I asked a different question – where did the get their ideas for example – they described different sources – overheard conversations, videos they found browsing, art that they saw, pictures in magazines, fashion on the streets, brainstorming sessions with friends, critiques from other content creators, conversations, school assignments, in short the world around them provided a variety of sources of information that was used for inspiration. If I asked how they learned something they described how to videos, images, using instructions from other people, pushing buttons, help from people virtually and in real life, and from mentors and respected artists work – including professionals. If I asked what they did when they needed to know something, they described process that included asking for help from local peers and mentors, asking for help on forums, using search engines, and reading books. In this way they encountered information orally, through text, in both a communal way and in an individualistic manner.
From this it seems that they experience information in four ways (probably more, but this is where I am at.) The four ways of experiencing information seem to be information as community, information as inspiration, information as skills, and information as content.
Information as community involves collaborative and interactive experiences – commenting on art; asking for help; competing to build code; receiving and giving critique, brainstorming, talking. The use of the information is different. In some cases it helps them make authority judgments, others it helps learn the social mores and structure of a community, in some cases it builds personal knowledge (how to do something – information as skills); in other cases it builds community knowledge and adds to the community conversation.
Information as inspiration involves the sources of information that lead to the idea for content. While sometimes this is perfectly clear and participants know exactly where their ideas came from, other times it is much more vague. What is significant is that the information comes in a wide variety of formats – both the concrete and visible, and the less concrete and invisible – for instance an emotional reaction to an experience or content. Information as inspiration is mused, pondered, tossed around in a wide variety of ways until content emerges from it.
Information as skills seems in some ways to be the most concrete –it is the simple “how to” do something; the skills need to edit the video, or write the blog, or upload art. But it is more than that because it also involves the physical act of doing – the muscle memory of drawing a line, holding a camera steady. It tends to be the default when asked what information is needed – teens outline the skills – how to use a particular piece of software or how to write a particular piece of html. They describe gathering information needed for skills from how to videos, how to books, and teachers. But the process of implementing the instruction, the doing produces the information as skills.
And finally there is information as content. I am struggling with articulating this because in some ways it seems to be knowledge. The bringing together of the skills and the inspiration to create something new, to recognize how and where it may fit within a community. The problem with information as content description is content is so concrete and what I mean is information as their content. Maybe it is information as product. Again product is a concrete noun but it does maybe represent the personal presentation of content. What is interesting about this is that while it brings together previous information to create – it also provides information through evaluation and reflection. I liked this element so I will do this next time, this didn’t work, I need to adjust that, etc.
I have for over a year now been circling around the connotations of information, my problems with how it is constructed and privileged and this seems to be the beginning of articulating why it has been such a problem in both collecting and analyzing data in regards to using information. It isn’t using, it is experiencing.
My definition of information practices keeps coming up – how am I defining practices. Some of this arises from the feeling that I may be forcing data into an existing theory – and that I am locating it more within the information behaviors paradigm. I think that I struggle with the problem that while I firmly believe information is subjective and constructed, there is some individualism to how we construct information – it is not purely social. How I interpret and understand a process, a practice, and/or event is filters through my unique understandings and therefore I may experience it and construct knowledge differently. I can’t firmly locate myself in constructivism – the socially constructed understanding of our world and the way we define it through agreed on language and social knowledge is too important but I don’t want to lose the role of individualism that constructionism challenges – or maybe I am reading that wrong….
All of that is a bit of an aside however. So let me focus on how I am constructing information practices and what is informing my understandings.
Information practices are
So what is informing this understanding? Much of it comes from a Savolainen article examining the conceptualizations of information behaviors and information practice. The article is Information Behavior and Information Practice: Reviewing the “Umbrella Concepts” of Information-Seeking Studies published in Library Quarterly vol. 77 no 2 in 2007.
Some of the ways Savolainen discusses practices include
He suggest that the “main attention is directed to them as members of various groups” and that one looks at the “context of mundane activities”. The emphasis is on the role of contextual factors. Furthermore it “devotes attention to the process of information sharing”
McKenzie also states the emphasis is on social practices – “the concrete and situated activities of interacting people, reproduced in social contexts across time and space” (McKenzie, Pamela J. A model of information practices in accounts of everyday life information seeking. Journal of Documentation. Vol. 59 No. 1, 2003). She also points to a suggestion that information practices incorporates and extends information behaviors (McKenzie, Pamela J. Justifying Cognitive Authority Decisions: Discursive Strategies of Information Seeking. Library Quarterly, vol. 73 no. 3. 2003). This is of course a bit of a problem making practices perhaps too broad and blurring lines between research that adopts a practice lens and research that adopts a behaviors lens.
One of the reasons I came to practices as a concept is that it moved beyond seeking and focuses more on use (constructing knowledge) – this quote I think is worth noting and remembering in the way I understand and respond to the information practice lens:
Yesterday during a discussion surrounding coding and the process of coding – particularly in grounded theory a question occurred to me – in open coding do you code with your research question in mind so that you are theoretically sensitive to the question in the data or do you just “code what you see”? I’ll admit I haven’t been particularly consistent with this. When I am conscious of the process I try to code what I see in the initial go around, but it is an effort not to code for what I want to see – or participant answers to my research problem. I think this is where some of the tension around forcing the data into an established paradigm or model is coming in.
Someone in the session mentioned this in terms of research topic; that you are coding around your topic – and while I wasn’t 100% on board with the point in terms of my methodology I do think there is something to explore here. I have a specific research problem – what are the information practices of teen content creators? This research question guides the interview questions – I am not asking random questions; they are designed to get at the problem. But I also am conducting semi-structured interviews and sometimes the conversation evolves in unexpected ways. When this happens and I code what I see in the data unexpected practices emerge. It is also possible that the practices that emerge are consistent with existing theory (I venture to say to some extent this is true). However I am actively trying to stay open to emerging ideas and concepts even if at first glance they seem unrelated to the research question. If the idea emerges in the data in a variety of ways with different participants it is worth exploring in terms of both why is this emerging in the conversations, and how is it related to the research problem. Here is the thinking on that: if it is emerging (meaning more than one mention) then obviously it has some bearing on their practice even if it isn’t immediately obvious to me. Since the interview questions are broad, and the interviews in action are open to explore unexpected avenues of conversation around the topic then whatever is emerging has some relevance on the overall research process.
There was also some conversation around the tension between the dissertation process, and the methodology – what is expected by supervisors versus how I am applying the process. I need to explore this more, ask Christine to talk about it from her perspective so I can clarify.
It seems there are some other questions to think about – maybe I need to go back and listen…….
I had a conversation this weekend with the Physics teacher about how I am struggling to identify and capture the practice of serendipitous encounter and musing. The primary problem is that there are two practices that can occur when one comes across data that ‘speaks to’ them in a manner that causes them to internalize it, therefore causing it to become information. One one hand there is a conscious awareness – ‘this is cool’, I want to think further on it. This is easy to identify, and often when questioned regarding knowledge (interpreted information) a teen can point to the source. But often there is a unconscious internalization, and the information becomes in some ways inspiration but the source of that inspiration is not apparent to the creator (or knower). So is this a gathering practice? or a thinking practice? The Physics teacher in discussing his process through the lens of his experience unintentionally pointed something out which is that this time unbounded. The nugget of information gathered may be mused upon for a length of time before it is dredged to the surface of consciousness to put it into use in a manner that one can then say they ‘own the information’ or that they know. In some ways that is quite obvious, but I think it is important to remember because that may be a part of the problem in terms of identifying source. It also suggests an interesting dilemma in intellectual property – if you don’t recall source how do you credit? I suspect in many cases it isn’t particularly important as it is a nugget of an idea used for inspiration, and the content becomes something else but there is potential for unintentional plagiarism.
