The Information Literacy User's Guide: An Open, Online Textbook
Using the 7 Pillars of Information Literacy as an organizing structure, and with the addition of two chapters discussing specific kinds of information literacy (visual and scientific), the text provides a broad overview of information literacy with an emphasis on metaliteracy, which the authors describe as "information literacy for today's open, networked, collaborative information environment" (1). The text covers traditional sorts of information gathering, such as library stacks and databases, as well as newer approaches like using social media and backtracking through popular sources to locate primary research. While the general philosophy undergirding the work is one that will be familiar to many faculty members (for example, those teaching a prospectus-based opening to working with information often use guiding questions: What is your tentative position? What do you know? What do you not know? Where will you look? What problems do you anticipate?), the authors provide a contemporary approach with a practical and overt stress on metacognition. They also offer a useful focus on collaboration that is often missing from this kind of text. The authors provide in-text definitions of most but not all concepts; they provide neither glossary nor index, although both would be valued additions to the book. The depth of coverage, I believe, would likely work best in lower-division college courses, or in upper-division courses with additional deeper analytic tools from the professor, aimed at specific course content.
I found the content to be high quality. The exercises are directly connected to the material and have been carefully designed to help students apply what they've just learned. The book's information and strategies are up-to-date and accurate. I would, however, quibble with the Chapter 7 definition of the "traditional paper"; I don't know many faculty who are assigning work fitting such a limited description. We're looking for analysis, synthesis, evaluation, creation of something new - and we recognize that the writing process itself adds to learning about the topic. We're not just wanting students to show they've "understood the topic and can draw some conclusions" (94), even within the "traditional" kind of format. Deepening of a few concepts at some point would be very helpful. Chapter 5, for example, discusses fact checking but doesn't describe differing levels of fact-checking, which is likely different at _The New Yorker_, perhaps, than it is at _People_. The "Choosing Materials" section in this chapter offers key characteristics to seek but doesn't give much about HOW to check accuracy, relevance, bias, reputation, credibility. On the other hand, the text does use worksheets, exercises, and other resources (the CRAAP test from Chico State, for example, is great) to help clarify difficult concepts. In the big picture, this text attempts to help students uncover what they don't know by offering relevant information and skills for this kind of intellectual work, and this "what we don't know" focus is supported by an accurate text.
This text makes good use of contemporary issues (such as hydraulic fracturing) in its examples and also does a nice job of tracing an idea (iodine use after radioactive exposure) by starting with an event that may not be familiar to students (the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986) and making connections to an event that probably is familiar to them (the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011). The text integrates examples in such a way that updating should be a smooth process. If the authors should choose to integrate more visual elements into the text (a strategy that I recommend, by the way), these should also be easy to update.
With the exceptions that I've noted under the "grammar" category, below, the text is clearly written and easy to follow. Jargon is minimal and the text explains newly introduced concepts. If anything is missing that would directly influence clarity, I would say that it is a discussion, including suggestions, to help students surface the idea that "what we don't know" is a very Big Space and may include ideas, facts, and possibilities that aren't yet in the student's current awareness. That is, if Sarah doesn't have a certain bit of information, and that bit of information isn't even on her radar, how will she begin to look for the thing that she doesn't know exists? Many students lack the experience, context, and background knowledge that faculty can draw on--and may take for granted--to help in the search. This idea of "what we don't know" is especially important when students are working on projects that they didn't choose themselves and might not be inherently curious about, as sometimes occurs in college (gasp).
My comments on organization, below, will be helpful here in terms of noting some repetition and overlap. One overall comment would be that the book might benefit from the application of a similar structure to each chapter: some chapters begin with a scenario, while others begin with an introduction or other opening strategy. This suggestion also applies to the structure and order of the opening bullets (what to understand, what to do). Harmonizing the chapters for style, content, and consistency of categories and divisions would be helpful.
Because it uses the 7 Pillars of Information Literacy, and because the text itself notes that these pillars don't necessarily delineate a step-by-step process, instructors can certainly divide the book if necessary. None of the chapters is excessively long, but even so, it would be simple to assign parts of chapters. That said, the information-seeking and -analyzing process does have some inherent order (that is, the chapter on gathering information comes before the chapter on sharing information), and the 7 Pillars approach will work best in their original order. The final chapters on visual and science literacy, however, could be easily shifted and integrated anywhere to best fit a given course. As someone who teaches technical writing for engineers, for example, I would open with the chapters on science and visual literacy.
The flow is not seamless, although the text does refer the reader to relevant discussions elsewhere in-text, which indicates that some connecting work has taken place. More "conversation" among the topics would be very helpful. For example, Chapter 5 distinguishes between news media and social media, but Chapter 2 does not mention the latter, an important distinction that should take place early and work thematically throughout the book. Chapter 2 discusses Boolean Operators, and then Chapter 3 repeats that discussion (although with less effectiveness); Chapter 3, however, adds some advanced search tips not available in Chapter 2. Combining all of this information in one place, with many visuals, would be much more effective. In addition, Chapter 7 ("Present") would benefit from a discussion of what happens to information that people gather and share; that is, what goes on when the work goes "out there" into the world and joins the conversation (I am thinking of the Burkean Parlor here, of course). A discussion along these lines would give a sense of completeness and working-together of the entire structure.
I've read several books in the Open Textbook Library, and this one has a very good reader interface. A few of the visuals (screenshots, for example) in the book are fuzzy, but the rest are clear and sufficiently sized for usability. I do recommend a re-working of the links: The Table of Contents links out into the text, but the text does not link back to the Table of Contents. Similarly, the authors occasionally provide in-text links to upcoming chapters that they've referred to; these are helpful, but links BACK to the starting point would eliminate the long scroll backward. Also, having notes/links to the exercise answers would be helpful (I did not realize until I got to the end of the book that answers for students were even available). And finally, in-text links to the full-size versions of the worksheets would be most welcome. Nevertheless, the book is generally easy to navigate, and I did not have any difficulty reading it online.
The book suffers from inconsistency of style (likely because of the working of multiple authors) and minor but annoying grammar problems. Issues of pronoun disagreement within sentences (mixing single and plural pronouns, mixing first- , second- , and third-person pronouns) and lack of pronoun clarity (for example, use of "this", "that", "there", and "it" without specifying what nouns these words point to) are very distracting. As a technical writer, I would need to explain to my students why these are not OK. The mix of active and passive voice is also distracting. Finally, although perhaps nobody other than technical writers will find it bothersome, I was unsettled by the occasional lack of parallel grammatical structure among bulleted items and (especially) within the 7 Pillars (perhaps "scope" is actually being used as a verb in the second pillar, but the explanation doesn't lend itself to that interpretation). That said, I noted no glaring issues of sentence structure that would cause me not to adopt this text.
The text uses a variety of examples (computers, fracking, women painters, and radiation poisoning, for example), although the examples lean toward East College college students. The names in the examples range from "cutesy" ("Norm Allknow" and "Harry Dositall" to pseudonymous ("Harry and Sally Dennis"), so I suggest a consistent naming strategy throughout the book, and one that uses a variety of names. The text is not offensive in any way, but it is not particularly inclusive--however, the examples in the text would be easy to update for diversity.
I'm adopting this text for my technical writing students and would recommend it for nearly any lower-division course that involves research, application of critical thinking principles, analysis/synthesis/evaluation of information, or metacognitive activities (in particular, helping students to understand the thinking process and encouraging them to think about their thinking). I would not recommend assigning this book as "recommended reading" to help students with course content and projects; rather, if you don't want to use the entire text, I'd recommend choosing specific chapters such as those on visual and science literacy, and then working the exercises together so that you, the context expert, can model your own information literacy processes and abilities.