IL Catches the Wave

November 10th, 2005 Stewart

Barbara Fister posts to ACRLog (although the URL is acrlBLOG.org — argh! Pick one, guys!) regarding the AACU report on liberal education outcomes. The outcomes listed in the report include “information literacy.”

And that’s great, no question, and I think instructional librarians can use this report as ammunition against immobile faculty, department chairs and deans who do not recognize the need for a strong information literacy component to their curricula.

That said, the report itself is pretty disappointing — thin on details, it almost gives the impression that information literacy and computer literacy are interchangable concepts. Under the information literacy heading, the report details general faculty response to two questions:

Percent of faculty reporting their institutions encourage students to use computers in their academic work
* “Very much” or “Quite a bit” – 91%

How much emphasis do you place on making judgments about the value of information, arguments, or methods such as examining how others gathered and interpreted data and assessing the soundness of conclusions?
* “Very much” or “Quite a bit” – 73%

Notice that only the second question really touches on what librarians consider to be “information literacy.” The other major weakness of the report is, perhaps, more a weakness of our own: a lack of nationwide statistics assessing information literacy successes from standardized testing. The emphasis is on admissions exams (SAT, ACT, etc.) where IL is starting to gain a foothold.

Personally, I would like to see ACRL libraries develop a central registry for scoring of the IL tests we develop. The UB Libraries produce such a standardized IL test, but the scores are not published as far as I know, and are not submitted to any kind of national registry, to be sure. Having access to this raw data could be very useful, especially if assigned to student demographics, including class, major, age, and any other axis that might provide insight into general success/failure of IL training among more specific user populations.

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Where do we go from here?

November 7th, 2005 Stewart

Now that all of the children have grown up.

Actually, the missus and I were just discussing the impact the music of Gen X had on our attitudes, and “Games People Play” seemed appropriate enough for this post. I wanted to follow up on yesterday’s note about the BusinessWeek special article on Gen Xers hitting their thirties with significant debt and not enough income.

There’s a tendency in the article to blame this situation on Gen Xer attitudes toward money, a belief that while we had little choice but to rack up significant college loans, we were also wasteful and spend-happy after college, compounding the problem. Let’s talk about some of the other items that have contributed to this issue, many of which are glossed over in the column:

*”The average credit-card debt among 25-to-34-year-olds was $5,200 in 2004, 98% higher than in 1992.” That number is truly frightening. That said, five grand in credit card debt, while appalling, is nothing compared with $40 - $50 K in student loans. So why does it have such an impact? What really harms young workers is loading them with such a distributed debt while they earn rather poor average salaries. (The average 30 year old in the U.S. makes $27,000 a year.) Making several minimum payments on mulitple cards while simultaneously paying down larger debts, including student loans and loans for other major purchases (cars, furniture, electronics, etc.) is spreading these small salaries much too thinly.

* In addition, this situation leads to missed payments, poor credit ratings, mounting late fees and additional charges. And with recent changes in the law, even filing bankruptcy would offer little relief. So instead, Xers get caught up in a debt-cycle that seems unending.

* Federal Pell Grants simply haven’t kept pace with college costs — In 1979/80, when many Boomers were still finishing up with college, the maximum Pell award would cover 77 percent of costs for the average four-year public university student. According to a 2003 report, the maximum award covers 41 percent of those costs now. If additional money was available for attending college, recent graduates would be in far better shape to help our miserable economy as consumers, rather than debt-heavy borrowers.

*”It’s so much more difficult to achieve the adult milestones today than it was 30 years ago.” The workplace is a harder place than it was ten or twenty years ago, but there’s more to it than that. Lots of Boomers don’t plan on retiring until they hit 70, or later. Many Boomers are financially unprepared for retirement as well, due to a sagging economy and rising health care costs. With Boomers planning on staying in their jobs, there is less opportunity for advancement of younger workers. Combined with more jobs being shipped overseas and a young, agile Millennial workforce waiting in the wings, the competition for jobs is about to become even fiercer.

What steps would alleviate this condition? I think a few major changes in policy and the law would go a very long way:

1. No more unsecured debt. Simply put, credit card companies should not be able to establish credit lines without collateral. If a creditor takes the risk of giving out unsecured money, then they need to be prepared to eat the losses when people cannot pay. Simple as that.
2. Fund the Pell Grant system to keep pace with the rising cost of college tuition. If you qualify for Pell, you should be able to go to a four-year public college with at least 90 percent of your costs covered.
3. Make all college tuition, fees, books and housing completely tax-deductable so that parents who are already paying enormous costs for college will see some relief.

There’s a lot more the U.S. could be doing to help this generation, and the next, to pay for college in a responsible way. But we need to get started now.

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While we’re on the subject of Factiva…

November 6th, 2005 Stewart

Factiva Begins Support for Firefox and Safari Browsers

This one had slipped past me. While I applaud the effort of Dow Jones to keep up with technology, it says something about their corporate mentality and lack of insight that their pages weren’t standards-compliant all along. I’m certain their coders thought the browser wars were long over and that IE was going to be the only browser anyone will ever use. (Many pundits now feel the same way about Google as a search engine. If the internet has taught us anything, it’s that change is the only constant. I guarantee that in ten years, we’ll be saying “Google-who?” the same way we reference Infoseek, Looksmart or even Yahoo today.)

Libraries simply have to become more progressive in pursuing standards-compliance among our vendors. I see nothing wrong with libraries suspending contracts or refusing to pay for resources that cannot be unilaterally accessed with any standards-compliant browser or reader. Not only does it force a response by otherwise sluggish and overcompensated database vendors, but it also makes this issue much more public.

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Reality Bites

November 6th, 2005 Stewart

The Kept-Up Academic Librarian: Thirty And Broke

Gen Xers have enormous student loan and credit card debts due to increases in college tuition and they just aren’t making enough money to pay it all off. The BusinessWeek article doesn’t seem to be available on Factiva yet, but once it is, I’ll post again with more detail.

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