Lise’s Final VRE Report

OSS Presentation in mp3 format

Definitions of literacy:

• There was a time when you were considered literate if you knew how to sign your name
• Humans have not been reading for that long; the majority of people have not been reading for very long at all
• Rich countries are not necessarily those with the highest literacy rates
• NEA report
• Educators use fluency as key measurement — reading text with speed, accuracy, and expression (National Reading Panel, 2000)
• We are now being given ever-expanding definitions of information literacy, some of which go so far as to include indicators of social behaviour and belonging
• Reading and writing are in fact less related than we might think. (We learn a lot about the brain by studying people with brain injuries, identifying which area of the brain has been affected and determining which functions have been harmed.) In The Brain That Changes Itself, Doidge describes a patient of famous neurologist Aleksandr Luria, who, after having received a bullet in his brain, could write but could no longer read, the former being an intentional activity while the latter is mainly perceptual.
• The Ball & Moeller hypertext article stresses the need for other measurements of literacy aside from academic literacy — understanding links, design and navigation are every bit as important to “reading” most of the text that comes at us these days as knowing where the index will be in a book; Schroeder’s Table of Comparison of Institutional vs. Student-Perceived Academic Literacies shows the difference between what instructors think they are teaching and what students are learning. Ball and Moeller argue the need for “critical literacy skills” that address reading of not only academic formatted papers, but new media as well.
• Mark Twain quote: “The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.” What is the use of being literate if you don’t make use of it? Is knowing how to retrieve and interpret information a good measure?
• There is no rigid definition — it is a concept in flux.

Evaluating of these definitions:

The moral of this story, simple as it is: reading is different for everyone. Our own personal experience is likely different from other people’s, in some ways. Not everyone enjoys reading — enjoyment of the reading experience becomes an important measure of the print literacy experience. If it were up to me, I would promote the idea of literacy, or at least functional literacy, as one requiring a definition based on an individual’s needs and environment. Is this person happy with their level of literacy? Is he or she able to read to his or her children? Is this person able to gain and interpret reliable medical and community information? (Illustration: A dyslexic university student can get government funding to purchase her own personal computer, scanner, OCR software, text-to-voice and voice-to-text conversion software. If this person is fully competent with computers, is able to scan her textbooks and play them back in audio form so as to have the textbook read to her, dictate her paper and have it automatically transcribed, use screenreader software to access blogs, FaceBook and Wikipedia and every other source of information a university accesses, is this person still functionally illiterate? These technologies may not be 100% reliable yet, but they are infinitely closer than they were ten years ago. In ten more years, what will our definition of functional literacy be?)

Conclusion:

We can — and should — assume that the definition of literacy will continue to evolve (expand on this).

(2008). The Community Behind the Code. Computers in Libraries 28(3): , Retrieved March 13, 2008, from Academic Search Premier database.

Balas, J. L. (2008). Open Source Becomes More Accessible. Computers in Libraries 28(3): 32, Retrieved March 13, 2008, from Academic Search Premier database.

Breeding, M. (2008). Making a Business Case for Open Source ILS. Computers in Libraries 28(3): 36-39, Retrieved March 13, 2008, from Academic Search Premier database.

Chudnov, D. (2008). What Librarians Still Don’t Know About Open Source. Computers in Libraries 28(3): 40-43, Retrieved March 13, 2008, from Academic Search Premier database.

Gordon, R. S., & West, J. (2008). What Can Open Source Do for You?. Computers in Libraries 28(3): 44-45, Retrieved March 13, 2008, from Academic Search Premier database.

These recently published articles in Computers in Libraries could be useful to someone in the library community who wishes to get a quick glimpse at some of the uses of OSS in libraries, as well as some of the arguments for and against. The very fact that such a substantial part of this issue is devoted to OSS is indicative of how prevalent at least some of these solutions have become in libraries.

In his aptly called “What Librarians Still Don’t Know About Open Source,” Chudnov graciously alerts us to the one phrase one should be sure to retain from his article: “FLOSS provides the freedom to run, study, adapt, improve, and redistribute software.” I certainly find this description of OSS (or FLOSS) freedom more useful than Gordon & West’s, who assert that the “free” in free software is like in “free kittens”. They do however present a tidy list of OSS offerings that they believe are ripe, or accessible to all libraries. This list includes Firefox add-ins such as Check4Change and Accessibar, OCLC Link Evaluator and Greasemonkey scripts. WordPress, Drupal and Ubuntu also get a nod.

Chudnov, knowing his audience, makes a point of reminding readers that using OSS software does not have to mean doing all the customization in-house. He lists examples of vendors who provide OSS software along with fee-based service. He also recommends understanding the concepts around OSS in order to gain more leverage when negotiating with vendors, even when it comes to proprietary software — i.e. adding a clause that requires the vendor to hand over the code should the product be discontinued.

This study compared the comprehension of two groups of students who had been given the same Faulkner short story to read, but been engaged in different types of pre-reading and during-reading activities. Basing the study on research that analyzed different types of reading-related activities and showed that apt readers were more likely to exert a range of such activities, they were able to show that students who participated in different types of reading activities displayed different types of comprehension.

Aside from the experiment itself, this article includes a brief and enlightening review of research in the reading process and comprehension. It describes the “shift from a perception of reading as a rather passive process towards that of an interactive process” (114), describing this leading model of reading as an interactive process as one involving both bottom-up and top-down processes. The review also introduces the concept of schemata (background knowledge) and its role in an individual’s comprehension. The concept is a complex one, with several identified types of schemata: content schemata, formal schemata and abstract schemata. The review also points out identified cognitive behaviours of good and poor readers (separated into pre-reading, during-reading and post-reading activities) that can be targeted and developed in poor readers. For example, “good” readers typically engage in the following pre-reading activities: they activate prior knowledge, they understand the task and set purpose, the choose appropriate strategies for reading. Meanwhile “poor” readers start reading without preparation, read without knowing why and read without considering how to approach the material (116).

I can’t help but think that event the best readers are poor readers at time, and that this may account for variance in comprehension in an individual. However, at the same time, other research has indicated that apt readers are more likely to be able to make up for certain inadequacies (i.e. lack of background knowledge) than poorer readers.

Referring to prior research by Widdowson, Brantmeier and Saricoban, Erten and Karakas define effective readers as “those who can automatically engage in an interactive reading process”(117). Perhaps I should collect all these definitions for reading-related measures, i.e. effective readers, good readers, poor readers, literacy, fluency, information literacy, and see how they all fit together?