Dr. Jeremy Shapiro

Dr. Jeremy J. Shapiro is professor of human and organization development and a faculty member in the Information Society and Knowledge Organizations concentration at Fielding Graduate University where he also serves as senior consultant on academic information projects. Together with Shelley Hughes he has been working on information literacy issues for more than 15 years, at every level from that of teaching classes through directing academic computing and networking to that of institutional and curriculum planning and writing. He has also at various times represented Fielding in such U.S. national fora as Educause and CNI. For further information see the Wikipedia article.

Ms. Shelley Hughes

Shelley Hughes took on the task of learning to use computers and communication technology as an adult in the late 1980's while she was working on her master's degree in counseling psychology. Since then she has combined her interest in technology and the support of adult learners in her work at Fielding Graduate University, and since 1996 she has served there as Director, Online Academic Environment. Fielding has been a distributed, learner-centered institution for mid-life, mid-career adults since its inception in 1974, and keeping pace with developments in communication and personal computing technology has been both essential and a challenge for the distributed community. Shelley and Jeremy have collaborated around information technology and literacy for presentations, articles, and in providing an introduction to the scholarly community for incoming graduate students. Shelley also teaches the use of bibliographic formatting software (EndNote) and qualitative data analysis software at Fielding's in-person sessions. She makes her home in the Santa Ynez Mountains north of Santa Barbara, CA, where she enjoys the native chaparral plant community and has been a member of the local volunteer fire department. She is currently a student in Fielding's Human and Organization Development doctoral program.

If everything is information, is information literacy possible?

Dr. Jeremy Shapiro and Ms. Shelley Hughes

Opening Plenary - Thursday, May 11 @ 9:00 am

The concepts of information literacy and information technology literacy exemplify Marshall McLuhan's idea that we look at the present through a rear view mirror. For they are really supplements to the framework of information acquisition and everyday competence that existed before information and its technologies became central to social life and to education. In the original conceptualization, information literacy was a narrowly circumscribed set of skills, information itself was defined positivistically, and the concept itself was part of the professional ideology of librarians. Thus in some ways it presupposes a world that we have already left behind us: before a time when finding one's own information on one's own computer might be as challenging as finding it in a library or database, when one's informational identity could be stolen, when students could participate in writing an encyclopedia rather than being limited to just looking things up in one, when one's every move can be tracked through the information broadcast by one's own cellphone, when the move to privatize, commodify, and commercialize information has made information use and access a foray into ongoing legal, political, and criminal turmoil.

In an increasingly informatized, increasingly complex, increasingly difficult-to-manage world, what would real information literacy look like and what are the limitations and obstacles to it? To what extent can librarians be responsible for bringing it about? And what does "information literacy as a liberal art" mean in the present context?