Later today, I will be holding a Zotero Installation Party for the students at Windsor Law.
I used to present “Introductions to Zotero” but I was recently inspired by the 2021 article “Increasing Student Attendance at Library Workshops: What the Data Tells Us” by Richelle L. Witherspoon and Philip O.L. Taber, and have reframed my regular Zotero For Law workshop to promote the most “in-person, experiential” reasons to be at this workshop.
I know many librarians hate the “one-shot” but I have seen too many transformative moments take place during workshops to give them up.
There are several Canadian academic libraries that regularly host a diverse series of workshops as a means of teaching and outreach, including Guelph, TMU, and Concordia. The library where I used to work at, does not follow this model of outreach, although it has provided shorts series of workshops from time to time.
Now, I want to tell as story about a disagreement I had with my library’s information literacy librarian many years ago. I tell this story without any ill feelings because I believe it is be illustrative of a larger issue. We were in the hallway of the library offices when I was trying to make the argument to the Information Literacy Coordinator at the time, that we – the librarians – should consider teaching Zotero as part of our Information Literacy outreach. And while I cannot remember the exact wording, I distinctly remember being told that the library’s IL approach was that “we don’t teach to the tool”. I was then told that technology was something that “only you are interested in“.
This response stuck with me through all of these years because it made it clear to me that — despite of all of my efforts — I had not been not able to convince my colleagues that we shouldn’t separate “technology” from “teaching”. I read Ursula Franklin’s Real World of Technology in library school so I have long-recognized that the affordances of technology can preclude your options. This is why I believe that it is critically important to properly consider, whenever you can, your choice of technology, whether in your learning, research, or in your work.
The IL librarian mentioned above is now working towards how the library can teach students “Ai literacy.”
And I am still teaching Zotero.
I don’t believe that teaching students “Ai as literacy” is the best approach for libraries to use in their instruction.
If are going to teach a literacy, I much prefer David White’s suggestion to teach critical literacy, which he recently introduced in his talk, The Inconvenient Library: Friction and Dissonance as Central to Developing Critical Literacy.
White has also summarized his talk in an essay called, AI requires us to explain education:
During my talk I complained that many universities demand that students ‘think critically’ when using AI, as if that was a skill any novice could switch on at will rather than a literacy that is developed through experience, something which should be taught. I claimed that teaching Critical Literacy is crucial in the AI era and is now on par with the importance of subject specific teaching.
I argued that the subjective nature of Arts Education means that much of our pedagogy has always been a form of Critical Literacy, as the strength of student work is assessed by the ability to account for its genesis (process) and demonstrate intention in its production. In Arts Education an element of this is specific to each piece of work and therefore connected to the lived experience of the student or group.
Education is inquiry. It is the work that troubles, that criticizes, that challenges.
What I particularly appreciate about White’s description of friction within libraries, is that he recognizes that, in some contexts, the friction is part of the teaching mandate of the library, while in other contexts, the friction of finding and retrieving works can be felt and perceived as a frustrating service.
On October 6th, 2010, I published a blog post called, When an imploring librarian is not enough. It was a telling of my experience of having to teach a 3 hour class on “research” to about 100 2nd year students from across a variety of disciplines.
Here is an excerpt that I would like to retell that I believe illustrates how friction can be useful:
… even though I navigated on my own screen to the library’s newspaper page and suggested that they try to use these sources for this mini-assignment, the majority of students still defaulted to using Google and Google News where they found some newspaper articles and reprints of newspaper articles in blog posts. This has happened to me before. I once led a class about scholarly visual arts resources and even after immediately showing what fine tools we had, the majority of the class used dictionary.com for their research assignment. It throws me off every time. Their online habits are too strong to be broken by the imploring of a librarian to change.
And yet I persist because I’m not sure what else to do. I then used the same method to introduce tools to find journal articles on the topic: ask them to use the tool they would normally use for an in-class assignment, show them the advantages to using Google Scholar instead of Google, and then show them the advantages of using library-paid scholarly tools instead of Google. At the end of this part of the class, I’m quite sure I have converted many of the students to using Google Scholar instead of Google but I don’t have same confidence that I have made a convincing case for what we provide from the library.
But later in the class, I accidentally stumbled on a way where I actually had students ask me if there was something better than Google Scholar was available.
In the second hour of the class, I introduced RefWorks and Zotero to the students and gave them a mini-assignment to create a bibliography that they would then have to share with someone else. I didn’t teach them how to use the tools – I just pointed to the screencasts that both citation management products provide and wandered around to help out the students who were stuck. And I would like to note that the students *loved* these tools. At first, at least…
And that’s when it happened. Students starting importing articles from Google Scholar into their bibliographies and noticed that many authors and other key bits of information were missing. I told these students that at this point they had a choice: they could either correct the citations manually, or they could use a library-provided tool like Web of Science that would do a better job of the citation information. And it was only then that I saw real and genuine interest in using library subscription products for their research needs. For better metadata, no less.
I’m still working through ideas about how tool choice and habit influence how students learn, both within and out of higher education.
This post that you are reading now was inspired by a workshop offering from Concordia that was served to me on Instagram:
This post made me pause, not because it offers to introduce students to two of my favourite tools (Zotero and Obsidian) but because the workshop is “geared to will help students start practising the principles of a Zettelkasten technique to build a personal knowledge base of literature notes, interlinked ideas, long-form writing, visual concept maps, and more”.
From the people’s encyclopedia:
A Zettelkasten (German: ‘slipbox’, plural Zettelkästen) or card file consists of small items of information stored on Zetteln (German: ‘slips’; singular: Zettel), paper slips or cards, that may be linked to each other through subject headings or other metadata such as numbers and tags.[1][2] It has often been used as a system of note-taking and personal knowledge management for research, study, and writing.[3]
Much of my understanding of the Zettelkasten method comes from the book, How to Take Smart Notes by Sonke Ahrens. In it, the author stresses the importance that one must create and organize paraphrased versions of the text that you have read and want to capture, rather than collecting citations with quotations.
In the context of what I have just read and considered from David White, I now understand Zettlekasten as a method that introduces and applies friction to transform the reading process into a research and writing process.