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Learning in
Information-Rich
Environments
I-LEARN and the Construction of
Knowledge from Information
Second Edition
Learning in Information-Rich Environments
Delia Neuman • Mary Jean Tecce DeCarlo
Vera J. Lee • Stacey Greenwell • Allen Grant
Learning in Information-Rich
Environments
I-LEARN and the Construction
of Knowledge from Information
Second Edition
Delia Neuman Mary Jean Tecce DeCarlo
College of Computing and Informatics School of Education
Drexel University Drexel University
Philadelphia, PA, USA Philadelphia, PA, USA
Allen Grant
School of Education and Professional
Studies
SUNY-Potsdam
Potsdam, NY, USA
This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
For Michael Neuman
For Dan, Danielle, Casey, and Faith
DeCarlo
For Dave Kurz and Charis and Phoebe Wu
For Rick Drasch
For Kristin, Hunter, and Sophia Grant
Preface
The information environment has exploded since the first edition of this book
appeared in 2011, a little less than a decade ago. Not only have the amount and
kinds of information ballooned—all the ways in which information is created, dis-
seminated, manipulated, and interpreted have soared as well. Nevertheless, all of us
are still learners—as we were in 2011—and now we must navigate an even more
agitated sea of information to make sense of the world. From the time the cell phone
alarm beeps or chimes in the morning to the time the last tweet is received for the
night, we are flooded with information
• that asks us to pay attention (or gives us a way to vegetate),
• that invites us to distinguish the useful from the useless (or allows us to lose
ourselves in the fog), or
• that calls on us to create new products of our own (or encourages us to be passive
consumers of others’ ideas).
The information comes in all formats—print, visuals, music, talk, exhibits, digi-
tal files, and even odors. It comes through avenues as traditional as the daily news-
paper and television news and as modern as the latest blog or social media site. The
one characteristic that all the formats and avenues have in common is that they all
convey varieties of information. Together, they offer a tsunami of facts, ideas, and
opinions that we can access, evaluate, and use to build an understanding of the
world and of ourselves—that is, to learn.
The amount and range of information available to us today is unprecedented.
Phrases like “the information revolution,” “the information (or knowledge) society,”
“the knowledge economy,” and similar expressions underscore the truism that our
society has been transformed by virtually instantaneous access to virtually unlim-
ited stores of information. Thomas Friedman was among the first to tell us that the
world is flat (2005/2007) and that we must devise new political and economic
understandings based on the ceaseless communication of information from all cor-
ners of the world. Governments continue to tell us that information relating to
national security is so time-sensitive that we must allow new kinds of surveillance
to keep society safe. Teenage subscribers to social networks not only access
vii
viii Preface
information but enter text and video images and publish them widely—becoming
the first adolescents in history to be creators as well as consumers of vast quantities
of information.
If the characteristics of “the information age” demand new conceptions of com-
merce, national security, and publishing—among other things—it is logical to
assume that they carry implications for education as well. In fact, a good deal has
been written about how education as a whole must transform its structure and cur-
riculum to accommodate the possibilities offered by new technologies. Far less has
been written, however, about the specific implications of these technologies—and
the information they allow students (and all learners) to access and create—for the
central purpose of education: learning. What does “learning” mean in an information-
rich environment? What are its characteristics? What kinds of tasks should it
involve? What concepts, strategies, attitudes, and skills must educators and students
master to learn effectively and efficiently in such an environment? How can research-
ers, theorists, and practitioners foster the well-founded and widespread develop-
ment of such key elements of the learning process?
This book explores these questions and suggests some tentative answers. All its
original chapters have been revised—some quite extensively—and several new
chapters have been added to provide fresh insights. Chapter 1 still begins by por-
traying information not just as a collection of facts, ideas, and opinions but as a tool
for learning that provides the basic building blocks for critical thinking and problem
solving. Chapters 2 and 3 expand on their predecessors in the first edition to define
and describe the formal and informal information-rich environments that surround
us and to show how their evolution suggests a need for an expanded conception of
learning itself. Chapter 4 and new Chap. 5 paint an updated picture of learners as
“information users” and describe their needs and abilities for learning in information-
rich environments—particularly as elements of digital and critical literacies have
come to enrich the notion of “information literacy.” Chapter 6 (formerly Chap. 5)
draws on the core ideas found in the earlier chapters to provide a framework for
learning in the kinds of dynamic, information-rich environments available today
and to offer Neuman’s (2011a, b) I-LEARN model as a way to guide information-
based learning at the highest levels. Chapter 7 (formerly Chap. 6) closes the book’s
theoretical focus on learning in information-rich environments by discussing con-
temporary assessment approaches and describing how the model can serve as a tool
for evaluating learning in both formal and informal settings. New Chap. 8 draws on
all five authors’ research over the past several years to validate the I-LEARN model
in a variety of schools and at all levels of the educational system. This final chapter
completes the circle from theory to design to practice by illustrating how using the
model can help learners master the process of learning with information.
Today, information in all its vastness and variety provides the raw material for
the kind of learning that all of us must master as we encounter new realities in soci-
ety and in our personal lives. Indeed, the process of accessing, evaluating, using,
and creating information constitutes the “authentic learning” that contemporary
education promotes and that all of us must pursue throughout our lives. By explor-
ing some of the key ideas and issues related to learning with information at this
Preface ix
point in the information age, this book attempts to provide some insights and sug-
gestions that will help educators and those we serve make steady progress in that
pursuit.
The authors are indebted to many people for insights and encouragement that
played an essential role in creating this book. Delia Neuman is still deeply grateful
to all those cited in the original edition—especially to her husband Michael for his
continuing encouragement and support and to Kara Howland, whose illustrations
continue to grace this edition—and to the four coauthors whose hard work and solid
insights have given this revised edition a broader perspective, a deeper research
base, and far richer practical guidance than its predecessor was able to offer. Mary
Jean Tecce DeCarlo would like to thank her patient family and the wonderful real-
world teachers and students who inspired Chap. 8. Vera Lee would like to thank her
husband and children for their flexibility and understanding about late nights and
work weekends. Stacey Greenwell would like to thank her partner and best friend,
Rick Drasch, for all his support during this project, and Dr. Gary J. Anglin, her dis-
sertation advisor, for introducing her to Delia. Allen Grant would like to thank the
early adopters of I-LEARN for their enthusiasm and willingness to share their ideas,
materials, and students in order to advance the fields of information, digital, and
critical literacy. All the authors are utterly in debt to graduate assistant Aly Meloche,
whose substantive knowledge, technical skills, and quiet patience have been invalu-
able. Finally, Delia Neuman published the first edition of the book in 2011. Without
her vision, this updated book—and the I-LEARN-related research, presentations,
and publications noted here—would not have been possible. Her coauthors would
like to thank her for her invaluable mentorship and her scholarly generosity.
Any errors in the book belong, of course, to the authors; any value it offers is
attributable to many others as well.
Reference
Friedman, T. (2007). The world is flat. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux. (Original work
published 2005)
Neuman, D. (2011a). Constructing knowledge in the 21st century: I-LEARN and using infor-
mation as a tool for learning. School Library Media Research, 14. Available at http://www.
ala.org/aasl/sites/ala.org.aasl/files/content/aaslpubsandjournals/slr/vol14/SLR_Constructing
Knowledge_V14.pdf
Neuman, D. (2011b). Learning in information-rich environments: I-LEARN and the construction
of knowledge in the 21st century. New York: Spinger
Contents
xi
xii Contents
xvii
xviii List of Figures
Over a 100 years ago, the philosopher William James described the infant’s view of
the world as a “big, blooming, buzzing confusion” that enveloped his or her mind
(1890, p. 488). If he were writing today, James might conclude that information is the
“buzzing confusion” that seems to suffuse our every waking moment. In fact, many
authors have provided colorful interpretations of “information”: we have all heard that
“information is power,” and McCandless (2012) told us that “information is beautiful”
(http://www.informationisbeautiful.net). President Ronald Reagan once referred to
information as “the oxygen of the modern age” that “seeps through the walls topped
by barbed wire [and] wafts across the electrified borders” (London Guardian 1989,
June 14). T.S. Eliot, musing in 1934 on behalf of many humanists facing the modern
age, offered perhaps the most famous questions of all about the nature and role of
information: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowl-
edge we have lost in information?” (1962, p. 96).
Every scholarly and professional field defines “information” in ways that con-
note its own particular needs and foci. For medicine, information includes vital
signs, data on drug interactions, and test results; for journalism, it consists (at least
in part) of leads, leaks, tweets, and recovered emails. For information profession-
als—librarians, information scientists, information managers, and others who work
with various kinds of information in a range of contexts—and for educators—teach-
ers, curriculum developers, instructional designers, librarians, media specialists,
administrators, and others who work with information in various learning environ-
ments—information also has specialized connotations.
This book takes the position that information is not only powerful and beautiful
but that it is the basic building block for human learning. Drawing primarily on
research and practice in the fields of information studies and instructional design
and development, the book suggests a way to think about constructing knowledge
that is directly applicable in today’s information age. It offers ideas that will be of
interest to researchers and theorists from its two core disciplines and related fields
and also to those who teach the research process—postsecondary faculty, librarians,
and information specialists as well as K-12 teachers, school librarians, and media
specialists. In sum, this book is intended for anyone who believes—or who at least
wants to consider—the proposition that “developing expertise in accessing, evaluat-
ing, and using information is in fact the authentic learning that modern education
seeks to promote” (American Association of School Librarians and Association for
Educational Communications and Technology, 1998, p. 2).
Looking at information as it is understood by information professionals and by
those who design and deliver instruction leads to a powerful insight: in today’s
world, information is, at bottom, the basis for learning. Understanding the nature
and role of information in learning is crucial to understanding how learning itself
has changed in the information age. Recognizing the profundity of this change is, in
turn, critical to fostering deep and meaningful learning in today’s information-rich
environments. The perspectives reviewed and offered here provide key informa-
tion—yes, information—about this phenomenon.
Within the overarching field of education, the subfield of instructional design and
development is the source of most of the theory underlying the conceptualization
and creation of learning activities. Also known as “instructional systems design,”
“instructional technology,” and “educational technology,” this area has been a for-
mal discipline for over 60 years and has been defined as “an organized procedure
that includes the steps of analyzing, designing, developing, implementing, and
evaluating instruction” (Seels & Richey, 1994, p. 31). As the definition suggests,
the central “information” concern of instructional designers involves selecting,
organizing, and presenting information in ways that enhance the possibility of
learning.
Instructional designers—the usual title for practitioners in the field—are more
concerned with the pedagogical uses of information than with organizing informa-
tion for access and retrieval. But writings from this field echo information special-
ists’ understanding of information as a set of entities that are discrete and have
specific characteristics and relationships. Early—and key—theorists like Gagne
(1985) and Merrill (1983, 1999) proposed “categories of learning” and “compo-
nents of learning” that correspond closely to different types of information and of
information use, from making simple stimulus-response connections to engaging in
complex problem solving. While the details of their work—and the work of many
others over the years—need not concern us here, some illustration of the “pieces” of
information these two theorists posited provides a useful context.
After a lifetime of work on classifying kinds of learning and looking for ways to
achieve each kind, Gagne (1985) ultimately proposed five types of “learned capabili-
ties”—verbal information, intellectual skills, motor skills, attitudes, and cognitive strat-
egies—and specified four kinds of “intellectual skills”—discriminations, concepts,
rules, and problem solving. Focusing on those categories most closely allied with the
cognitive dimension implied by the definitions of “information” above, we can see that
Gagne’s hierarchy assumes a number of more or less clearly defined subcategories, or
types, of information:
• Verbal information might be called information at face value, since it consists of
symbols such as words or musical notations without reference to their underlying
meanings.
• Cognitive strategies are techniques and skills—all of which involve knowledge
of types of information—that individuals use to manage their learning.
• Discriminations involve differences among objects varying in such basic proper-
ties as color, shape, and size.
• Concepts can be concrete (e.g., table) or defined (e.g., democracy) and are in
essence ideas about things that are joined by particular relationships into basic
categories.
1.2 What Is Information? The View from Instructional Design and Development 5
• Rules are statements that relate classes of stimuli to classes of responses (e.g.,
two pints make a quart) that enable us to respond predictably to situations even
when we are unable to state an appropriate rule. Gagne considered rules the
“stuff of thinking” (Gagne, 1985, p. 157).
• Problem solving—the category in which a specific kind of information merges
inseparably with information use—involves “discover[ing] a combination of pre-
viously learned rules which can be applied to achieve a solution for a novel situ-
ation” (Gagne, 1985, p. 155). The elements of discovery, combination, and
novelty move this kind of thinking with rules to a higher kind of knowledge.
Merrill’s (1983) “component display theory” provides another example of the
notion that information consists of discrete but interrelated entities that have particu-
lar uses. Merrill proposed that information to be learned consists of four types—facts,
concepts, principles, and procedures. He further posited that learning involves three
different kinds of performance—remember, use, and find. According to Ragan and
Smith (2004), Merrill formed the rationale for his categorization on “some assump-
tions about the nature of subject matter” (Merrill, 1983, p. 298, quoted in Ragan and
Smith, p. 632)—suggesting, once again, that theorists of instructional design and
development view information as consisting of interrelated entities. Merrill expanded
the number and breadth of those entities in his later work by identifying 13 types of
learning in his “instructional transaction theory” (Merrill, 1999; Merrill, Jones, & Li,
1992). This refinement of his thinking reaffirms his early work and its proposition
that information consists of multifaceted and interrelated components.
These early ideas are revisited and reflected in a key contemporary view of informa-
tion from the perspective of instructional development and design: “the knowledge
dimension” outlined in Anderson and Krathwohl’s (2001) A Taxonomy for Learning,
Teaching, and Assessing. This dimension posits that knowledge—or, in other words,
information, as defined above—can be characterized as falling into four categories:
factual knowledge, conceptual knowledge, procedural knowledge, and metacogni-
tive knowledge. What is significant about this formulation for a discussion of infor-
mation and learning is that it appears in what is considered the current version of
“Bloom’s Taxonomy,” one of the most important and widely used sets of ideas in
instructional design and indeed in American education for over 50 years. Bloom’s
original Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, published in 1956, delineated six
“levels of learning” but did not directly specify the types of information involved in
these levels. The inclusion of a “knowledge dimension” in this first-ever revision
and update of Bloom’s Taxonomy indicates the importance to contemporary instruc-
tional design and development of understanding the components of information that
underlie learning across the spectrum of levels of complexity.
6 1 Information as a Tool for Learning
As shown in Fig. 1.1, Anderson and Krathwohl (2001) define four “types of
knowledge”: factual knowledge, conceptual knowledge, procedural knowledge, and
metacognitive knowledge.
Figure 1.2 displays Anderson and Krathwohl’s (2001) “cognitive process dimen-
sion.” This dimension—a revision of the “levels of learning” that comprised Bloom’s
(1956) original Taxonomy—lays out six categories of learning arranged in a hierar-
chy based on complexity: remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, and cre-
ate. Each of these categories also includes its own subcategories—19 in all—that
further delineate the chunks within the categories themselves: classifying is a sub-
category of understand, for example, while critiquing is a subcategory of evaluate.
Like the taxonomy provided for kinds of knowledge, the one provided for catego-
ries of learning mirrors similar work in information science.
To varying degrees, the different types of knowledge support different kinds of
processing, but this relationship is obviously flexible: both factual knowledge and
metacognitive knowledge can support all six levels, for example, although each is
more likely than others to come into play at various levels. The existence of this
Web of relationships reflects the connections between content and process, com-
plexity and dynamism, which are characteristic of conceptions of information held
by the instructional-design field in general. Heer’s (2012) three-dimensional repre-
sentation of Anderson and Krathwohl’s taxonomy both provides a graphic image of
this Web and shows examples of links to specific learning outcomes (www.celt.
iastate.edu/teaching/RevisedBlooms1.html).
8 1 Information as a Tool for Learning
The conceptions of information presented above suggest that the fields of informa-
tion science and instructional design and development consider information in
much the same way. Anderson and Krathwohl’s (2001) Taxonomy maps closely to
Buckland’s (1991) process-knowledge-thing characterization of information and to
Marchionini’s (1995) object-representation-knowledge typology. Both the
“information-science” and the “instructional-design-and-development” viewpoints
10 1 Information as a Tool for Learning
What are the implications for learning that flow from instructional designers’ and
information scientists’ shared understanding of information? The question is key, of
course, but it cannot be answered without consideration of the nature and processes
of learning itself. Theorists have pondered these phenomena for centuries, although
the “scientific” study of learning began only about a 100 years ago. Today, as a
result of extensive research into what has been called “cognitive information pro-
cessing,” our understanding of learning is as dynamic, complex, and multifaceted as
our understanding of information itself.
Kalojen riidan alku taas oli seuraava. Oli kiiski kovasti kiukustunut
hauelle ja miettinyt miettimistään, miten saisi sille pedolle kaikki sen
tekemät tuhot kostetuksi. Se oli suuri ja vanha hauki, asui siinä
kauniissa ja aurinkoisessa Airiston lahdessa ja söi kalaa kuin
ahmatti, kiiskiäkään hyljeksimättä. Vallan olivat toiset kalat
helisemässä sen ahmatin pedon vuoksi.
Näkipä sitten kiiski kerta, kuinka Vänskän Aatami laski suuren
rysän tulvan aikana — se oli tänä samana keväänä — lahden
pohjukkaan, ja kohta heräsi hänen kiviaivoissaan hyvä ja viekas
ajatus. Hän läksi uida lurittelemaan pitkin pohjaa varovaisesti
katsellen, missä hauki mahtaisi olla, ja jopas löysikin. Tuossa se
makasi päiväpaisteessa kiven kupeessa sikeässä unessa, vatsa
pullollaan kalaa täynnä kuin suursyömärillä ainakin. Nähdessään
hänet hyvin kylläiseksi poruutti kiiski pelkäämättä vettä hänen
nokkansa alla ja teki hauin herättyä kohteliaan hyvän päivän. Äreästi
hauki unisena tiedusteli hänen asiaansa, mutta kiiski sanoi
viekkaasti:
Iloisena nyt akka ajelee, kun oli kottasillaan saanut näin pulskan
hevosen itselleen keplotelluksi, ajelee pitkin mieroa, kunnes
talvisena iltana päätyy synkälle sydänmaan taipaleelle. Hämärää ja
salaperäistä on kaikki, lumi hiljaa tipahtelee puista ja tupsahtelee
kinokseen pudotessaan, hiljainen tuuli huokaa korvessa ja
alakuloiset tähtöset joskus taivaan korkeudesta vilahtavat. Akka
ajelee ja vaipuu ajatuksiinsa, kunnes herääkin siihen, ettei hevonen
enää tahdo mennäkään eteenpäin. Akka sivaltaa piiskalla, mutta ei
mene hepo, korskuu vain äänekkäästi ja pystyyn karkaa. Katsoo
akka tarkemmin ja hämmästyy: siinä on tiellä karhu kahdella jalalla
hevosen edessä, kuinka lieneekään vielä korven kuningas valveilla
liikkunut.