information literacy and transliteracy... how do they relate?

*Half-baked stream-of-consciousness alert!*

I just had a quick read of a blog post over at the Libraries and Transliteracy blog, which looked at how information literacy (IL) and transliteracy might relate to each other.

This is a “think as I write post” – I’m really writing this to think through my thoughts on this topic. So be gentle with me! Here goes.

I’m not sure why this connection hasn’t happened in my brain before, but it struck me that the view of IL in the post mentioned above is very much a skills based view, rather than a relational view, where we look at how people use information to learn. And it made me think, from a relational, experiential viewpoint, I can indeed see how transliteracy would be subsumed by IL. Through a relational lens, we consider information to be much more than textual content and we consider it to be experienced via multiple channels (including technological channels like social media).

Because I subscribe to an experiential view of IL, for me, transliteracy borders on being a redundant concept. Or perhaps more to the point, I wonder why practitioners in library and information science have looked outside our discipline for an explanation of this phenomenon (what others call transliteracy, but whatever you want to call it) when one already exists in our own literature. This phenomenon that some call transliteracy is (for me at least) encompassed by IL – maybe not as IL is discussed in practitioner discourse, where the focus is on skills for seeking and using information, but most certainly in the IL discourse that I position myself within, where we look at how people use information to learn, how people experience information.

There is an increasing interest in information studies research in how people experience information in social media. My PhD is just one example of a study concerned with this phenomenon. I’m excited about the research my colleagues have underway, looking at, for example, information experience in Twitter, and information experience in social media in a time of natural disaster. As publications begin to appear in this area, the discussion about how IL and transliteracy relate is bound to get a whole lot more interesting.