Collaboration, Technology and LibrariesMeg Westbury, Wolfson College

@MegWestbury

Hello. I'm Meg Westbury, the librarian for Wolfson College. In this presentation, I want to critique some notions of library-technology use, using the results of a little study I did last autumn.

1. So – three big ways of thinking about tools for searching and managing information that I see a lot of are:

3 notions of information technology

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One: 'technology is neutral.' As in: 'we just pick up a tool and use it. And if our end users could just learn the correct way of using that tool (such as a database) all would be well.' This is how I was taught in library school, and it runs through much of our information skills teaching.

N e u tra l

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Neutral

Two: 'technology as deterministic.' Here, biases in the technology such as algorithms and filter bubbles control our search behaviour. Such algorithms are there, of course, and are something we need to be highly critical of, but the notion here is of technology as a force actively to work against.Deterministic

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Three: 'library technology as black box.' You see this all over the scholarly literature about technology and learning: The role of information management technologies in the research process is taken for granted and not critically examined. It's just an amorphous bunch of 'library tools' out there somehow.

B la c k b o x e d

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Blackbox

But in my 20 years of working in academic libraries, the picture seems more complicated. There seems a more convincing way of thinking about how people and library technologies are enmeshed.

A different way?

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So, very quickly: As many of you know, I'm currently working on a PhD through Lancaster University in their department of E-Research and Technology Enhanced Learning. I'm hoping to finish before my kids hit puberty. This HUGE question of how people and technologies are entangled is something that really fascinates me.

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For the first two years of the programme, I did five empirical projects about how technology is implicated in various aspects of library services. For my most recent study, I wanted to try to unpick the process of searching and managing information, so as not to privilege either the technologies or the people, but to show how they're entangled and mutually constitutive. I was also keen to look at contexts where students were working collaboratively.

Empirical studies

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• So, as a pilot study this past autumn, I interviewed 3 students in the mainly online programme in sustainability leadership here at Cambridge.

• The 3 students were part of a 6-person team assigned a 10-month research project on a topic of their choosing. The 6 students all live in different countries and together had to figure out the scope of their topic, its salient literature, and then manage their search results.

• I was really curious how the students accomplished this as a group.

The pilot study• 3 semi-structured interviews• Globally dispersed post-graduate

students• 10-month group project

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First: How the students used the technologies was very social. Though they obviously didn't sit shoulder-to-shoulder doing searches, there was fascinating collaborative dialogue after retrieving their search results, meaning they worked together to determine uniqueness and relevance.

Finding 1: Sociality

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Second: The shape of this dialogue stemmed from an interplay of two things: A) Social roles – i.e., decisions about who did what in their team – which was a complicated negotiation along many relations of power. And also: The students' choice to use Slack, the online project-management app, to manage and discuss their search results, which was super interesting because it provided a high-level of surveillance and scruitny of each others' work, which in turn actively shaped the course of their learning and collaboration.

Finding 2: Roles and Tech

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Searching for and managing information is socSo, I realise this is a very fast gallop, but a few major over-arching themes of the study are:

1) The whole process of managing information for this group was intensely social and fraught with power negotiations from dividing the labour of who searched what (and why) and the long dialogues afterwards about relevance and worth.

2) And these social relations were inextricably bound up with technology choices and usage decisions. How the students chose to use Slack both reinforced their social divisions, through forums for posting their findings, and, conversely, allowed for a huge degree of fluidity within their roles, precisely because of the high degree of surveillance and scrutiny Slack enabled.

• ial and contextual• The social and technical are

inextricably bound together

Themes

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So, the two main points I want to make here are this: In just my little study, I was able to see that technology use is a complicated entanglement of social relations, power dynamics and how features of technology are interpreted within a specific moment. The technology was hardly neutral, nor was it a force to work against, and it really mattered which tools were used and how.

Technology use is a complex entanglement

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And: We need to be very careful when we use terms such as 'technology-enhanced learning,' Because what exactly is being enhanced, and for whom? Who benefits from educational technology, or not, and why? My little study showed that it's impossible to prescribe one-sized fits all technology solutions. I think this is something we always need to keep in mind as we develop library services.

Inherent biasin the term 'technology-enhanced learning'

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Thank you@MegWestbury