scholarly journals Understanding Critical Information Literacy through Social Epistemology

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 1-22
Author(s):  
Martin I. Nord

Critical theoretical approaches to information literacy are an important part of the growing LIS focus on the context of information. This concern for information’s social environment and the awareness of new models of interaction between learners and librarians open the possibility for using social epistemology to better understand information literacy. The concept of social epistemology—the study of the ways in which an individual’s knowledge is shaped by their interactions with the world around them—has long been part of epistemology. However, LIS theorists Margaret Egan and Jesse Shera, who coined the term, intended it to address librarianship specifically. This paper argues that social epistemology is well positioned to strengthen the critical practice of information literacy, based both on the social epistemological characteristics of critical theory and the information literacy aspects of the social epistemology stream in the field of philosophy. A review of the critical theoretical trend in LIS literature on information literacy reveals an already-present social epistemological foundation on which LIS research can build to expand the application of critical theory to information literacy. Placing this literature in conversation with itself illuminates the ways in which engagement with social epistemological concerns is already evolving. This paper then critiques the literature and highlights some concerns. Recognition of these weaknesses in otherwise valuable work alerts us to opportunities for improvement. This paper suggests that future progress will be tied to better understanding of the social context of knowledge.

2017 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 107
Author(s):  
Patricia Bandeira de Melo ◽  
Tatiane Oliveira de Carvalho Moura

Este artigo apresenta um modelo de mediação didática para o ensino de sociologia. Efetivada em uma escola pública na cidade de São José do Belmonte, Pernambuco, Brasil, a mediação fitou o aprendizado a partir de uma pesquisa de campo feita durante a festa da Cavalgada à Pedra do Reino. Primeiro, os estudantes apropriaram-se dos conceitos de cultura, cultura popular, festa, festa popular e etnografia, e foram a campo para observar, estranhar e refletir acerca do meio do qual fazem parte, registrando suas reflexões em cadernos de campo. Nessa proposta de trabalho de perspectiva etnográfica, os alunos usaram o mundo como laboratório para compreender a sociologia. A mediação didática considerou que os discentes são investigadores críticos, protagonistas do processo de ensino-aprendizagem, na qual a palavra é dada ao educando. Eles usaram o seu contexto de existência para compreender sociologicamente o que já conheciam, mas cujos sentidos eram silenciados na estrutura social.Palavras-chave: Mediação didática; Ensino de sociologia; Perspectiva etnográfica. ABSTRACTThis article presents a didactic mediation model to teaching sociology. This mediation was applied in a public school in São José do Belmonte city, Pernambuco, Brazil, whose aim was the learning through a fieldwork during the Cavalgada à Pedra do Reino Festival. Firstly, students learned concepts as culture, popular culture, festival, popular festival and ethnography, and then they went to the field to observe, defamiliarize and reflect about their social environment, reporting their reflections in ethnographic notebooks. On this ethnographic perspective proposal, students experienced the world as a laboratory, trying to understand sociology. In the didactic mediation, students were considered as critical researchers, protagonists of the teaching-learning process, in which each one has an own narrative. They were immersed in their own social context to understand sociologically what they already knew, but which meanings were restrained in the social structure.Keywords: Didactic mediation; Sociology teaching; Ethnographic perspective


2021 ◽  
Vol 75 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick A. R. Jones ◽  
Helen C. Spence-Jones ◽  
Mike Webster ◽  
Luke Rendell

Abstract Learning can enable rapid behavioural responses to changing conditions but can depend on the social context and behavioural phenotype of the individual. Learning rates have been linked to consistent individual differences in behavioural traits, especially in situations which require engaging with novelty, but the social environment can also play an important role. The presence of others can modulate the effects of individual behavioural traits and afford access to social information that can reduce the need for ‘risky’ asocial learning. Most studies of social effects on learning are focused on more social species; however, such factors can be important even for less-social animals, including non-grouping or facultatively social species which may still derive benefit from social conditions. Using archerfish, Toxotes chatareus, which exhibit high levels of intra-specific competition and do not show a strong preference for grouping, we explored the effect of social contexts on learning. Individually housed fish were assayed in an ‘open-field’ test and then trained to criterion in a task where fish learnt to shoot a novel cue for a food reward—with a conspecific neighbour visible either during training, outside of training or never (full, partial or no visible presence). Time to learn to shoot the novel cue differed across individuals but not across social context. This suggests that social context does not have a strong effect on learning in this non-obligatory social species; instead, it further highlights the importance that inter-individual variation in behavioural traits can have on learning. Significance statement Some individuals learn faster than others. Many factors can affect an animal’s learning rate—for example, its behavioural phenotype may make it more or less likely to engage with novel objects. The social environment can play a big role too—affecting learning directly and modifying the effects of an individual’s traits. Effects of social context on learning mostly come from highly social species, but recent research has focused on less-social animals. Archerfish display high intra-specific competition, and our study suggests that social context has no strong effect on their learning to shoot novel objects for rewards. Our results may have some relevance for social enrichment and welfare of this increasingly studied species, suggesting there are no negative effects of short- to medium-term isolation of this species—at least with regards to behavioural performance and learning tasks.


Economies ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 59
Author(s):  
Dmitriy G. Rodionov ◽  
Evgenii A. Konnikov ◽  
Magomedgusen N. Nasrutdinov

The global COVID-19 pandemic has caused a transformation of virtually all aspects of the world order today. Due to the introduction of the world quarantine, a considerable share of professional communications has been transformed into a format of distance interaction. As a result, the specific weight of traditional components of the investment attractiveness of a region is steadily going down, because modern business can be built without the need for territorial unity. It should be stated that now the criteria according to which investors decide if they are ready to invest in a region are dynamically transforming. The significance of the following characteristics is increasingly growing: the sustainable development of a region, qualities of the social environment, and consistency of the social infrastructure. Thus, the approaches to evaluating the region’s investment attractiveness must be transformed. Moreover, the investment process at the federal level involves the determination of target areas of regional development. Despite the universal significance of innovative development, the region can develop much more dynamically when a complex external environment is formed that complements its development model. Interregional interaction, as well as an integrated approach to innovative development, taking into account not only the momentary effect, but also the qualitative long-term transformation of the region, will significantly increase the return on investment. At the same time, the currently existing methods for assessing the investment attractiveness of the region are usually heuristic in nature and are not universal. The heuristic nature of the existing methods does not allow to completely abstract from the subjectivity of the researcher. Moreover, the existing methods do not take into account the cyclical properties of the innovative development of the region, which lead to the formation of a long-term effect from the transformation of the regional environment. This study is aimed at forming a comprehensive methodology that can be used to evaluate the investment attractiveness of a certain region and conclude about the lines of business that should be developed in it as well as to find ways to increase the region’s investment attractiveness. According to the results of the study, a comprehensive methodology was formed to evaluate the region’s investment attractiveness. It consists of three key indicators, namely, the level of the region’s investment attractiveness, the projected level of the region’s investment attractiveness, and the development vector of the region’s investment attractiveness. This methodology is based on a set of indicators that consider the status of the economic and social environment of the region, as well as the status of the innovative and ecological environment. The methodology can be used to make multi-dimensional conclusions both about the growth areas responsible for increasing the region’s innovative attractiveness and the lines of business that should be developed in the region.


2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-118
Author(s):  
Milan Orlić

Post-Yugoslav literature and culture came out of the stylistic formations of Yugoslav modernism and postmodernism, in the context of European cultural discourse. Yugoslav literature, which spans the existence of “two” Yugoslavias, the “first” Yugoslavia (1928–1941) and the “second” socialist Yugoslavia (1945–1990), is the foundation of various national literary and cultural paradigms, which shared the same or similar historical, philosophical and aesthetic roots. These were fed, on the one hand, by a phenomenological understanding of the world, language, style and culture, and on the other, by an acceptance of or resistance to the socialist realist aesthetics and ideological values of socialist Yugoslav society. In selected examples of contemporary Serbian prose, the author explores the social context, which has shaped contemporary Serbian literature, focusing on its roots in Serbian and Yugoslav 20th century (post)modernism.


2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Micheal Shier ◽  
Carole Sinclair ◽  
Lila Gault

Social work programs in Canada teach emerging generalist practitioners about the consequences of oppression in the lives of the clients they work with. More emphasis within social work education could be placed on practical ways of contextualizing forms of oppression as each relates specifically to practice. The following provides a description of the oppression of ‘ableism’, and offers an applied training module to help prepare generalist social workers (i.e. current students or direct practitioners) to work with issues of disability as they emerge in their direct practice with clients. The training module helps to facilitate learning specific to the leading theoretical discussions and the social context of disability within society. Through these discussions students might then become more aware of their role as practitioners in challenging the oppression of ‘ableism’, rather than maintain outdated modes of service delivery and intervention with those people disabled by the social environment.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-29
Author(s):  
M.V. Vinogradov ◽  
O.A. Ulyanina

The article analyzes the processes of intensive informatization and technologization of modern society, affecting the vector of development of the social, economic, political and military spheres of the state. In this context, the problem of informational impact on a human personality, his consciousness, mindset, spiritual and value orientations is considered. On the scale of the geopolitical interaction of the world community at the information-psychological level, this problem is revealed through the prism of describing the nature and content of the information war carried out in the interests of achieving political and military goals. Areas of informational influence on police officers are specified. In this regard, the need for the formation of information literacy of law enforcement specialists is being updated; the directions of information and psychological counteraction and protection against information attacks are highlighted. Psychological resistance, critical thinking, information security are named among the priority solutions to the highlighted issue.


2020 ◽  
pp. 119-125
Author(s):  
Nicolas Bommarito

This chapter provides an overview of the wide variety of Buddhist practices. Though people who practice Buddhism would all self-identify as Buddhist, what Buddhism means to them and the role it plays in their lives is very different. Think about the social context. For some Buddhists, Buddhism is deeply intertwined with both family life and powerful social institutions. This social context affects how practice looks for each. The role of ritual is also different for each. Moreover, there are different background assumptions about the supernatural in play. Another difference is the place of meditation in the lives of each of these Buddhists. None of this is to say that any of these people are practicing “real” or “authentic” Buddhism. It is merely to highlight the ways in which Buddhist practice varies around the world.


Author(s):  
Soraj Hongladarom

The problem of global digital divide, namely disparity in Internet access and use among the various regions of the world, is a growing concern. Even though, according to some reports, the gap is getting narrower, this does not mean that the problem is disappearing, because the problem does not just consist in getting more people to become “wired,” so to speak. This chapter investigates the various relationships among the global digital divide, global justice, cultures and epistemology. Very briefly stated, not getting access to the Internet constitutes an injustice because the access is a social good that can lead to various other goods. Furthermore, as information technology is a second-order technology, one that operates on meaning bearing symbols, access to the technology is very much an issue of social epistemology, an attempt to find out the optimal way to distribute knowledge across the social and cultural domains.


2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 343-356
Author(s):  
Keiko Yasukawa ◽  
Jeff Evans

Abstract Numeracy practices are always dependent on the social context in which they emerge. These contexts, however, are unstable because of a range of technological and socio-political changes. How does this instability affect people’s agency in the world? After reviewing key approaches to numeracy practices research, we distil key findings from recent numeracy studies. We introduce the concept of the numerate environment to examine the context in which opportunities, supports and demands present themselves for people’s numeracy development, explaining how cultural-historical activity theory can be used to analyse the effects of changes in numerate environments. We consider examples of social trends likely to effect such changes and conclude with implications of shifts in people’s numerate environment for future educational provision, policy and research.


2006 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 406-408 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ralf-Peter Behrendt

Genetically and neurodevelopmentally, there may be a thousand schizophrenias, yet there would be no schizophrenia at all without active contribution from all of us; none – outside the primitive processes that regulate our relationship with one another. In order to understand the nature of schizophrenia as it unfolds relatively uniformly in the social context, we need to depart from an evolutionarily more feasible understanding of society.


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