The fundamental purpose of higher education is the preparation of students for their futures. If graduates of today and tomorrow are to flourish in the modern, fast-paced, high-tech world, they must have information seeking and technology skills. They must be information and technology literate. The means of acquiring these literacies must be imbedded in student learning and be part and parcel of their educational experience. For this to be so imbedded, it is necessary for the institution to develop and maintain a robust information technology infrastructure.
Information literate people have a number of qualities and skills. First of all, they recognize when they have an information need. This, as we all know, is not a quality possessed by everyone. They know the appropriate places to look for information, and they know the appropriate strategies to use for each of them. The information literate person has the ability to recognize the information when it is found, and then to determine if it is the best, most accurate, or most current information available.
Information literacy can combine various elements of library literacy, computer literacy, media literacy, network literacy and other literacies, but it should be noted that in the best educational experiences, students become more information literate in the natural course of learning subject content and research methodologies of the various disciplines they study.
Whether our institutions of higher learning expressly articulate it or not, they all want their graduates to have developed these competencies and many believe their students have done so. Even though all want their students to be information literate, few have specifically built the means of acquiring those skills into the curriculum. We are all aware that inculcating these competencies should be a curriculum-wide responsibility. But because of the differences in technical expertise among the faculty and the technical resources on our campuses, not all can contribute equally to the effort.
There is an important area that seems to get little notice when college and university administrators, librarians and faculty discuss the needs for development of information literacy among their charges. In most cases the needs and values, the courses, and the specific skills all receive adequate attention when programs are planned and implemented. But all too often the basic ingredients that undergird the information literacy programs are ignored. Even more likely they are routinely taken for granted. We refer here to the information and technology infrastructure. All too frequently we find the information and technology infrastructure are incomplete and/or inadequately maintained to provide consistently high quality support in all areas that technology can and should be called upon to deliver.
How does a campus go about maintaining the information/instruction technology that will support a curriculum that pursues information literacy as an educational outcome? Without doubt most campuses have had some success dealing with these issues in recent years. Nonetheless, there are few if any institutions that can say they have had no instances of student or faculty frustration with parts of the technological infrastructure. Nearly everyone has encountered technology failures, or at the very least, technology that did not work as smoothly or as intuitively as the users would want it to.
We all know that sometimes this failure is 'just the nature of technology', or can be attributed to 'user error', or the result of poor directions, documentation or user guides. But some of it is due to failure of the infrastructure itself. Of course, not all frustration can be eliminated, nor should it be since in things educational, as well as elsewhere, 'no pain, no gain' is a valid concept. But, this does not excuse us from attempting to provide the best technical and information infrastructure we can. As much as possible, we must be prepared to provide the best support our resources allow so we can to make the campus educational and work experience a positive and productive one. A predictable, stable, and dependable infrastructure will encourage use of the resources, learning by students, and incorporation of instructional technology into the curriculum by the faculty.
It is important to recognize that development and maintenance of the infrastructure is very complex and expensive. Probably none of the campus technology promoters and users are fully aware of its cost in budgetary resources or in human effort--not the administration, when they venture into 'technifying' the campus, nor the faculty or students who are the direct beneficiaries and most numerous and persistent users of the infrastructure's resources. Probably not even the support staff in the library and computer centers who acquire and maintain it on a daily basis are fully aware of its cost.
Everyone on campus is a potential beneficiary and perhaps all use at least a small portion of its total offerings. But, therein probably is where some of the difficulty lies. Hardly anyone will use all of the options and applications offered, certainly not on a frequent basis. Each of us will have a favorite technology, application, information database or service, and will expect that part to be available always, and regularly improved or upgraded.
However, sometimes we fail to remember that computers, networks and electronic information resources are immature technologies. Yet we expect them to perform mission critical functions unfailingly. There should be little surprise that the tension levels of the users and providers run high when parts of the system fail. The resultant stress is further compounded by frequent changes, upgrades and new versions of hardware and software.
What are these various infrastructure elements? There are a number of them that we should consider in this essay: the campus wide network, telecommunications, equipment and hardware, software, information resources, and service and training.
