REGISTRATION: https://lehigh.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEudOGhrDorEtY0wyHJDPyPZEqRmAAO2Iy9

The LVAIC Information Literacy Learning Community presents our 5th annual information literacy symposium. This year’s event features a keynote by Dr. Donna Lanclos, anthropologist and folklorist, who has worked with academic libraries since 2009, with a guided community conversation to follow.

It might well be that at this point it is a cliche to point to what our experiences with COVID are teaching us and say “this was always the case, it is just even more apparent now.” The struggles we encounter as teachers, students, and library workers confined to online environments are versions of struggles that existed already in those environments (but might not have been so widely felt), and also that were always the case in physical environments. When we talk about the need for engagement, when we wonder what that looks like in Zoom, it bears remembering that those questions were relevant in classrooms and lecture halls. This extremely online time in education is forcing us to ask, what is a teaching environment? What is learning? What is a library? Where are the people? Too often the easy “solution” offered to those concerned about engagement and interactivity are those of edtech surveillance, and the alleged promises of AI. I want to talk about those promises, and the problems of reducing teaching, learning, and research to the numbers offered by edtech and library systems.