A major concern for libraries, and in particular for university libraries that are trying to play a part in engendering good research capabilities in students (and in so doing justify their own existence as well as improving the lot of the organization as a whole) – is information literacy.

Quite a bit of work in information literacy at the moment involves team working – in this respect it works hand in hand with contemporary pedagogical practice. People are brought into dialogue with one another to create team projects, and it’s thought that this allows people to use different skill sets that are more or less germane to their own learning styles, and, in the dialogue process, it encourages a reflective practice.

I have my own views about whether this fits in all that well with the typically time-poor lot of today’s student who probably needs to spend a little more time by his or herself absorbing the basics, but I do think that the whole collaborative working ethic has some good effects; in particular in the area of codiscovery. It can be frustrating to try to find ways to pool effort, though but that’s another story.

One of the ways in which structures can be coordinated to pool effort, though, is through games. Games typically have clearly set out rules or achievements, and we can work well together on games because these are easy to see and easy to share the effort towards. It’s one of the things that McGonnigal writes about in her book Reality is Broken which argues for making more aspects of real life work and achievement function a bit more like games. Games have a nice ramp of difficulty, they give constant feedback on one’s achievements, and they are often specifically designed to make working together not only possible, but fun. It’s not something I have personally had that much experience of; I don’t really have the time to devote to something like World of Warcraft or its ilk that would give me a proper sense of what it is like. But I get the idea.

McGonigal points out that the sorts of feedback and camaraderie that a project like Wikipedia depends upon approach these game-traits, and that to be a good player often means being a good collaborator. But she has this to say about collaboration, and I think it bears relating to what I’ve been writing about lately in terms of Trickster and especially the work of trickster in deconstructing categories and expectations:

“Extraordinary collaborators are adept and comfortable working within complex, chaotic systems. They don't mind messiness or uncertainty. They immerse themselves in the flow of the work and keep a high-level perspective rather than getting lost in the weeds. They have the information stamina to filter large amounts of noise and remain focused on signals that are meaningful to their work. And they practice possibility scanning: always remaining open and alert to unplanned opportunities and surprising insights – especially at bigger scales. They are willing to bypass or throw out old goals if a more achievable or a more epic goal presents itself. And they are constantly zooming out to construct a much bigger picture: finding ways to extend collaborative efforts to new communities, over longer time cycles and towards more epic goals.”

(McGonnigal)

This seems to me to be a description of a person who is on their toes, ready for what the unexpected can provide. I’m not sure what it is about this that makes them an extraordinary collaborator, per se, but it certainly would seem to mark them out as someone with a high degree of critical skill – someone who is on the lookout for the seeds of insight – someone a bit like Picasso when he says “I do not seek, I find”.

Also worth picking up on, I think, in what McGonnigal notes, is this capability in terms of creativity when the going gets rough: thriving on chaos, doing one’s own filter work (or indeed, one’s own dirt work, bringing the unexpected and the alarming into play). In the wilds are where we often find inspiration.

Eli Pariser picks it up in a different way in The Filter Bubble – for him the absence of “chaos, messiness and uncertainty” engendered by the smooth, personalized edges of a powerfully personalized information filter, degrade our ability to see for ourselves when there is a diamond in the rough. One of the things McGonnigal’s exceptional collaborator is doing is that they are doing their own filtering: they are aware of what they exclude and what they include, and they are constantly scanning for stuff they didn’t think to include before. This doesn’t necessarily happen in the filter bubble: it’s automatic, and we cannot be aware of what’s outside it. What it does is invisible to us.

For Pariser, this blocks out the challenge that makes searching and learning worthwhile (something that is, McGonigall’s model, a crucial aspect of games design.) Sometimes the challenge itself lies in the chaotic nature of the information; and decoding or otherwise working with this can be a valuable prompt for curiosity, attention and learning.

Pariser notes:

“the filter bubble […] can block what researcher Travis Proulx calls “meaning threats” the confusing, unsettling occurrences that fuel our desire to understand and acquire new ideas.”

Proulx is quoted by Pariser:

“”The key to our study is that our participants were surprised by the series of unexpected events, and they had no way to make sense of them” Proulx wrote. “Hence they strived to make sense of something else.”

For similar reasons, a filtered environment could have consequences for curiosity. According to psychologist Gorge Lowenstein, curiosity is aroused when we’re presented with an “information gap.” It’s a sensation of deprivation […] but to feel curiosity, we have to be conscious that something’s being hidden. Because the filter bubble hides things invisibly, we’re not as compelled to learn about what we don’t know.”

This is not a good game: nor is it a good learning experience, because it is too easy, and it trains us to ignore the rough edges, rather than to pay attention to them.

To bring this full circle, we have to imagine what an information literacy programme (which frequently invokes the language and techniques of gaming) would do if it wanted to harness the power of these information gaps, of these challenges to sense. It would have to include some difficulty; and if it is really serious about preparing its graduates for working with libraries, it has to include the deconstruction of the library system itself: no system is foolproof or complete. It is up to us as its users to seek the gaps in it. Or, as Lewis Hyde has it, Trickster works in the aporia, in the gaps. One justification for collections such as artists’ books in libraries is that they provide just the sort of diificult, protean material that catalogues and other systems of understanding find difficult to deal with. They can be a good place to help students understand the edges of what it is possible to describe. [Beyond this they have much of value in themselves, but merely to come to grips with the difficulty of their definition can be instructive and help raise critical awareness of the research process and its tools.]