Wherever you go, there you are.

Are we are learning how to learn how to learn so that we can teach how to learn how to learn? No wonder it sometimes seems complicated! Perhaps a teacher-librarian is a kind of midwife to the inquiry process.

I feel I am grappling with a huge volume of information, in daily life as well as in this course, and this is at times overwhelming. Some of the information is what I think of as raw or pure data. Some folks thrive on this and can readily, even eagerly, absorb and sort it. Others, like me, not so much. Multiple intelligences, personality type (and by definition, brain differences) factor into this. I’m an idea and “big picture” type of person, and dislike having to process a lot of data, so if this course helps me acquire more effective information literacy tools that will be a big help.

One thing that has definitely been reinforced for me is that clarity is crucial to a user-friendly learning process. I get frustrated when acronyms appear again and again, tripping up my thought process. It’s like walking along and suddenly finding an obstacle on the path, or a direction sign written in a foreign language, forcing me to hunt through a guide book to find the translation for a term that could easily have been made clear in the first place.

I experienced this kind of frustration during a long distance walking holiday in Wales a couple of years ago. The route, which had been promoted as “well sign-posted” turned out to be quite confusing in places, often with several route markers on the same post all pointing in different directions (!), or the markers obscured by foliage so that my partner and I would walk right past them and not realize it until we’d walked a couple of miles too far (in pouring rain, thunder and lightning). That was the first (and soggiest) day of the 11-day, 136 mile journey. Other times, out of sheer curiosity (and armed with maps and compass), we’d deliberately veer off the designated route and discover incredible new scenic delights that we would have missed had we remained on track. Still, it’s better to have a choice to veer off than to end up there because of poor directions.

Inquiry too can send us off in the wrong direction and have us looking for new possibilities to answer new questions.