Threshold concepts are defined as troublesome, transformative, irreversible, integrative, and bounded.  They are also said to be ‘liminal’ that is, they are akin to a rite of passage through coming to know a concept.

What troubles me about threshold concepts is that sometimes it appears that the defined threshold was troublesome for the teacher.  A certain ego-centric take on what troubled them would be the same as what troubles others.  There may be more to it and this is particularly highlighted by O’Donnell (2010) in his study of the ways in which economists understand the classic example of a threshold concept: opportunity cost.  O’Donnell found that there were 4 distinct conceptualisations of opportunity cost and that only one of them aligned with the classic definition.  He also found that economists were equally likely to claim any one of the four definitions as their understanding (that is, in a question about opportunity cost, each of the four multiple choices gained around a quarter of the responses).

Troublesome, indeed.

So when we start to talk about information literacy, what are the concepts that are most troublesome? Are they the same for everyone? Can we define a set of concepts that lead everyone to the same (or similar) understanding?

And when we talk about information literacy in universities, are we invoking a broad categorisation or a more confined set of skills around academic literacies?

Ref: O’Donnell, R., 2010. A Critique of the Threshold Concept Hypothesis and an Application in Economics. Working Paper Series, #164. Available at: http://www.finance.uts.edu.au/research/wpapers/wp164.pdf

What do I mean by knowingness of lately? The free dictionary suggests one possible definition for knowingness which is:  Possessing knowledge, information, or understanding.  Well, that term fits.  We want to know how people come to possess knowledge, information or understanding (although defining understanding itself is sometimes problematic as it is often unmeasurable).

So the problems of keeping up to date, of coming to possess knowledge, information or understanding are central to our project.  How do people do this? Given the expansion of information, the fragmentation (Rowland, 2006) of knowledge, how can any one of us, or even a team, keep up to date.  And that’s the lately part.

So the knowingness of lately refers to the ever shifting processes we need to keep up to date.

(How does this differ from the ‘knowingness of now’?)

Reference: Rowland, S., 2006, The Enquiring University: Compliance and Contestation in Higher Education, Berkshire: Open University Press