I still follow the discussions on the health librarians' Jiscmail list lis-medical. I do this largely for nostalgic reasons, though I would not rule out a return to health librarianship at some point in the future, despite the fact that document supply requests for articles from the Armenian Journal of Proctology have little relevance to the bread and butter of life in a further education college.
However, a recent discussion on creative methods of teaching the basic concepts of Boolean logic caught my eye. Participants leant towards using food and drink to illustrate concepts: fruit salads, gins and tonic, fish and chips, and others even more inventive.
And yet....I do wonder, and did when I practiced it, quite what some of the brightest young minds in the country, who choose to make a career in medicine or nursing, would make of such kindergarten paedagogy. I encountered set theory at school: for some reason we were exposed to what was known, in 1965 or 66, as the 'new maths', including set theory, before reverting to the old sort in the run up to O level. I next encountered it years later on my postgraduate librarianship course when learning how to search a database.
Leaving aside theories about falling or rising educational standards, I find it hard to believe that well-educated doctors, nurses or physiotherapists have never heard of Boolean logic until presented with it by a health librarian in a stuffy library training room on a warm afternoon. I think it may be time for an approach to information literacy that credits the user with some intelligence.
