Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Experts/ expats

Carrying on the web 2.0 theme from the last post, the following was notified to the ALIA list:
Mitchell, P. (2007) "Information literacy experts or expats?" paper presented at SLANZA 2007. "This paper challenges library staff to reconsider their role in information literacy and how we ensure students and teachers are equipped to navigate the new information landscape. Are we experts in contemporary information literacyissues – issues such as online identity, digital rights, social networking, personalisation and collaborative content? Or are we in danger of becoming more like expatriates - continuing to do things like we did in ‘the old country’?"

It is full text and highlights some of the issues quite concisely. On the Education.au page at http://www.educationau.edu.au/jahia/Jahia/home/pid/482 there is a link to this and also to a couple of other papers (e.g. web 2.0 in education) that may be of interest.

Photo by Sheila Webber: window on a summer's afternoon, Madrid, July 2007.

Information Literacy 2.0

Peter Godwin alerted me to this and he's probably going to blog it too: Peter's blog is Information Literacy meets Web 2.0 at http://infolitweb.blogspot.com/

Kimmo Tuominen, of the Finnish Parliamentary Library, gave a keynote at the Making a difference: moving towards Library 2.0 conference held in Helsinki in May. The talk was called Information Literacy 2.0 and in it he explains his take on Web 2.0 and what this means for information literacy.

I think he does make the assumptions about people's existing concept of Information Literacy. His ideas on "Information Literacy 2.0" seem to me to fit in fine with my ideas of "Information Literacy 1.0" since I would include all kinds of information & information channels in my existing definition and I know some other people would too. Nevertheless, interesting, and I liked his slides on "sociotechnical filtering solutions". The pdf of the presentation is here.

Photo by Sheila Webber: Orchid in my office. I never thought it would bloom again, but it likes the natural light in this office I moved into in February.

Monday, July 30, 2007

EBL papers

Full papers from the Evidence-based Library and Information Practice conference held in May are at: http://www.eblip4.unc.edu/ Particularly relevant papers:
Brettle, Alison. Information skills training in health libraries: Are we any nearer the evidence?
Myers, Glenda & D. R. Prozesky. Comparison of training interventions for PubMed search skills amongst 3rd and 4th year medical students.
Nagata, Haruki, Akira Toda & Päivi Kytömäki. Students’ patterns of library use and their learning outcomes. (I liked the idea that "strolling around" the shelves could be associated with motivation to learn ;-)
Oakleaf, Megan. Using rubrics to collect evidence for decision-making: What do librarians need to learn?
Phelps, Sue F. & Karen R. Diller. Transforming the library: Applying multiple assessment methodologies to library instruction and planning.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Another one of Carmen's cats, Madrid, July 2007.

Sunday, July 29, 2007

Blogher 07 conference: Journalism in SL

I attended two sessions (and a disco!) of the BlogHer 07 Second Life (SL) conference. This is a conference that focuses on women (the "her") and blogging, and the Real Life (RL) version was taking place in Chicago, USA. The first session was about journalism in SL and since I think there is relevance to information behaviour and information literacy I'll blog about it here. (I have blogged about the business and SL session (and the disco) on my SL blog: I was obviously attending as Sheila Yoshikawa (my avatar).

This was a panel session, including people from the UK, USA and Australia (or, rather, their avatars). One was a woman who was a freelance journalist in RL and SL (Cybergrrl Oh), one was the editor (57 Miles, in RL Nick Wilson) of Metaversed http://www.metaversed.com/ which reports on technology and business in SL, one was Starr Sonic a presenter on SLNTV (SLNTV recorded the whole session, so you can listen & look at http://slcn.tv/blogher-sl-covering-virtual-world).

A few themes emerged.
a) SL Media are underdeveloped at the moment. If you have been in SL you will know you can search for things like shops and destinations as well as people, but there isn't to my knowledge a SL equivalent of yellow pages nor are there well-indexed business directories. Therefore (this is my view) resources like blogs are helping people to find out "what" and "where" information, as well as being essential to keep track of things like SL events and news.
b) There are a lot of different potential sources for news about SL (mostly things like blogs, but SL is increasingly being covered by traditional media), and it is difficult to keep track of what's going on. Wilson said that "you have to build a network of friends" to keep in touch with what is going on - so an emphasis on using people as information sources, and developing your own information community.
c) There was disagreement as to whether current news about SL would be interesting in the future. I think this might correspond to similar arguments about any current news - some seeing the value to social historians, others just seeing today's news as "tomorrow's fish wrapper" (Wilson).
d) SL media are developing reputation, as they would in RL, except (as ever nowadays) reputations are being developed more quickly than in the past. Nevertheless it is still a matter of people learning which sources can be trusted, which ones suit your specialist interests etc.
e) Whilst I don't think Rupert Murdoch (News Corporation) owns any major SL media (yet) there is still an "Editorial bias" issue, namely where media are seen to be influenced by the creators of SL, Linden Labs. Are some sources reluctant to publish criticism of Linden? I suppose, in fact, this is more like Government Censorship (since Linden ultimately own the SL world) than media ownership.
f) As in RL, if you want to get a story into the media, you need to provide an angle, some human interest, an "exclusive" etc.
g) There is a need to get information inworld (in SL itself) and also to get information about what is going on in SL to people outside (these may be people with avatars who like to keep in touch, or people who are interested but don't go inworld). The information content may be the same, but the form that channels take in SL itself is certainly at an early stage.

I continue to think that there is a big role, potentially for information professionals and information managers within SL - associated with "libraries" in some cases, but perhaps often not tied to libraries. I must say that I didn't contribute any questions or comments - this was my first biggish conference in SL so I was in learning mode.

There are a lot of blog posts about Blogher, as you might expect, as well as the recordings of the SL sessions on SLCN. Another good write-up of a session on blogs as media and this journalism one are on Jerry Everard’s Blog at http://lostbiro.com/blog/?p=893

Saturday, July 28, 2007

Free chapter

Whilst checking something else I was reminded that there is a free chapter online from:
Levy, P. and Roberts, S. (Eds) Developing the New Learning Environment: the changing role of the academic librarian. London: Facet. ISBN: 978-1-85604-530-8
namely Allison Littlejohn's chapter: Chapter 4: Key issues in the design and delivery of technology-enhanced learning

Photo by Sheila Webber: Royal Palace from Sabatini Gardens, Madrid, July 2007.

Thursday, July 26, 2007

Gaming and information literacy

The ALA TechSource Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium took place in Chicago, USA, 22-24 July 2007. It included sessions on information literacy:
Information Literacy through Unique Education Gaming Application. Annie Downey, Kristin Boyett (University of North Texas Libraries)
Games Students Play: A New Approach to Online Information Literacy Instruction. Amy Harris (University of North Carolina, Greensboro), Scott Rice (University of North Carolina, Greensboro)
Quarantined: Axl Wise and the Information Outbreak: Creating an Online Game to Teach Information Skills. Bee Gallegos, Tammy Allgood (Fletcher Library, Arizona State University at the West campus)

John Kirriemuir was doing a talk Off the Beaten Track in Second Life which is why I noticed it (and I see I'm mentioned ;-)

The website is at http://gaming.techsource.ala.org/index.php/Main_Page. At time of writing there were just extended abstracts. The technorati page (blog posts etc) is at http://technorati.com/tag/glls2007

Photo by Sheila Webber: Retiro Park, Madrid, Spain, before a concert, July 2007 (the chairs filled up).

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

Passively multiplayer

Thanks to Sabine Little who alerted me to a blog post which describes a presentation in which Justin Hall was talking about a sort of webquest evaluating websites that has been turned into a game where the players (students) can interact "players can anticipate sites that their friends will be visiting, and plant bombs there, such that as that person hits the site, they get a message indicating some change in their points (either increased or decreased) or some other effect on their play." The players also get points, so there is a strong competitive element. The blog post is:
Warlick, D. (2007) "Passively Multiplayer Online Gaming: The Web". 2c worth, 13 July.
http://davidwarlick.com/2cents/
2007/07/13/passively-multiplayer-online-gaming-the-web
/

and the actual website is at http://www.passivelymultiplayer.com/ - I must say getting students involved in actually creating an exercise like this, and adding the excitement of competition sounds good, as "evaluate the website" exercises can be really dull. There is always a risk that the focus is then on tweaking the game, rather than what is meant to be the learning outcome. However I think you could design things so that thinking about what should get points/prizes and why it should was an integral part. The blog post talks about the privacy concerns with this example, but talking that through with students could also be an interesting exercise in itself (issues of data protection, privacy on the web, acceptable behaviour etc.)

Photo by Sheila Webber: One of Carmen's cats, Madrid, July 2007.

Informs project news

There is news about the Informs project (software enabling tutorial creation) , including results of their questionnaire and reports from the user meetings at: http://www.informs.intute.ac.uk/
projectnews.html


Photo by Sheila Webber: Bench, Sabatini Gardens, Madrid, Spain, July 2007.

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

A student on why students are resistent

Apologies for slight gap in entries - have been on holiday in Madrid. Anyway, there's a really interesting post on the CILASS student blog (well, of course there are actually lots of interesting posts, I'm just picking on this one) in which Tim Fiennes, outgoing student CILASS ambassador, reflects about why students are resistent to groupwork and "skills" (including learning about information literacy) but how in the end you see they are useful.

He concludes .... "I’ve just realised that I could actually sum ALL of that up with “students will be happier to engage with IBL [inquiry based learning] if they understand the benefits of doing so” " ....but it's the thinking-through of various points that is interesting. Tim has just graduated with a BA in Politics and Philosophy.
http://cilass-student-blog.group.shef.ac.uk/?p=70

Photo by Sheila Webber: I have been attending graduation ceremonies, this was taken last Wednesday after the ceremony that included our BSc Information Management students.

Middle School Information and Digital Literacy Project

Thanks to Chris Armstrong for alerting me to the following. "The Center for Digital Literacy at Syracuse University's School of Information Studies is conducting a national online survey of US 8th graders and the library media specialist / teacher librarians at their schools. The study measures students' perceived and actual competence in information and digital literacy, and some other motivational variables that may impact students' information seeking." They are going to recruit teacher librarians from schools in the USA and are asking interested parties to fill in a questionnaire (the first stage of the selection process). I don't know how old 8th graders would be, so if anyone from the USA can add a comment telling us, that would be useful.
The questionnaire is at http://imls8.syr.edu/survey/index.php?sid=3D5 and the home page for the Middle School Information and Digital Literacy Project is at http://imls8.syr.edu/

Thursday, July 19, 2007

IL in Brisbane

Bill Johnston is touring round Australia at the moment: he was giving a session at the Pacific Rim First Year Experience conference, and has also been meeting people and giving talks at universities in Perth, Melbourne and Brisbane. He was able to enjoy an evening hosted by Christine Bruce, and in this photo which Christine kindly emailed to me he (in the white shirt) is pictured next to Sylvia Edwards, with Angela Button and Hilary Hughes (Queensland University of Technology) also standing and Li Wang (University of Auckland), Christine Bruce and Ian Stoodley on the sofa.
I highlighted some papers by Christine, Sylvia and Hilary only a few days ago (here) so I will now mention a paper by Li Wang:
Wang, L. (2006) "Information literacy courses – a shift from a teacher-centred to a collaborative learning environment." In: Proceedings: 4th International Lifelong Learning Conference : Partners, Pathways, and Pedagogies, 13-16 June, 2006, Yeppoon, Queensland, Australia. pp 350-354. http://researchspace.auckland.ac.nz/handle/2292/438

University of Kostanz conference

The Library of the University of Konstanz has organised the Konstanz Workshop on Information Literacy, 8-9 November 2007, in Konstanz, Germany. The theme is Advanced users: Information Literacy and Custumised Services. There is a call for proposals, with more information on the website at http://www.ub.uni-konstanz.de/kwil
Travelling expenses of speakers will partially be financed by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. [Apologies for an earlier garbled version of this post, I hit Publish last night when I meant to hit Save Draft]
Photo by Sheila Webber: The last strawberry, July 2007.

Blog her and Bloggers cafe

I have registered for the Second Life (SL) version of the Blogher conference http://blogher.org/, an annual event held in the US that focuses on women & blogging. The Real Life event takes place 27-28 July 2007 in , and the SL version (with some original events and some streamed into SL) 27-28 July in the Hyperstring conference centre. You can register for either event at the Blogher website, but the SL is free ;-) The Blogher website contains (as you might expect) a huge listing of blogs by/for women & discussion fora.

I'm pictured here in SL as Sheila Yoshikawa, standing next to my photo in the Bloggers' cafe. In fact the photo in the cafe links to this blog, so I think I'll need to add a permanent link here to my SL blog. The Bloggers Cafe has a web equivalent at http://thebloggerscafe.com/, where the aim is to develop e.g. a wiki about educating in SL, although there isn't a lot there yet apart from some thoughtful posts about education on (what else) the Bloggers Cafe blog.

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Conferences

In searching for TAFE material the other day (see below) I also was reminded of the EDNA website which includes a searchable catalogue of events, resources, articles etc. There is lots on it about teaching & learning, but I identified the following events:

The information literacy landscape. 5-7 October 2007, Belgrade, Serbia. Conference themes include: Critical thinking/evaluation of information; Teaching & Assessment of information literacy; Access to information: the 'have' vs. the 'have not'; Economic, legal, ethical, and social aspects of information literacy; Information beyond Google. http://slim.emporia.edu/globenet/belgrade2007/

OpenEd 2007: Localizing and Learning, 26-28 September 2007. It "focuses on how open content is used by learners and teachers. Do open educational resources support learning in ways different from non-open resources? In what concrete ways do open educational resources support learning?" http://cosl.usu.edu/conferences/opened2007

education.au seminar: Generation MySpace. Brisbane, Australia, 6 August 2007. "danah boyd, an internationally recognised authority on the way people use networked social media, will be the keynote speaker at education.au's second seminar for 2007 on social networking and its impact on students and education. http://www.educationau.edu.au/jahia/Jahia/pid/479

Photo by Sheila Webber: arrangement in Radford (pattern OS) vase, July 2007.

Children's digital literacy

An issue of Language and education (vol 21 no. 3, 2007) focuses on children and digital literacy. I could see the full text free but I'm not sure whether that's because Sheffield subscribes to it. http://www.multilingual-matters.net/
le/021/3/default.htm

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

IL: whose job is it?

Yesterday there was a session held in the USA: Information Literacy Redux: Whose Job is It? given by Cerise Oberman (Dean of the Library & Information Services
State University of New York at Plattsburgh) It was an ELI Web Seminar Discussion .

There is Oberman's ppt and also a transcript of the chat session that took place afterwards. This latter has the problems of chat (e.g. different people asking questions at the same time) and there are more questions than answers in it. However, there are also a few useful resources mentioned and some additional opinions.

In the ppt, Oberman draws on the latest Horizon report and the ETS report (both already mentioned on this blog) for info on trends and student behaviours. She also mentions ACRL standards etc. to identify in the end that essentially it is everybody's job: librarian; faculty; learning technologists; regional accrediting agencies; state university systems; schools ("K12"); business and policy makers - and the student's job, obviously. So it is what one might expect, but interesting to see the case put together. It is on the Educause site at: http://connect.educause.edu/library/abstract/
InformationLiteracyR/44740?time=1184663979

Monday, July 16, 2007

TAFE and IL

I was talking today to someone about information literacy in further education colleges: as anyone in that area will know there is far less literature than there is about universities. I was recommending looking at the material written about IL in Australian TAFEs, so I thought I'd mention that here too. TAFE stands for Technical And Further Education and I think they are the nearest equivalent to the UK's FE colleges (someone correct me if I'm wrong). You can actually find some good material by doing a search on good old Google TAFE "Information literacy".

To pick out a couple of specific items:
Fafeita, J. (2006) "The Current Status of Teaching and Fostering Information Literacy in TAFE." Australian academic and research libraries, 37 (2), 136-162. http://alia.org.au/publishing/aarl/37.2/fafeita.pdf (this reports on a survey of TAFE librarians)

LEARN Network of South Australian TAFE Libraries. (2006) Learn Information Literacy Initiative (Lili). http://www2.tafe.sa.edu.au/lili/index.html (A tutorial)

You also might want to keep an eye on the wiki Towards a knowledge commons: modelling a transformation of library services and information resource provision in the Vocational Education Sector http://victafe.pbwiki.com/


Photo by Sheila Webber: Yeppoon, Australia, June 2004.

School Library presentations

There are presentations from the weekend school of the School Library Association (held on June 22nd 2007) up online. They include a ppt from Sharon Markless, Information Literacy and the future of learning. They can be accessed via http://www.sla.org.uk/
wkd-course-2007-programme.php
Photo by Sheila Webber: Rare moment of sunshine, Sheffield, July 2007.

Sunday, July 15, 2007

Framework for Masters and Doctoral students

Thanks to the bibliotecarios 2-0 ("librarian 2.0", a Spanish blog) for alerting me to the French framework for information literacy for Masters and doctoral students, which was published earlier this year.

Noel, E. (Ed) (2007) Maîtrise de l’information des étudiants avancés (master et doctorat)Eléments pour une formation. FORMIST. The web address is http://www.enssib.fr/bibliotheque-numerique/notice-21101
The document was produced as part of the June 2006 FORMIST conference, and subsequently (I think) approved for release by the Comité Editorial et Scientifique de FORMIST. It does not aim to be prescriptive, but to act as a tool and discussion document for those concerned with this issue. It seems to me interesting in not choosing the usual key categories, but the following (I hope I have translated correctly):

1 .Culture de l’information (I think perhaps "information environment")
2. Connaissance de l’information scientifique (Knowledge of scholarly information)
3. Recherche de l’information (Information seeking)
4. Analyse et exploitation de l’information (Analysis and use of information)

There are more specific objectives in each section, with some additional notes, an indication of whether it is required at Masters (level 1/2) and Doctoral, noting whether the objective is essential or desirable for student learning.

The PowerPoints from the FORMIST 2006 conference itself (on a Web 2.0 theme) are at http://formist.enssib.fr/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=33
Photo by Sheila Webber: Roses in the rain, July 2007.

Friday, July 13, 2007

Some recent articles

Free on the web:
Hughes, Hilary E. and Bruce, Christine S. and Edwards, Sylvia L. (2007) "Models for reflection and learning: a culturally inclusive response to the infomation literacy imbalance." In: Andretta, S, (Eds) Change and challenge: Information literacy for the 21st century, pp. 59-84. Adelaide: Auslib Press. Available from QUT e-print archive: http://eprints.qut.edu.au/archive/00007038/

Irving, C. and Crawford, J. (2007) "Information literacy: a framework for life." Library and information update, 6 (7). (Discusses Scottish Framework and the background to it) http://www.cilip.org.uk/publications/
updatemagazine/archive/archive2007/
july/Irving%20and%20Crawford.htm


Priced:
Bombaro, C. (2007) "Using audience response technology to teach academic integrity: 'The seven deadly sins of plagiarism' at Dickinson College." Reference Services Review, 35 (2), 296-309. "This paper seeks to explore the successes and challenges associated with teaching first-year students a session on plagiarism avoidance through the use of an audience response system."

Emmett, A. and Emde, J. (2007) "Assessing information literacy skills using the ACRL standards as a guide." Reference Services Review, 35 (2), 210 - 229. "The purpose of this study is to obtain preliminary evidence over a three-year period on the efficacy of a curriculum designed to foster information literacy skills in graduate students in a chemistry bibliography course."

Mizrachi, D. and Bedoya, J. (2007) "LITE Bites: broadcasting bite-sized library instruction." Reference Services Review, 35 (2), 249 - 256. "This paper sets out to describe a successful collaboration between the UCLA Library and a campus-based student television production team to create and broadcast a series of short library commercials."
Photos by Sheila Webber: Top photo - trying to pick cherries from top of tree through the bedroom window; 2nd photo - the tree, before the pesky birds ate most of the cherries.

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Survey of plagiarism penalties

This was published last month:
Tennant P., Rowell G. and Duggan F. (2007) Academic Misconduct Benchmarking Research Project: Part I: The Range and Spread of Penalties Available for Student Plagiarism among UK Higher Education Institutions. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: JISC PLagiarism Advisory Service.
It identifies that "The regulations that recommend penalties for plagiarism among higher education institutions (HEIs) vary substantially throughout the UK .... almost a third of HEIs use guidelines that fail to advise academic staff which penalties are appropriate for particular cases." Certainly when there ISN'T consistency and clear guidance within a university it can be problematic (I hasten to add we have a policy here at Sheffield, although guidelines are being clarified further: I think it has to be an ongoing thing).
Photo by Sheila Webber: Rose (perhaps "Peace"?), Firth Court, Sheffield, July 2007.

Trivia: librarian video

I thought the video of a track called "Librarian" was quite amusing. For me it plays with rather than reinforces the librarian stereotype ("discuss" ;-) It was filmed at Dunedin Public Library (NZ) I see. http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=Ne_WXP7lUWM&NR=1

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

ALIA Information Literacy Forum makeover

The ALIA (Australian Library and Information association) Information Literacy Forum is celebrating is 6th birthday and has decided to have a "mini makeover". They are inviting people to help rename the group. There is a competition with the prize of a AUS$50 Borders book voucher. Deadline is Monday July 30 2007. Further details on the group's website http://www.alia.org.au/groups/infolit/

Photo by Sheila Webber: Bee in a poppy, July 2007.

Social software

The newly published article in the IFLA Academic and Research Libraries newsletter asks "Social Software – is enough, enough?" I'm not sure whether Stephen Marvin really answers his own question, but it's a useful article. He starts by summarising Steve Abram's view of "generation we", goes on to review more sceptical reaction (e.g. from Andrew Keen author of recently-published The Cult of the Amateur**), and then provides brief descriptions of some key web 2.0 products like youtube, livejournal, Second Life, including some useful links & references.

Marvin, S. (2007) "Social Software – is enough, enough?" Academic and Research Libraries newsletter, (39) 11-16. http://www.ifla.org/VII/s2/pub/s2-newsletter-July07.pdf (this is the web address for the whole issue)
**You can find an extract of Andrew Keen's book via his blog http://andrewkeen.typepad.com/
Photo by Sheila Webber: Tour de France, which I saw going past on Sunday,near Charlton (South London).

Monday, July 09, 2007

Digital Outreach

One of the sessions I would have liked to get to at Umbrella a week or so ago (but I was getting to grips with my poster) was organised CoFHE/UCR and featured Lisa Hincliffe (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and Lisa Sloniowski (York University, Toronto). They talked about Digital Outreach and Social Engagement: connecting with users. They have a Library Outreach Wiki at http://libraryoutreach.pbwiki.com/ which I think they mentioned. If the sidebar isn't already displayed click sidebar on the right of the home page to see the list of active pages in the wiki: these are Enagement Techniques, Face to Face, Workshop Hints, Digital Outreach and Bibliography.
Photo by Sheila webber: More hollyhocks.

Saturday, July 07, 2007

Information Literacy at IFLA

There are a number of sessions on information literacy at the IFLA conference in Durban, South Africa taking place 19-23rd August. (I've put the web address at the end of this entry.) On Monday there is a session Introduction to the International IFLA/UNESCO IL Resources Directory and the IL International State of the Art Report with Jesus Lau (Universidad Veracruzana, Veracruz, Mexico, and Chair of the IFLA Information Literacy section), Sylvie Chevillotte (ENSSB, Lyon, France) and Linda Goff (California State University, Sacramento, USA).

Wednesday is a key day for information literacy. There is a joint session with the Academic Libraries Section. For the first 3 papers, there is already a full paper on the site which can be downloaded in pdf:
Knowledge-enhancing Helix: Herausbildung und Entwicklung von Informations- und Medienkompetenz durch systemgestütztes kollaboratives Arbeiten in der universitären Ausbildung. Eine Fallstudie [case study of development of information and media literacy skills through system-supported collaborative work in a university context]: NADJA BÖLLER, JOSEF HERGET and SONJA HIERL (Swiss Institute for Information Research, Chur, Switzerland)
Building a Virtual Learning Commons: What do YOU want to do? BETTY BRAAKSMA, KATHY DREWES, GEORGE SIEMENS and PETER TITTENBERGER (University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada)
Second Life Machinima for Libraries: the intersection of instruction, outreach and marketing in a virtual world: BERNADETTE DALY SWANSON (University of California, Davis, USA)
The Reflective Online Searching Skills (ROSS) Environment: embedding information literacy into student learning through an online environment: HELEN PARTRIDGE (Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia)

On the same day there is a talk: Information Literacy in Practice: engaging public library workers in rural South Africa: from KARIN DE JAGER and MARY NASSIMBENI (Centre for Information Literacy, Department of LIS, Cape Town, South Africa) Again, the paper is already on the site.

The session organised by Academic and Research Libraries with Information Literacy has the papers (first and third already on the site)
Are you fit to FILE? SUSIE ANDRETTA (London Metropolitan University, London, UK)
Podcasting for Information Literacy: REGINA ROBERTS (Stanford University, Stanford, USA)
Developing IT-Based teaching materials to enhance information skills and knowledge awareness among students: IDA FAJAR PRIYANTO (Gadjah Mada University Library, Yogyakarta, Indonesia)

There are also some relevant talks on Thursday, particularly in the Getting and keeping ahead: educating for reference and information services for the future session.

For more info and the full text of papers indicated above go to http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla73/Programme2007.htm

Photo by Sheila Webber: Sunflower arrangement in Mason's Regency jug, July 2007.

Thursday, July 05, 2007

WILU conference materials

There are a good number of slides and handouts from the 2007 WILU (Canadian Information Literacy) conference. Given one of my current interests, the checklist & slides on "It's All Fun and Games Until Someone Loses an Avatar: Library Instruction in a 3D Virtual World" caught my eye. Altogether a lot of interesting presentations e.g. "Understanding International Students' Information Research Behavior ", "The Use of Personal Response Systems in Promoting Information Literacy and Library Instruction". There is even a whole workbook on Web feeds for information literate libararians from Lorie Kloda & Genevieve Gore of McGill University Library! The WILU materials web page is at http://www.yorku.ca/wilu2007/programme/materials.htm
Photo by Sheila Webber: Hollyhock bloom, Blackheath, June 2007.

Wednesday, July 04, 2007

Literary exercise in SL

I was reading an account of an exercise by an educator (who teaches English in Real Life) carried out in Second Life (SL, the virtual world). Students had to draw a literary term (from an object called "Pete the Spider") and then find a definitions for that term on the web, rewrite them in students' own words and cite the original sources, then hide the definitions for others to find. The aim was to get students acquainted with the terminology and also to encourage good practice as regards avoiding plagiarism and citing correctly. This is obviously similar to Real Life (RL) exercises but with a playing-with-objects etc. side to it. The exercise is described in: Levine, A. (2007) "An Overactive Teachers Buzz!" NMC Campus observer, 27 June. http://sl.nmc.org/2007/06/27/active/

There is a transcript of the session at http://sl.nmc.org/wiki/Teachers_Buzz_Jun_25_Transcript; you can easily generate a transcript in SL by setting it to record all chat and messages to a file. This session is actually a transcript of some other educators joining in and learning about the activity. It is interesting to read, though it also reminded me a bit of Joyce Grenfell (in her famous schoolteacher sketch with the catchphrase "George - don't do that"), in this case "No Chauney, not yet" or "it is ok to Google, but you must always at least place in the URL of where you got it".

Thank goodness there aren't transcripts of all my teaching sessions. However, when I do things in SL it will be a valuable tool in reflecting what went well or not so well. There is information about the Literature alive project here. The NMC (New Media Consortium) home page is at http://www.nmc.org/.
Photo by Sheila Webber: A view of the New Media Consortium (NMC) Second Life campus, taken from the skylift to the Boardroom - that's me sitting on the left.

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Health Communication Research

There is a new blog focused around Health Communication Research, including health literacy ("the ability of individuals to obtain, process, and then act on health information"), from Michael Mackert at the University of Texas at Austin. The website is at http://blog.healthcommunicationresearch.com/ Seeing as "health information" is a subset of "information" I think I would see health literacy as part of information literacy (does anyone disagree).

This is an example of crossover serendipity, in that I came across the blog because Mackert runs a fan website for the "Wheel of Time" (WOT) series (a series I feel vaguely embarrassed about following, but there now, I've come out).
Photo by Sheila Webber: Tay Bridge, Dundee, photoshopped (I think I altered "curves"), June 2007.

i3 conference - other people's entries

I am going to do some more blogging about the i3 conference. In the meantime there was a conference blog with an interesting entry from Kate Friday (see http://i3conference.blogspot.com/) , especially covering the issue of "millennials". Moira Bent has also blogged about the conference briefly here and there is a posting in Swedish here. While I'm mentioning Moira, there is a new book out from her, Jo Webb and Pat Gannon-Leary called Providing Effective Library Services for Research (i.e. for researchers). There is more info on the book here.
Photo by Sheila Webber: pipe band on the Strathclyde University campus, June 2007. When I worked at Strathclyde I was in the building in the background, the Livingstone Tower. Like some other Strathclyde buildings it has masqueraded as a police station etc. in episodes of Taggart

Monday, July 02, 2007

Delivering information skills

This is a one-day workshop being held at Loughborough University, UK, on 12 July 2007. Key sessions are as follows:
Learning outcomes - coat hanger or strait-jacket? Tracy Marshall & Ginny Franklin.
Delivering a 1 hour lecture in information Skills. Ruth Stubbings
Reusable Learning Objects at Cardiff University Library: Information Literacy Resource Bank. Rebecca Mogg
Paddling like crazy: planning for success (or how to make it all look easy!). Chris Powis and Ruth Stubbings
Further information and booking: http://www.ics.heacademy.ac.uk/
events/displayevent.php?id=172
Photo by Sheila Webber: Poppy & poppy head, Blackheath, June 2007