Saturday, June 04, 2016

Reports from #ckviii day 2: Focusing on students: Librarians and writing tutors working together; Lisa Hinchliffe's keynote

More from Pamela McKinney who is attending the Creating Knowledge conference in Reykjavik. Pam writes here about 2 talks:
(1) "Focusing on students: Librarians and writing tutors working together: Miritt Zisser and Bodil Moberg, Karolinska Institutet Universitetsbiblioteket, Stockholm, Sweden (Presenting authors)
"This is a Large library with 120 employees and a student body of 6000. Academic writing support has been located in the library since 2008. Students can get support with writing texts in either Swedish or English, and get support with information searching.
"They found that they were often referring students between the two different services, indicating that Students had difficultly in determining the nature of their own inquiry. So they have been experimenting with running various development sessions jointly with a librarian and an academic writing tutor, for example a plagiarism seminar and a 2 hour workshop where they attempt to collaboratively write an essay with a students to model the research and writing process. They also run events called "late night at the library" where they offer targeted support at assessment time from writing tutors and librarians. The collaboration is fruitful for identifying new ideas for activities they could do to enhance support for students, and gives both professional groups a wider understanding of students' working processes.
(2) "Lisa Hinchliffe, University of Illinois, USA, @LisaLibrarian, gave the final keynote talk.
"Lisa outlined the framework for her presentation with some questions. Firstly she asked us "are you information literate?" But not everyone in the audience raised their hands, which she said indicated that IL is a difficult concept to pin down and is due to the contextual nature of information literacy.
"Teaching isn't telling, it's about creating learning environments" this can be a library building as a space for learning as well as active teaching sessions.
"Lisa helped create the ACRL standards for libraries in higher education which sets out the 9 areas of library activity. Number 3 relates to the educational role of libraries but this is not just restricted to "just" information literacy teaching, but also how libraries can facilitate lifelong learning. Lisa challenged us to produce our own definitions of IL before going on to discuss the unfolding of formal definitions of IL. Christine Bruce challenged the idea that there is one view of IL with her work on the seven faces or conceptions of information literacy.
"The Prague declaration tied IL to the information society and lifelong learning, and this was extended in the Moscow declaration on IL. Is there a right way to be information literate? Given the situated nature of information needs and information behaviour this is difficult to answer positively. "Many students in the us take their entire college degree on their phone, but do they therefore have access to the right information. We like to think that information is positive and empowering but actually there are times when information is challenging and upsetting. Some of us deliberately choose to reject information, and this was one of the findings of Kondwani Wella in his research on sero-discordant couples in Malawi. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/10743/
"Lisa advocates information literacy as a way of life, to support lifelong learning."
Thanks again to Pam for her reports from the conference!
Photo by Pam McKinney: Street art in Reykjavik, Iceland, June 2016

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