Wednesday, April 08, 2009

LILAC report: Information Literacy and Second Life

At LILAC I gave a symposium about information literacy in virtual worlds, together with Vicki Cormie (St Andrews University), Denny Colledge, Marshall Dozier (both Edinburgh University), and Lyn Parker (Sheffield University). Lyn and Denny participated in Second Life and so we did a lot of technology fiddling beforehand: on the day we used Marshall's laptop (connected to Edinburgh University VPN) as the most reliable connection for the main screen, and Vicki and I also logged in so that we could switch round if there were any problems with Marshall's computer.
The two themes were: what does it mean to be information literate in Second Life, and how can virtual worlds be used to develop real life information literacy. I talked first of all about some forms of information in Second Life, and drew some implications from a study carried out by my students. Next, Lyn contributed her thoughts on information literacy in SL, typing into text chat (which was legible on teh big screen). Finally on this theme, Vicki showed people round the St Andrews University management school area on their Second Life island.
For the second theme, all those in SL teleported over to Infolit iSchool and I showed my model of the SCONUL 7 Pillars of information literacy in Second Life and talked a little about using it to develop information literacy. Then Lyn again contributed from within SL and finally Marshall talked about intellectual property issues, and how discussion about copyright can be stimulated by looking at copyright issues within SL.
We didn't show powerpoint, but we used some slides for a handout and that is linked below. We also created a delicious set of bookmarks, which we will add to. That is at http://delicious.com/LILACSL
The link to the powerpoint is: http://www.slideshare.net/sheilawebber/aspects-of-information-literacy-in-virtual-worlds

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