Expanding/Enhancing Information Literacy Using In-World Tools

The transcript of the discussion on Expanding/Enhancing Information Literacy Using In-World Tools, held on Infolit iSchool in the virtual world, second Life, is now available at http://sleeds.org/chatlog/?c=295
The discussion took place on 29 May 2008. It was led by Robin Ashford, a US librarian (Robin Mochi in Second Life). Robin introduced the SLOOg and the Salamander tools, explained their uses and responded to questions (basically these tools allow you to bookmark and tag inworld locations). Robin provided a handout with some core definitions, links and explanations, which can be downloaded from http://dis.shef.ac.uk/sheila/mochi-29-may.pdf
People had the opportunity to get copies of the tools themselves and the vendors for these are now the Centre for Information Literacy Research building on Infolit iSchool (http://slurl.com/secondlife/Infolit%20iSchool/101/211/22/ )

Using SL in an undergraduate class

There is a transcript of the session on Using SL in a first year undergraduate module held on 15 May 2008 on Infolit iSchool in Second Life (the virtual world) online at http://sleeds.org/chatlog/?c=291
In this session Lyn Parker, Vicki Cormie and I talked about the class aims, the nature of the intervention etc. and our thoughts about its impact. There was quite a lot of good discussion, I think, and the picture shows the discussion in progress. The module is "Information Literacy" which is where it gets relevant to this blog ;-)

I also realise that I haven't blogged a presentation I did on an overlapping topic at the CILASS Staff-Student Symposium we had here at Sheffield University on 2nd May. The subject of the presentation was Inquiry in Second Life, and I was describing the use of Second Life in this first year class and also with Masters students. One of the Masters students, Tim Zijlstra, also contributed. This symposium is innovative, in that students and staff present together about experiences of inquiry-based learning, and indeed there were two presentations just from students. There have been a number of posting about it on the IBL blog and the CILASS Student blog. Anyway, this was our presentation on 2nd May:

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LILAC conference report 1

This is my first report from the LILAC (UK information literacy) conference which is taking place in Liverpool, UK, 17-19 March. Note there is a dedicated LILAC 2008 conference blog maintained by one of the delegates at http://lilac2008.wordpress.com/

My own active involvement in this conference is leading two workshops on Second Life, the virtual world. Vicki Cormie (St Andrews University library), Lyn Parker (Sheffield University library) and I planned these together, following our joint work with my first year students in Second Life. Unfortunately Lyn hasn't been able to attend the conference, but we were lucky that Pam Dowsett works at Liverpool John Moore's University (where the conference is based) and she is an expert SL librarian and mentor. The short introductory powerpoint to our session is on Slideshare here and I have also blogged about the first workshop on my Sheila Yoshikawa blog here (Sheila Yoshikawa is my name in Second Life)

The other session that I'll mention in this post is the one I just attended Playing catch-up: new initiatives for improving tech-knowledge and information literacy amongst library and teaching staff at the Open University. This session was given by Anne Hewling, from the Open University. She talked in particularly about the Digilab (http://digilab.open.ac.uk/ ) which is a play and learning space where educators can get familiar with technologies, play about with them, and get to understand how they might be able to use them to support student learning. She described, for example, "Digiquests" where people might be set off on adventures round campus to use technologies to record or capture and solve problems: the idea being (I think) to improve people's confidence in using the technologies and spark ideas of how they might be used in authentic learning situations. There is a Digilab blog at http://digilablog.blogspot.com/ and I notice a recent headline is "Surgeons are using the Wii to prepare for surgery."

Anne also mentioned the information skills tutorial, Safari, produced by the Open University some years ago and apparently revised recently. It is also being launched as "Safari Mobile" for reception on mobile devices.
Photos by Sheila Webber: Liverpool's Catholic cathedral, which is just over the road from our conference venue, and me hovering over delegates on our island (Infolit iSchool) in Second Life.

Virtual Worlds: Libraries, Education, Museums

At the weekend I attended the Virtual Worlds: Libraries, Education, Museums conference in Second Life (SL: the virtual world). I have blogged the conference on my Sheila Yoshikawa blog (that's my SL name) at:
http://adventuresofyoshikawa.blogspot.com/
2008/03/
libraries-education-museums-conference.html
http://adventuresofyoshikawa.blogspot.com/2008/03
/virtual-worlds-libraries-education.html
http://adventuresofyoshikawa.blogspot.com/2008/
03/virtual-worlds-libraries-education_09.html
and finally
http://adventuresofyoshikawa.blogspot.com/2008/03/
virtual-worlds-libraries-education_3273.html

One thing which I started thinking about was why I am more likely to blog a Second Life (SL) event than a Real Life one. I think the answer is that:

1) in SL I can start the blogging while the conference is on: taking notes on the computer whilst I'm at the conference. The conferences I attend in Real Life don't tend to have facilities for delegates to be connected whilst in the audience; also my laptop has a short battery life so would give out after about one session.

2) Once the conference is over, I'm there at the computer, ready to write up notes on the spot.

Second Life talk & article

I will be giving a talk My Second Life after the AGM of the Commercial, Legal & Scientific Information Group of CILIP next Tuesday 29th January 2008 at 6.30pm. I will be giving an overview of Second Life, the virtual world, and go on to give a personal perspective on its uses for education, business and information work. It will cost £5 (payable in advance) to attend the presentation; however the AGM is free to all members of CLSIG. It will be held at; Macfarlanes 10 Norwich Street, London, EC4A 1BD. Please contact Kim Mclachlan if you would like to attend: kim.mclachlan@macfarlanes.com

Also Lyn Parker, who has been working with me in SL with my students, has written an article:
Parker, L. (2008) "More questions than answers: the reflections of Maggie Kohime, a virtual librarian in Second Life." Aliss Quarterly, 3 (2) January, 13-17.
The issue is on Web 2.0 and the Library and information service: the publication details are not yet on their website http://www.alissnet.org.uk/

Talk on IBL and SL

I have finally uploaded the presentation from last week to slideshare. This was the talk I gave at Strathclyde University on 29th November. The main focus was on Inquiry Based Learning: firstly I talked about what it was and how it was different from problem based learning (since the starting and/or finishing point are less fixed than with PBL).

I moved on to talk about the Centre for Inquiry Based Learning in the Arts and Social Sciences (CILASS), which is based at Sheffield University, with some examples of some modules that have carried out IBL activities with CILASS support. I mentioned the level 1 module Inquiry in Information Management (new last year), where I am part of the teaching team, and in particular I talked about the activity in Second Life with my first year Information Literacy class. The stage the students have reached now is interviewing Second Life residents about their information behaviour, by the way. The presentation is at http://www.slideshare.net/sheilawebber/inquiry-based-learning-a-perspective/

Librarians and Second Life

The latest discussion in Second Life, the virtual world, was What is important for librarians to learn about Second Life and what role should they be taking? This discussion was led by Maggie Kohime (Lyn Parker in real life) yesterday in the Centre for Information Literacy Research, Eduserv Island. We had some people from the UK and some from North America. The log of our discussion is at http://sleeds.org/chatlog/?c=152 Lyn posed some questions for us, although we did not keep to these strictly:
1. Librarians need to be able to operate in SL in order to see the possibilities. What functions therefore do you consider to be most important and where should newbies concentrate their efforts first?
2. What things are librarians doing in Second Life? Are they different to RL activities? What scope does the environment give us to enable us to do things differently?3. What are the issues within Second Life that librarians with their various skills can help resolve?
Lyn also provided some references.

Grassian, E. and Trueman, R. B. (2007) "Stumbling, bumbling, teleporting and flying … librarian avatars in Second Life." Reference Services Review, 35 (1), 84 - 89.

Greenhill, Kathryn (2007) "Flying Librarians of Oz: Whats all the fuss about second life and whats it got to do with libraries." Presentation to the National Library of Australia on 14 February 2007. http://www.slideshare.net/sirexkat/
flying-librarians-of-oz-whats-all-the-fuss-
about-second-life-and-whats-it-got-to-
do-with-libraries

Hurst-Wahl, Jill (2007) "Librarians and Second Life: it's a source of information, a platform for networking, an opportunity to try out new approaches before you take them to the real world." Information Outlook, June. http://findarticles.com/p/
articles/mi_m0FWE/is_6_11/ai_n19311772/pg_1

The first picture shows discussion underway, and the second is of a meeting later that evening with North Lamar (Joe Sanchez in real life), a North American teacher and researcher, in the water garden I created on our island, Infolit iSchool.

Discussion on librarians' image

On September 4th there was a discussion How should Librarians present themselves in Second Life, Facebook, My Space etc? in the office of the Centre for Information Literacy Research in Second Life (SL), the virtual world. Lyn Parker of Sheffield University Library (Maggie Kohime in SL) led the discussion and 10 people were present (plus a few lurkers looking over shoulders in Real Life apparently ;-) The transcript of the session is in two parts at http://sleeds.org/chatlog/?c=124 and http://sleeds.org/chatlog/?c=125

Maggie is on the far left of the photo summing up discussion. There is a fuller description at http://adventuresofyoshikawa.blogspot.com/
2007/09/librarians-in-sl.html

Information Literacy/Second Life

We have had two discussion sessions in the Centre for Information Literacy Research's home in Second Life, the virtual world. The first was explaining the Information Literacy Research map (there is a writeup including a link to the poster here). The second was on "search" in Second Life. The 3rd is on 4th September 2007 at 4-pm UK time (08.00 SL time) and Lyn Parker will be leading a discussion on librarian image in SL.

There is an account of the second, "search", session on my SL blog, including a link to the full transcript of the session, and some web links. The blog entry for the 2nd session is here (n.b. my SL blog is in a slightly Bridget-Jonesy sort of style, though I tone it down a bit for the more serious entries like this). As a result of the session I'm starting a wiki (i.e. on search in SL), which I will be "encouraging" my students to contribute to, if nothing else. I'll announce the web address when it has some content in it.

There is a big Second Life conference; SLCC about to start in Chicago, USA, and the proceedings of the educational track have already been published free at http://www.simteach.com/slccedu07proceedings.pdf. It is useful reading for anyone considering teaching in SL. It includes one case study from a librarian Library Services on the Teen Grid [that's the teenagers' version of SL] by Kelly Czarnecki (Technology Education Librarian, ImaginOn, Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County) and a one-pager about activities on Info Island. The conference is also being streamed onto the web and inworld. The first photo shows me at the inworld poster session: I will be asking students to undertake enquiry into information in SL, so this poster on research in SL was interesting.
James Dearnley from Loughborough is moderating a session in Chicago, however I am getting to another SL meeting ... in London on the 20th Sept which will focus on the JISC/Eduserv-funded SL projects. I haven't got a JISC project but I have won the money for a SL island to use next academic year. The 2nd photo shows me at the poster display on Eduserv Island advertising this seminar

I will continue to use the Sheila Yoshikawa (that's me) blog for most SL material and provide summaries here now and then. [Added 24 Aug] The Report on the First Year of Operation
of the Alliance Second Life Library 2.0 Project also known as the Alliance Information Archipelago has just been published at: http://www.alliancelibrarysystem.com/pdf/07sllreport.pdf

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

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.

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.

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.