Inquiry based learning in undergraduate modules

Today I gave a session on the above topic at the First Year Experience in Higher Education conference in Hobart, Australia. I put a posting on on the CILASS IBL blog giving links to material on the two modules (in our BSc Information Management) I was talking about. This blog entry is here, and I am doing a couple more blog entries on that IBL blog. The extended abstract of my session is on this page (you need to scroll down). The discussion included questions about "What was Web 2.0" and people giving some more examples of having students produce posters as output from projects, and having events around the poster displays (our first year students produce posters about their projects and this has worked well).

The delegates at the conference were mostly from Australia and New Zealand, and a mixture of educational developers, student services people, first year coordinators, academics in specific disciplines etc. There is a big literature about the First Year Experience in Higher Education, including some valuable reports from the UK, and as usual it is interesting/ depressing to see that often there is not much crossover of people with different interests. For example, although there was some mention of information literacy and working with librarians by different speakers, there was a lack of awareness of (for example) the amount of work that libraries have done in developing innovative learning spaces. By the same token, I think that the FYHE literature could be tapped into more (perhaps) by the library sector.

There is work on current projects about the first year experience in Scotland appearing at http://www.enhancementthemes.ac.uk/ (with a useful links page) and a 2006 literature review at http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/projects/detail/lr_2006_harvey
Photo by Sheila Webber: Bridge over the Derwent, Hobart, Australia, June 2008

SCONUL Focus

Issue 42 of SCONUL Focus is now available. Articles include:
Helen Fallon and Mary Antonesa. The development of information literacy skills to support a changing postgraduate research environment: an Irish experience
Mary Antonesa. Can information literacy motivate students to become global citizens?
James Fisher and Susan Smith. To PB or not PB: making wikis work for your library
The electronic version is free at http://www.sconul.ac.uk/publications/newsletter/42/

Photo by Sheila Webber: Shells on Yeppoon beach, June 2008

IL and Lifelong Learning

On Tuesday I gave two presentations at the Lifelong Learning conference in Yeppoon, Australia (that's a picture of the tea tent). One presentation was on Second Life and Information Literacy (I might do another post on that), but the main one was Fostering Lifelong Learning through Information Literacy education: Exploring conceptions in different disciplines and framing pedagogies for lifelong learning. You will find it embedded below (or follow the link from the title): I have added an extra slide (compared with the actual presentation) to explain a bit more what we were doing in the presentation. The abstract for it was as follows: "Information Literacy (IL) has been acknowledged as a key element of lifelong learning (Candy et al., 1994). The aim of this presentation is to explore the lifelong learning dimensions of pedagogies for IL in different disciplines. Our starting points are the categories of pedagogy for IL identified in a research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). We will look at them in relation to: a.Candy Report’s attributes and qualities of the lifelong learner in relation to the ideal structure of the undergraduate curriculum described in that report. b.The competing models of lifelong learning identified with OECD and UNESCO respectively. The AHRC project investigated conceptions of UK academics in four disciplines: Marketing, English, Chemistry and Civil Engineering. It is notable that some conceptions of teaching IL focused on the requirements for the students’ course of study, whilst others focused on supporting students both in their course and for their life beyond university. For example, in marketing one conception of pedagogy for IL was Helping students understand how information literacy is critical to them, for marketing and life whilst another was of Upgrading students’ information toolbox at an appropriate point (of the course). We will reflect how these differing approaches relate to different aspects of Candy’s model/structure. Similarly, some conceptions focused more on students’ development as people and citizens (thus with more connection to the UNESCO view), and others on students’ development as practitioners. The discussion will be augmented by evidence from the literature and the authors’ experiences of implementing IL in the University curriculum, including Webber’s work as a CILASS (Centre for Inquiry-based Learning in the Arts and Social Sciences) Fellow at the University of Sheffield.

Candy, P., Crebert, G. and OLeary, J. (1994) Developing lifelong learners through undergraduate education. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service. National Board of Employment, Education and Training Report; 28. http://www.dest.gov.au/sectors/training_skills/
publications_resources/profiles/nbeet/hec/ developing_lifelong_learners_through_undergraduate.htm"

| View | Upload your own

Approaches to web searching, and teaching it

Today there is an "Information Literacy Symposium" at the Lifelong Learning Conference.
Currently Sylvia Edwards and Lynn McAllister are talking about the modules they have developed building on Sylvia's research into undergraduate experiences of web searching. The presentation began by giving a summary of this. The experiences were
- Information searching seen as looking for a needle in a haystack.
- Information searching seen as finding a way through a maze.
- Information searching is seen as using the tools as a filter.
- Information searching is seen as panning for gold.

She has described this research in a website: http://www.netlenses.fit.qut.edu.au/ If you click the link to the Flash animation you will go to a site that includes animations that portray each category - if your computer does Flash, do explore this area (the link is in the middle of the paragraph of the site's home page).
Sylvia went on to describe variation theory - which regular blog readers will remember is an approach I am taking with our new Education for Information Literacy module. You are helping students understand by designing learning which brings out the differences in different approaches to (in this case) web searching (in my case, teaching information literacy).

Lynn took over to describe the online modules (ROSS:Reflective Online Searching Skills) that are based on Sylvia's work, developing students in all of the "lenses" on web searching. The module is also based around a cycle of action and reflection. ROSS "was developed as an online learning tool to help students develop their skill and knowledge in online searching." Last year it was embedded in two first year units, in Science Faculty and in the IT faculty. The latter is a 3rd year module, with coursework assessment. They work on an information consultant's report as one of their assessments, and they work through ROSS whilst they are doing this. Ross starts with a video of a client interview (helping students identify client information needs).

Adapting ROSS to the Environmental Science programme involved quite a lot of change, bearing in mind the lecturer's preferences, the students' learning styles etc. There is less text and are fewer activities. It includes a communication area, as the student expressed a need for this. This ROSS was based on the "dead fsh" problem, and there was then a version for Engineering, similar to Environmental Science, but with a problem about bridge construction.

Student feedback indicated students liked being led through, they thought there ws still too much text. They also wanted the work to be assessed (i.e. wanting direct reward for doing it rather than seeing how it will help them in getting better marks elsewhere). If you want more information, there is a Publications section on Sylvia's website, as noted above, and there is a paper here.

Photo by Sheila Webber: Dawn, Yeppoon, Australia, June 2008.

Some recent articles of interest

Harris, B. (2008) "Communities as Necessity in Information Literacy Development: Challenging the Standards" Journal of academic librarianship, 34 (3) , 248-255. "Contemporary standards suggest that information literate activity is a solitary process. As a corrective, research and pedagogical theories related to “learning communities” and “communities of practice” have become valuable sites of inquiry for librarians. The author provides strategies for making community a topic of instruction."

Jacobs, H. (2008) "Information Literacy and Reflective Pedagogical Praxis. " Journal of academic librarianship, 34 (3) , 256-262. "Drawing on discussions within Composition and Rhetoric, this article examines information literacy pedagogy. It considers how academic librarians can work toward theorizing our profession in such a way that we may ask new questions of it and foster creative, reflective, and critical habits of mind regarding pedagogical praxis." A North American focus. I like her subheading "thinking outside the rubric".

Korobili, S., Malliari, A. and Christodoulou, G. (2008) "Information literacy paradigm in academic libraries in Greece and Cyprus." Reference Services Review, 36 (2), 180 - 193. "The purpose of this study is to investigate the attitudes and perceptions of Greek librarians regarding information literacy programs and their preparedness for such programs. ... Most libraries do not deliver information literacy programs, but some kind of library instruction."
Photo by Sheila Webber: Copper beech leaves, June 2008

Plagiarism & citing resources

A couple of interesting sites I came across recently:
Glasgow Metroplolitan College's library guides in multiple languages and podcasts about plagiarism: http://www.glasgowmet.ac.uk/
aboutus.aspx
Queensland University of Technology's CITE/WRITE site: http://www.citewrite.qut.edu.au/
Photo by Sheila Webber: Bee on my apple blossom, May 2008.

Las VI Jornadas CRAI : presentations

Most of the powerpoints from the conference Las VI Jornadas CRAI tratarán: Las competencias en información en las nuevas enseñanzas universitarias (held in Pamplona, Spain) are online at http://www.craipamplona2008.org/
index.php?section=22 - you will see the links after the name and titles of the speakers. They are in Spanish apart from my talk (this is the same ppt as I posted to Slideshare and blogged about a few weeks ago). The powerpoint from Carla Basili is not online (it was presented in Italian) but she has directed me to an English-language version of the paper she presented, namely "Theorems of Information Literacy" at
http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00013509/

Photo by Sheila Webber: young leaves in Yamaguchi Park, Pamplona, May 2008

Varied information literacy

I am just travelling back from the Special Interest Group Phenomenography conference, held in Kristianstad, Sweden on 22-24 May. As you might guess, this is a conference for researchers who use the phenomenographic approach, and there were about 50 delegates from Europe, Australia, Africa and Asia. The presentation was Variation theory as a basis for designing a module´on teaching information literacy. This was coauthored with Stuart Boon and Bill Johnston: Stuart (pictured here) was at the conference with me to co-present as well. This is a slightly edited version of the powerpoint - I have inserted a couple of slides explaining a little about phenomenography (obviously not necessary at the actual conference!) and taken out a couple of slides at the end, since these are ideas-in-progress.

We presented some of the conceptions of teaching information literacy discovered in our phenomenographic research project (into UK academics' conceptions of informatio n literacy and teaching information literacy) as a basis for the discussion of my proposed use of variation theory for currculum design of a new module "Education for information literacy" (core to the new MA Information Literacy at Sheffield University, UK, for which I am programme coordinator). The idea behind variation theory (to simplify) is that learning takes place through the learner experiencing variations of a concept or subject or phenomenon, so that he/she can discern critical aspects and thus get a deeper understanding.

In this case, my idea is that students can gain a better understanding of what it means to teach information literacy through discussing, reflecting on (etc) the different ways that people conceive of teaching it. Our research showed that, amongst the academics we studied, there was a lot of variation: from thinking it was someone else's job, to seeing teaching information literacy as being about giving students access to sources, to conceiving of teaching information literacy as being about challenging the student to work creatively with information in their personal and professional lives. We could focus in on distinctive aspects of each approach and look at what makes that approach different.

As a prelude to discussing this in detail with colleagues I have been presenting my ideas in a Departmental seminar, a Second Life discussion and now at this conference. At the conference, Ference Marton (who is generally referred to as the "father" of phenomenography) in fact commented rather on his interest in the disciplinary differences we had discovered (just thought I'd name drop there). Here is the edited ppt at Slideshare.

| View | Upload your own

Use of information resources

Yesterday our level 1 BSc Information Management students presented posters from the projects they do in the Inquiry in Information Mangement module. All of them were interesting , but a prize was awarded for the best poster and it went to the poster on How do students use information resources to support their research during academic study: a comparison between levels of study. The photo shows Nina Jaswal, Natalie Chung and Lauren Cotton by their poster with Sheila Corrall (our Head of Department).

The sample was too small to generalise (20 students each from 1st, 2nd and 3rd years, mixture of Departments), nevertheless it may be indicative. For example, 20% of 1st years used library resources daily compared to 50% of 2nd years and 40% of3rd years. Similarly 60% of 1st years used search engines to search for academic material, whilst 30% of 3rd years did. I have put up the 6 posters on our Second Life island (Infolit iSchool), so if you have a SL avatar you can teleport up to the sky platform and see them.

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:

| View | Upload your own

Student plagiarism in an online world

Gerry McKiernan has highlighted a new book about plagiarism, which sounds very interesting (though expensive). It has contributors particularly from the UK and the Australia/ New Zealand, and also the USA and other parts of Europe.
Roberts, T. S. (2008) Student plagiarism in an online world: problems and solutions. Hershey, PA : Information Science Reference. More info at http://www.igi-pub.com/downloads/
pdf/Roberts_brochure.pdf
Photo by Sheila Webber: a friendly fish in the pool in famous Ubiquitous Chip restaurant in Hillhead, Glasgow - it knew it wasn't going to get eaten.

Pamplona report: 2

This is the second report the Las VI Jornadas CRAI in Pamplona, Spain. Yesterday at the Pamplona conference there were two sessions: mine and one from Carla Basili (Ceris-CNR, Rome). Carla’s talk was titled Information literacy policies in European universities. It was given in Italian, so again I am relying on my minimal skills in that language, with my understanding mostly derived from her powerpoint.
She started by explaining the background of ENIL (http://www.ceris.cnr.it/Basili/
EnIL/index.html ), the group she started with the aim of providing a focus for some European activities. In particular she mentioned the ENIL observatory (http://www.ceris.cnr.it/Basili/EnIL/
gateway/gatewayhome.htm and a diagnostic questionnaire (http://www.ceris.cnr.it/Basili/EnIL/questionnaire.html) translated into 12 languages.
She spent some time on reflecting on the different discourses about information literacy. She put forward two different Italian phrases, one of which puts more emphasis on the “process” of becoming an information literately aware person “Alfabetizzazione all’informazione processo di emananzione politica…” (may be spelt incorrectly), the other of which conveys more the state of being information literate.

I’ll observe that this issue of how you describe the concept – which words you use – is a very interesting one. In the English language the is the information skills vs. i-skills (etc.) vs information literacy debate. In some countries, France and Spain I believe, there have been debates about which words to use to translate information literacy: some using “literacy” words and some “competencies” words. In Spain the “literacy” phrase (i.e. alfabetización informacional) seems to be dominant now. I think that the phrase you choose does have implications for how you will conceive of the subject and go about teaching it.

Carla Basili identified three perspectives: a disciplinary approach (seeing the discipline as being “La cultura dell’informazione”; a socio-political approach (focused, as already indicated, on becoming information literate) and a cognitive approach (focused on individual competencies). If I understood correctly, towards the end of her talk she was advocating an approach to information literacy that took account of these three approaches: education about the value of information, as well as some theoretical understanding (e.g. of information retrieval) and practical skills. She proposed three levels of education.

One thing she wants to develop as a base level is a European Driving License for Information. This is a place where I disagree, as outlined in the talk I did at the IFLA conference a few years ago (see An International Information Literacy Certificate: opportunity or dead-end? at http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla69/papers/199e-Webber.pdf). However, I do agree about seeing information literacy as a disciplinary area, and it is interesting to debate where it fits and what it means for educating European citizens. Carla raised some important issues. Obviously I won’t have done her speech justice so (as with the talks in Spanish) I welcome any contributions from other people at the conference who will have understood better than me.

Photos by Sheila Webber: Yamaguchi Park, Pamplona, May 2008.

Pamplona

I am in Pamplona, Spain, shortly to give a talk at the Las VI Jornadas CRAI . I was invited by Rocio Serrano (pictured) who graduated from our MA Librarianship programme and is one of the organisers. She is now one of the deputies in the Science library at the University of Navarra.
Unfortunately my Spanish is very poor: I can follow some written words (e.g. on powerpoints) but not conversation, therefore I am not getting the most from the conference. A big theme of the conference is the Bologna Process (of harmonisation of Higher education in Europe so that mobility etc. is easier). Some countries have been making big changes to their university curricula and strategy because of this, though in the UK Bologna has been rather ignored (partly because it was closer the the model to start with and partly because hmmmm we're British ;-(

These curriculum changes have provided opportunities to raise the profile of information literacy and the role of the library. I did attend one session where I think I grasped a reasonable amount. Fransesc Xavier Grau Vidal talked about the strategy at his university, the Universitat Rovira i Virgili. He emphasised the increased competencies focus, with undergraduates being expected to acquire basic professional competencies, and Masters students more specialised professional competencies. His university is drawing up lists of transferable skills (with reference to various framworks etc including the Prague declaration on information literacy!) - examples are (if I understand correctly) "learning to learn" "Applying critical thinking, logic and creativity, demonstrating innovative thinking" "Ability to work independently, responsibly and using initiative".

These are similar to goals we have for our own "Sheffield graduates". Grau Vidal explained they also have core competencies, including ones relating to information and information technology, and (again if I've understood) there is cross tabulation between the two sets - so, for example, the skills and knowledge related to critical thinking and information work can be specified. The idea is that programmes should then apply these competencies to their own curricula and specifiy objectives specific to their subject, relating back to the university list. All programmes would either to have a dedicated module on information skills, or to combine them explicitly in core modules.
The work part of the day finished with an interesting tour of the Science Library (I will blog a little more about that). The second pictures shows part of the nice green campus.

Las competencias en información en las nuevas enseñanzas universitarias

Next week I will be talking at annual university library conference Las VI Jornadas CRAI and this year the theme is Las competencias en información en las nuevas enseñanzas universitarias (Information Literacy in the new world of university teaching). It takes place on the 12-13 May in Pamplona at the University of Navarra. The first day has presentations in Spanish, focusing on issues such as Spanish Universities' response to the Bologna process (of aligning higher education Europe) and information literacy as transferable skill. I and Carla Basili are presenting in English on the second day. Further information at http://www.craipamplona2008.org/index.php?section=27
Photo by Sheila Webber: Sheffield, May 2008

ESCALATE conference:1

I am at the ESCalate conference, which has the theme The Teaching-Research Interface: Implications for Practice in Higher Education and Further Education. ESCalate is the subject centre for education, and the conference is being held at Stirling University. There is a website at http://escalate.ac.uk/3936 but it does not have much info on it at the moment. I am giving a presentation tomorrow about inquiry based learning in our BSc Information Management Programme. When I have finished the ppt I will put it on slideshare (later today ;-) The first photo shows the conference bag, and the free ESCalate umbrella, but not the free ESCalate coffee carry-mug.

The delegates are academics from various Departments, incuding Education, and educational developers/researchers. The keynotes have been from Professor Gill Crozier, talking about her ESRC-funded project looking at working class students’ experiences of higher education, and from Professor Dai Hounsell, talking about some aspects of his team's ESRC-funded research into learning environments of undergraduate students.

There is a page about Prof Crozier's project here with some links to papers. Following wider questionnaires, they tracked 27 students over 2 years, who were based at four very different universities: one elite university, one pre-1992 university, one post-1992 university, and one college that did foundation degrees. The students were diverse in their home situations, as well as the nature of their university experience. For example, the elite university had a rule that students mustn't have outside jobs in their first tem, and they lived in halls, whereas at the college people\mostly lived at home and might be doing a lot of paid work, so that some of them scarcely identified themselves as "students".

Also, for example, while the students at the elite university had been identified as high flyers at school, nutured and therefore had quite positive views of themselves as learners, those from the college and post-1992 university might have low perceptions of their capabilities as learners. One interesting point was that the "traditional" system of the elite university was better at supporting students and helping them to feel at home in the university, whereas emphasis on "independent learning" and moves to e-learning (supposedly to make things more convenient for students) meant that it was even less likely that students would feel that they fitted in and were part of the university. This affects motivation and retention.

One thing that Dai Hounsell observed was that universities have tended to try and preserve the "elite" experience at least for their final year undergraduates, but there is an increasing gap between this final year experience and what students experience in first year. There has been a tendency for the first year experience to be more massified/generalised, with large lectures, use of teaching assistants and so forth. This made students potentially less prepared for a challenging final year: of course this is a familiar pattern from information literacy education, where librarians often seem to observe a sudden focus on information literacy in final year to support dissertation/project work, without a progression to this in previous years.
2nd photo is of woodland outside the conference centre

NCATE/ACRL

An article which talks about how "The information literacy and technology targets in the standards of the [US] National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) parallel the information literacy standards developed by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL)", with reference to teacher training departments/colleges, is republished on Redorbit.com.
Birch, T. et al (2008) "Partnering With Librarians to Meet Ncate Standards in Teacher Education" Redorbit.com. 13 April. "Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning." http://www.redorbit.com/news/education/
1339002/partnering_with_librarians_to_meet_
ncate_standards_in_teacher_education/
Photo by Sheila Webber: snowy camellias, April 2008

Staff development for IL

Mark Hepworth recently posted information that JISC have published a report, i-Skills: An investigation of the staff development issues relating to i-skills development, based on a study carried out by a team including Mark Hepworth, Marian Smith, Ruth Stubbings and Andrew Wilson (from Loughborough University) and Melissa Highton, Helen Howard and Angela Newton (from the University of Leeds). It looks at information literacy from the perspective of people in the Finance Department and the Research Office at Loughborough University, with data collected through interviews and focus groups. At http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/publications/iskillsdevelopment.aspx there is an executive summary and a link to the full report.
Photo by Sheila Webber: snowy tree, Blackheath, April 2008

Report from the LILAC conference: 4

On 27 March 2008 on Infolit iSchool, in the virtual world, Second Life, Vicki Cormie (Ishbel Hartmann in Second Life) and I (Sheila Yoshikawa in Second Life) led a discussion presenting some of our highlights from the 2008 LILAC conference. Some of the discussion participants had also attended the RL conference. The chatlog (transcript) of the session is at http://sleeds.org/chatlog/?c=270 and the photo is of the session. The discussion touched on some important issues (subjects of future discussion!)

Vicki Cormie had prepared interesting notes on three sessions that she wanted to highlight, and I reproduce them here, below, with Vicki's permission.

1. The library? Why would I go there? Library use by undergraduate students in China, India and Greece. Speaker; Anja Timm
(Diversity and Social Justice Theme)

This address focused on the information literacy needs of students on taught postgraduate programmes in the UK. The aims of the project were:
"* to inject timely and topical research results into the debate about the way international students are recruited, prepared and taught and how plagiarism can be deterred
"* to develop resources that will be of use to various groups within the the higher education sector and support its engagement with the issues of student diversity and academic writing, e.g. teaching staff, senior managers, educational developers, etc."

The project went out to look at libraries and the ways students used them in China, India and Greece. It was found that there were huge differences in the ways students used libraries for many different factors. In India, students at some of the less affluent universities had libraries that did not meet their needs in any respect, being full of out of date materials and being run by people (rarely librarians) who saw themselves as custodians of the material, and therefore there to protect it from use by the students. The relationship with academic tutors in these colleges, was also found to be strikingly different from the experiences of students in other countries with their tutor being very much as a friend; someone the student could socialise with and be their key contact and problem solver of all issues that the student might come across. Academic tutors are usually not involved with research and tend to teach with fixed texts for the course.

(Sheila adds: a comment from my own experience. A small study by one of my students indicated that at undergraduate level international students might be *more* likely to have experienced good school libraries, perhaps as it is the better off students who have money to go abroad.)
Links:
http://www.lums.lancs.ac.uk/departments/
owt/Research/sdaw/
http://www.lilacconference.com/dw/2008/
keynote_abstracts.htm#timm

2. Podcasts: IL delivery on demand. Speaker: Rebecca Mogg (Net generation theme)

This short presentation looked at using Podcasts for IL delivery at Cardiff University.
One of the things that I really like about LILAC is the good balance of the academic papers and the practical sessions, and this session was an excellent example of the latter. It was short and to the point and came up with many good suggestions and of practical ideas of how academic liaison can be taught through the use of podcasting.

Cardiff University employed a former student who had worked with student radio to produce a series of short radio programmes which were released on a weekly basis under the title “The Essay Survival Guide”. The programmes were created around a very loose script of questions created by library staff and then answered by using soundbites from students, academics and library staff. The result was a professional and engaging series of programmes that never sounded boring.
Links:
http://www.xpressradio.co.uk/shows/
student-survival-guide-to-writing-a-good-essay#
http://www.lilacconference.com/dw/2008/register/index.php?action=details&eventid=33

3. Role delineation in an iterative, cognitive skills based model of Information Literacy. Speakers: Judith Keene and John Colvin (Practical approaches to information literacy).

This session was a good mix of theory and practice based on several years worth of research done on creating a model of information literacy with mathematics students at the University of Worcester. One of the most interesting things that came out of it, and certainly one of the things that caused the most discussion at the end, was at the different roles of lecturers and librarians in the different stages of the model and whether it was always appropriate for information skills to be taught only by librarians, especially in the sciences.
Link:
http://www.lilacconference.com/dw/2008/register/index.php?action=details&eventid=43

College Information Literacy Efforts Benchmarks

Primary Research Group have released a report based on information from "more than 110" North American universities College Information Literacy Efforts
Benchmarks. The cost is 75 US dollars (you can download the pdf for this price from their website) and the ISBN is 1-57440-099-1. It has statistics on various things such as whether the university requires an information literacy test for graduation, what sessions are provided by librarians and (since this is a North American publication) information relating to IL in english composition classes. The Primary Research home page is at http://www.primaryresearch.com/ and you can find the item by selecting Publications and then Library publications. The press release giving some highlights is at http://www.primaryresearch.com/release-200803141.html
Photo by Sheila Webber: Primroses in snow, Sheffield, March 2008

Podcasts

Another winner from Cardiff University: a series of podcasts which are episodes on student radio.
Topics such as: What makes a good essay? Going beyond the reading list: finding good web sites; Going beyond the reading list: discovering books and journals - and the next one (at time of writing) was going to be on avoiding plagiarism.
http://www.xpressradio.co.uk/
shows/student-survival-guide-to-writing-a-good-essay#
Photo by Sheila Webber: Trolleys, St Pancras, Feb 2008 (dry grain effect in Photoshop)