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at some of the less affluent universities had libraries that did not meet their needs in any respect, being full of out of date materials and being run by people (rarely librarians) who saw themselves as custodians of the material, and therefore there to protect it from use by the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

Report from the LILAC conference: 3: blog reports

Yesterday Vicki Cormie and I led a discussion in Second Life (the virtual world) about our impressions of the LILAC (information literacy) conference held last week. For this we prepared a notecard (handout). "Waste not want not": I thought I could repurpose that material for the blog. I will make this into 3 entries.

In this first one I post web addresses of other blogs that covered LILAC, in the second I will post Vicki's material plus the address for the transcript of the Second Life event, and in the third provide my final round up.

There were a number of parallel sessions at LILAC, but if you look through all the blog entries you will find that, between them, they cover a good number of the sessions. I'm sure I haven't found all the entries, so please add comments to link to any other LILAC reports.
1. There was a dedicated LILAC 2008 conference blog maintained by one of the delegates at http://lilac2008.wordpress.com/
2. If you want to find the other entries on THIS blog, you should be able to do it by searching for the word lilac, using the search box in the top left of the screen. I have also used the blog tag lilac20083. Moira Bent has blogged the conference on Moira’s Info Lit blog with a good number of entries at http://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/moira.bent e.g. at http://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/blogs/index.php/moira.bent/
2008/03/26/lilac_2008_ask_assignment_survival_kit
4. Nancy O’hanlon blogged at http://teachingosulibraries.blogspot.com/
2008/03/lilac-conference-notes.html
5. Jane Secker (one of the organisers) has given her Reflections On LILAC at http://elearning.lse.ac.uk/blogs/socialsoftware/
2008/03/reflections-on-lilac/
6. Karl blogged at http://rsckarl.blogspot.com/2008/03/
live-from-lilac-part-1.html and http://rsckarl.blogspot.com/
2008/03/dead-after-lilac.html
7. There are 2 entries about the Second Life sessions on my Sheila Yoshikawa blog at http://adventuresofyoshikawa.blogspot.com/
2008/03/conference-dancing.html and http://adventuresofyoshikawa.blogspot.com/2008/03/conference.html
8. Angela Newton (also on the organising committee) reflects at https://elgg.leeds.ac.uk/libajn/weblog/9994.html
Photos by Sheila Webber: of the front of Liverpool's Catholic cathedral and of the view from that cathedral down to the Anglican cathedral (with, on the right, the John Foster building in which teh conference took place).

LILAC conference: 2nd report

This is the second report on the LILAC (UK information literacy) conference which is taking place in Liverpool, UK, 17-19 March. In this post I’ll concentrate on workplace information literacy. Firstly, the photo is part of a poster which gave results of a survey of Australian Government librarians, that was carried out a few months ago (authors are Jennifer Kirton, Lyn Barham and Sean Brady, Wollongbar Agricultural Institute).

Some of the questions asked the librarians the extent to which they saw each of the six information literacy standards (as outlined in the ANZIIL framework) as being their job to develop with departmental staff. They also asked about the information literacy training that was carried out.
On Monday of the conference I attended a presentation from John Crawford on the study Christine Irving and he had been doing into workplace information literacy. This is part of their overall project in Information Literacy looking at the spectrum of sectors and including development of the Scottish Framework for information literacy (which I’ve blogged about before and which was the subject of a conference keynote). Their project website is at http://www.caledonian.ac.uk/ils/ and there is a page specifically on workplace IL.

John started by highlighting some of the previous research into workplace learning, giving a summary which stated that “All theorists (e.g. Lave and Wenger) agree that learning in the workplace is a form of social interaction”, but that there is disagreement as to whether learning is exclusively situated in the particular workplace (or whether it is more amenable to influence from and to the outside world). John noted that the library literature and educational theory literature don’t connect (well, actually he talked of a “complete disjunction”) and one aspect which pedagogic literature neglects is that of intellectual property.

Another couple of points I’ll pick up are that he felt that “the daily round of tasks” could substitute for the curriculum in developing information literacy. This fits in with things I’ve blogged before about tying IL training in with workplace tasks or forms (such as linking into project cycles). The issue of “professional ideologies” was also raised, and I think there are parallels here to study of academics, where conceptions of information literacy are seen from the perspective of someone within an academic or professional grouping (e.g. a chemist’s perspective of information literacy).

John reported on findings from interviews with care home staff, staff at the Scottish Tribunal, Scottish Government, and Social work and NHS staff. As I would have expected, people were an important source of information in all cases, and this means that the role of human relationships in information activity needs to be taken into account. Adult literacies training was seen as "powerful driver" that might encourage information literacy.

Also unsurprisingly (I'm afraid), public libraries were not seen as relevant to people's workplace information needs. One point made in the conclusion was that "an understanding of what constitutes information literacy is widespread in the workplace but is often implicit rather than explicit and is based on qualifications, experience and networking activity." There was a lot of interesting material in teh presentation and John & Christine intend to write it up and also are pursuing follow up activities.

Finally I will briefly mention the i-skills in the workplace initiative, which Netskills have been carrying out. (NB for US readers this is not the ETS iskills, it is something that was called "i-skills" first ;-) This initiative is aimed at non-academic staff in further and higher education in the UK. There have been a number of workshops (firstly free, latterly with a modest fee) in which staff could reflect on their own i-skills and aim to develop them further. One tool that has been developed out of this work is a self-evaluation form online, so that people can identify which information literacy or information management skills they most need and how well they think they are doing in them. This is not a test, it is self-rating, but the profile gets stored online so you can refer back to it. This is in the final stages of development and should be made freely available. The website for this initiative (with information on resources and workshops) is at http://www.netskills.ac.uk/content/
themes/infoskills/index.html

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.