Pam Bing at CILASS

Last week was actually a busy one for my information literacy, as I was taking the first class for my new module, Information Literacy Research, and also attending a meeting of the SCONUL Working Group on Information Literacy, in London. I’ll deal with them in future entries, but for this entry I’ll mention one of the participants (rather than students) for the class, Pam Bing (pictured right). Pam did an MSc Information Management in our Department, then went to work in the Learning Resources Centre at Sheffield Hallam University. In particular she was involved in information literacy activities such as tailoring of infolit modules in WebCT for individual programmes at Sheffield Hallam (which is the other university in Sheffield.

Pam now works as the information literacy expert in the team at CILASS (Centre for Inquiry-based Learning in the Arts and Social Sciences http://www.shef.ac.uk/cilass/). She coordinates activities to do with an “Information Literacy Network” we are developing with the library and this Department, and is involved in CILASS projects with other arts & social science departments. In my Department, Information Studies, she is doing work on an “Information Literacy audit”, a CILASS project which I’m leading. This will involve interviewing staff about the extent to which information literacy is covered (taught and assessed) in all the individual modules in this Department.

Pam came along to the Information Literacy Research class partly out of interest, but also because the coursework for this class is 75% working on a project in small groups. Two of these potential mini projects are related to this CILASS project, and she was able to explain the context, and she’s also a contact for these mini-projects. In due course, I’ll let you know how the CILASS project gets on.