Creating Knowledge IV day 1

The opening session of the Creating Knowledge IV conference today was hosted by the Royal Library in Copenhagen. There is a very new building, the Black Diamond, on the waterfront which has cafes etc. and the very stylish conference room that we used. There are dramatic connecting escalators to the old library building behind. The top photo shows this area at break time from the conference.

The session started with an introduction from Claus Nielsen, Principal of Copenhagen University. This was followed by a monologue from an actress who was role playing being a student who had dropped out of Copenhagen University (at the time the audience wasn’t told this was an actress, but some people guessed). She was telling her story of being at university with many problems e.g. lack of support from lecturers, her own difficulties with seeing herself as an independent learner, bad advice from friends etc.

Someone I was talking to said that it included a lot of stereotypes, but still these are all individual problems which students have. The idea was that the keynote speakers today were responding to this story, which I’ll come to in a moment. What probably wasn’t planned was the interesting counterpoint with the Principal’s talk, which was all very “on message” talking about employers’s needs etc. It is always nice to senior university managers saying how important information literacy is, but for example I did find his approving quotation of the Danish government’s vision for higher education a bit too consumerist (“[students going] Faster into university, faster through university, faster into employment: all for the benefit of the Danish economy.” Hmmm)

The first two keynotes were Patricia Senn Breivik and Hans Siggaard Jensen (pictured in a blurred and photoshopped photo on the right). They addressed in turn the questions “What is the problem”, “What enhances and impedes the problem” and “ideas for a collaborative solution.” As usual Patricia was very persuasive in talking about the value of information literacy and librarians in empowering people to “better futures.” She saw the internet as the biggest challenge. She thought that it was important to get information literacy “institutionalised” and she described a process of approaching departments with IL standards, listing and discussing with them to identify ones which best suited them, getting them into the disciplinary language and integrating them into the curriculum. She urged librarians not to hide their lights under a bushel, and also to take more risks.

Hans Siggaard Jensen saw the tension between traditional elements of a university and the needs of the student (I think they haven’t been subjected to the rigours of teaching quality assessment in the same way as the UK). He felt that the knowledge that had been gained about how people create knowledge and how they learn wassn’t being applied nearly enough in universities. One thing that was talked about by him and Patricia was how people can learn by creating knowledge and engaging in research. This was one of the themes that was later picked up when we had an interactive session where the whole audience had to get up on stage and share their “top insight” from the keynotes with each other. For me this connects with things we are doing at Sheffield with enquiry based learning (I will blog about this a bit more when I get back!) “putting the process of research at the heart of the student experience.”

Hans also talked about the need to have a vision - he talked about past visions for the university and for libraries. This was another thing that resonated with delegates (as did Patricia’s exhortation for librarians to get out and about in their institution)

The final keynote was from Jude Carroll, on plagiarism. As this has been quite a long entry I will just represent this by mentioning a couple of the resources she recommended: The Center for Intellectual Property, University of Maryland (http://www.umuc.edu/distance/odell/cip/links_plagiarism.html), the site at Leeds Uni (http://www.ldu.leeds.ac.uk/plagiarism/) and the University of Alberta http://www.library.ualberta.ca/guides/plagiarism/why/