First year information literacy class

On Monday, in the "lecture" session of the Information Literacy class for 1st year Information Management students I had invited Alex Peng and Pam McKinney to respond to a few questions I had supplied to them earlier. Alex is a successful graduate of this course and is now studying for a PhD in the Department (an information management topic supervised by my colleague Dr Miguel Nunes). Pam has been mentioned on the blog before, as the information literacy expert in the Centre for Inquiry-based Learning in the Arts and Social Sciences. She graduated from our MSc IM course, and had a job at Sheffield Hallam University (the Other university in Sheffield) before joining CILASS. The questions I asked them were "How has being information literate helped you personally?", "Are you continuing to learn about information literacy & have your ideas about IL changed over time?" and "Have you any tips and favourite websites".

As you might imagine, I liked the way that Alex started off, by saying that "Based on my personal experience, I will strongly agree that information literacy skills are the most crucial skills that we should have in the information age." His tips at the end were about keeping track of the material you collect as you go along (rather than trying to go and find them again the day before submitting an assignment), using "different information sources for different purposes/ questions" and also organising material as you went along, so you could find it more easily.

Photo by Sheila Webber: Weston Park/ Sheffield University, Nov 2006, with a touch of Photoshop.