Library Philosophy and Practice

Articles added to Library Philosophy and Practice (a peer-reviewed electronic journal) in March and April include Games for Teaching Information Literacy Skills (games element in teaching chemistry sources) and The Role of Nigerian Primary School Libraries in Literacy and Lifelong Learning. The contents page (linked to full text) for 2007 is at http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~mbolin/lpp2007.htm

UNESCO initiative

"The Society for the Advancement of Library and Information Science (SALIS), India, in collaboration with UNESCO, has just launched a six-month project entitled Interactive E-Learning Portal on Information Literacy Competency Development Skills for South Asia. The project aims to raise awareness and enhance information literacy competency skills of laymen as well as information professionals and educators." An e-learning portal is being developed using the Moodle Virtual Learning Environment. A little more information is here. SALIS has a website at http://autolib-india.net/salis/ but there wasn't any information on the initiative when I just looked.

Photo by Sheila Webber: Fern in my garden, May 2007.

Another IL blog

Came across another nice blog, the Alkek Library Information Literacy blog at http://txstateinfolit.blogspot.com/. It had a posting about the Second Life best practices conference, and also news on what they are doing e.g. creating wikis for faculty.

Photo by Sheila Webber: Rose in Radford vase, May 2007.

Blogging in LIS teaching and learning

Today I tried to give a distance talk to a conference in Portugal called Web 2.0 na Ciência da Informação. My talk was on Blogging in LIS teaching and learning. I was using a service called WebEx which allows a host to switch control to a participant's desktop. Thus Julio Anjos in Portugal could, after he had invited me into the "meeting", switch control to my desktop (so he saw it on a screen that could be projected for the delegates). This meant I could show the PowerPoint on my machine and the delegates could see it. The delegates were in a real conference hall in Portugal (most talks were live).
That worked fine, but I was TALKING over the telephone, and that did not work well: they couldn't really hear what I was saying when my time came at 12.00 noon. Thus we had to abandon the attempt after 5 minutes or so. Fortunately I didn't have any more appointments today, so I was able to hang round my computer and I added extra text to my ppt. In the end I gave my first SILENT presentation at 17.00, highlighting important bits on the ppt using a drawing facility and managing the whole thing in 3 or 4 minutes. Perhaps all my presentations should be that short. I believe I got applause ;-))
So, here is the ppt, in pdf format at http://dis.shef.ac.uk/sheila/blogging2007.pdf . With the extra notes I hope it should be even easier than normal PowerPoints for you to follow what I meant!

Photo by Peter Stordy: Me, today, in my office.

Critical perspectives

Hazel Edmunds emailed me recently about an article which she says is based on the book Teaching Defiance: Stories and strategies for activist educators.
Newman, M. (2007) "Adult education and the home front."Adults Learning, 18 (7), (probably pages 8-11, I found this info on another site; the publisher - see URL below - doesn't give page numbers!).
Hazel continued "one part of Newman's article struck me as very apt for the information literacy scene. I quote: 'The skills I suggest we examine and practise are:
- 'how to critically appraise the statements of others;
- 'how to think clearly for ourselves;
- 'how to think inventively;
- 'how to participate actively in the affairs of our state; and
- 'how to participate wisely.
'Whenever we come across an apparently authoritative statement we can encourage people to tease out 'truth' from 'ideology'. I realise that both these concepts are contested but we can ask such questions as:
- 'Has the speaker (or writer) included all relevant information?
- 'Has the speaker included inconvenient ads well as convenient arguments? Or
- 'Is the speaker pushing a party line?'
"Newman then goes on to talk about legitimacy, authority, sincerity and openness."
Thanks to Hazel for this. The contents page for that issue of Adult learning is at http://www.niace.org.uk/Publications/
Periodicals/AdultsLearning/BackIss/Mar07Cont.htm
There is a review of Newman's book in College and research libraries, here

Photo by Sheila Webber: There are memorial trees for students on the Sheffield Campus. This is a young memorial tree for Louise Andrews, a student of French and German, which has a foxglove growing beside the little tree.

Research review - searching

For those of you interested in searching behaviour, two reviews in the latest edition of JASIST:

Markey, K. (2007) "Twenty-five years of end-user searching, Part 1: Research findings." Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58 (8), 1071 - 1081. "This is the first part of a two-part article that reviews 25 years of published research findings on end-user searching in online information retrieval (IR) systems."

Markey, K. (2007) "Twenty-five years of end-user searching, Part 2: Future research directions." Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 58 (8), 1123-1130.

Photo by Sheila Webber: Garden rose, May 2007.

Second Life again

Eduserv have now put up stuff from their Virtual Worlds symposium the other week. It is available in Second Life and also at http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/
symposium/2007/presentations

On the same themes, there is a Second Life International Best Practices in Education Conference tomorrow, which unfortunately I'll miss because of Real Life commitments, though I think it's a bit sad that we're already talking about "best practices" when surely it should stil be a case of creating and experimenting: see http://slbestpractices2007.wikispaces.com/

Finally I have a diary about my SL, http://adventuresofyoshikawa.blogspot.com/: that's me in the photo.

Talk on IBL & learning space

This is a week of "sharing practice" in learning and teaching at Sheffield Uni and I was giving a talk in an internal seminar called Advocating Inquiry Based Learning, specifically focusing on the use of the learning space refurbished using CILASS money.

My talk was called Collaboratory in practice: Department of Information Studies: a case study and I was talking about what we had used this space for, which modules, plus some detailed examples of activities. A couple of the activities were in a Human Resources Management module, some others in a Business Information module and a new module called Inquiry in Information Management. Here is the presentation in a pdf format: http://dis.shef.ac.uk/sheila/webber-barthouse2007.pdf
If you want to see what the room we were discussing lookes like, there is a video A technology-rich space for inquiry-based learning: CILASS – University of Sheffield on the JISC website (scroll down the page to find the link). Also the photo above was taken in the room at the poster presentation which was the culmination of the Inquiry in Information Management class. I avoid putting photos of students on my blog because it doesn't seem fair to them, but this seemed OK as it is mostly backs, and mostly my colleagues' backs, at that (they were helping to assess the posters).

Other presentations today were from Bill Hutchings of the Centre for Excellence in Enquiry Based Learning at Manchester Uni (see http://www.campus.manchester.ac.uk/ceebl/resources/ where there are a number of papers by him) and two colleagues in English, Duco van Ostrum and Richard Steadman Jones: here is a posting on the CILASS blog about their class. You can also see them in the above JISC video.

Updated State-of-the-Art report & Directory

The IFLA/UNESCO Information Literacy Resources Directory has been redesigned and includes the just-published latest version of the State-of-the-Art report on Information Literacy in different countries. This includes the report on the UK and Ireland authored by me and Claire McGuinness (written in June last year). The site also has a new, more memorable, web address http://www.infolitglobal.info/

Photo by Sheila Webber: Foxglove, Sheffield, May 2007.

Rencontres FORMIST

The 7th Rencontres FORMIST (French annual information literay conference) Entrer dans le flux ? Le défi du « web 2.0 » pour le bibliothécaire-formateur takes place at Enssib, Villeurbanne, 14 juin 2007. more information here

Informs survey

There is a survey to find out what people think the priorities should be for developing the tutorial system Informs: http://www.survey.bris.ac.uk/intute/informs

Use of e-books by people at UCL

CIBER, University College London, have published a study of UCL faculty and students: What do faculty and students really think about e-books? (authors: Ian Rowlands, David Nicholas, Hamid R. Jamali and Paul Huntington) "This article reports on a large-scale survey of nearly two thousand faculty and students at one institution, University College London, and profiles their use and perceptions of ebooks." http://www.homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~uczciro/findings.pdf

Photo by Sheila Webber: Copper beech leaves, Weston Park, Sheffield, May 2007.

WILU blog

There are a few postings on the WILU (Canadian Information Literacy conference) blog. WILU took place just over these past few days (16-18 May). Apart from a complaint about accommodation there are pretty full write-ups of two sessions - I imagine there might be more after the event. http://wilu.wordpress.com/

Photo by Sheila Webber: taken whilst at the 2005 WILU conference in Guelph.

Engaging learners: new opportunities for learning support and development in libraries

Engaging learners: new opportunities for learning support and development in libraries is a one-day conference for library and information professionals, organised by National Teaching Fellows from the University of Northampton and De Montfort University. It takes place at De Montfort University, Leicester 12th June 2007. Speakers and workshop leaders include: Professor Sally Brown, Pro Vice-Chancellor (Assessment, Learning and Teaching) at Leeds Metropolitan University; Sandy Gilkes (Head of the Centre for Academic Practice at the University of Northampton); Sally Patalong (Library Teaching Fellow at Coventry University); Mary Pillai (Teacher Fellow and Academic Team Manager of the Centre for Learning and Study Support at De Montfort University); Chris Powis, Deputy Director (Academic Services); Jo Webb (Academic Services Manager). Contact Chris Powis: chris.powis@northampton.ac.uk

Photo by Sheila Webber: It was nice weather for ducks today.

Learning about learning

Learning about learning is a one day event on 17 July 2007, held in London, UK. It is led by Sharon Markless and "explores how people learn, and is designed to give library and information staff knowledge about learning theory that should underpin their work." For more information go to http://www.cilip.org.uk/training/

Introducing Pedagogic Research Methods

Bill Johnston, Stuart Boon and I are doing a workshop session on "The phenomenographic approach" at a free Higher Education Academy event, Introducing Pedagogic Research Methods, on 20th June in Glasgow. The day is aimed at people who are more beginners in educational research or want to learn about a new area: lecturers, educational developers, and librarians too - although I see the latter are not mentioned as a target audience!http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/events/List_5532.htm

Photo by Sheila Webber: roses, Sheffield, May 2007.

Monica Vezzosi

I was recently in touch with Monica Vezzosi and she reminded me about her articles:
Vezzosi, M. (2005) "Information Literacy and Reflective Learning. An action-research experience at the University of Parma."(Dissertation) MSc University of Northumbria. http://dspace-unipr.cilea.it/handle/1889/476
Vezzosi, M. (2006) "Information literacy and action research: an overview and some reflections." New Library World, 107 (1226/1227), 286-301.

Photo by Sheila Webber: Cow Parsley, Hellingly, May 2007.

Communications in Information Literacy

The first issue of Communications in Information Literacy (CIL) has been published at http://www.comminfolit.org/ There is an interview with Patricia Senn Breivik plus articles:

Nancy E. Goebel, Paul J. Neff : Information Literacy at Augustana: A Programmatic Approach.
Jacqui Weetman DaCosta and Becky Jones: Developing students' information and research skills via Blackboard

Claire McGuinness: Targeting Academic Champions: A Short-Term Solution for Integrated Information Literacy?

Photo by Sheila Webber: Weigelia in my mother's garden, May 2007.

COLRIC Conference 2007

Council for Learning Resources in Colleges (COLRIC) Conference 2007: Impact Birmingham University, Edgbaston Campus Arts Building one day conference and AGM will be held in Birmingham on Friday 15th June 2007. The themes are "How do you ensure that service impact is recognised by senior managers and inspectors? How do you prove the value of teaching information literacy skills and improving status in your organisation? How do you make the most of the new inspection process? How can you use the CoLRiC self-assessment tool effectively?" http://www.colric.org.uk/

Also a few useful resources on the site e.g.:
Achen-Owor, F (2006) " 'Researching for your studies' project: Developing an online Information Literacy course to support Access to Nursing learners at Lewisham and Greenwich Community Colleges." COLRIC Newsletter, (40). http://www.colric.org.uk/
news06.htm#Researching_for_your_studies_project

Photo by Sheila Webber: Elderflower (I think), Hailsham, May 2007.

JISC web 2.0 seminar

A posting on lis-link from Ruth Keane about the JISC Web 2.0 seminar took me to this site which has content from the seminar (podcasts, ppt and the like) and also discussion fora: http://moodle.cs.man.ac.uk/
web2/course/view.php?id=3 When I arrived there I thought it looked vaguely familiar, and then realised I'd looked at it before, as Brian Kelly was presenting at it remotely and I'd thought of contributing to the discussion (but didn't). Ruth in her post lists the draft actions which JISC considering - they don't seem to me to cover all the aspects that emerged in the seminar.

Photo by Sheila Webber: Rhododendron, Hailsham, May 2007.

Second Life symposium

Last Thursday I attended the Eduserv Symposium Virtual Worlds, real learning. The main event took place in London, but it was also streamed to 3 venues in Second Life (SL) and people in SL could join an Instant Messaging board where they could comment and post questions. There were screens round the lecture room which showed one of the SL venues (mostly the venue on Eduserv Island). In the photo you can see 2 of these screens; when I took the photo, the Eduserv person who was leading events in SL was using his text editor.

I try not to make the postings on this blog too long, and not everyone interested in IL will be interested in Virtual Worlds, so I will blog a bit here and later will do some additional stuff on the Livejournal blog I set up a few years ago for our Educational Informatics module. From Eduserv, there are bookmarks on del.icio.us and other blog entries will be using the tag efsym2007 at Technorati. Also the whole thing is hopefully being put online in due course.
The delegates included another information lecturer, Mark Hepworth from Loughborough Uni, and some librarians, including Lyn Parker from here at Sheffield. There were also academics from other disciplines, people involved in/in charge of educational development or technical services, people researching in the area... job titles weren’t given on the delegate list, so I’m not sure of the exact composition. The food was nice, BTW, although it was the kind where waiters circulate with trays of stuff and greedy folk like me have to be on the alert to grab.

Although the day wasn't supposed to just be about SL, in fact a lot of talk focused on it. Presenters were Jim Purbrick (of Linden Labs, the developers of SL), Roo Reynolds (Metaverse Evangelist at IBM: yes, that really is his job title), Hamish Macleod, talking about the University of Edinburgh’s involvement, Jenny Scott from the journal Nature, talking about their experiments in SL including their “Second Nature” island, Gilly Salmon on her research, and finally Stephen Downes from Canada (all the other speakers were Brits) who had been asked to provide a critical perspective and Stephen duly obliged. Here are some themes and issues:

- What it offers in educational & information terms: the advantage of SL in particular seems to be that it has more parallels with Real Life (RL) than some virtual worlds and so is a more gentle introduction for non-techies. The fact that there is a real economy in SL (see below) also means that people can practice marketing, production etc. Of course there are librarians in SL, and libraries and library suppliers (see http://www.infoisland.org/). It still seems an issue, though, as to what form libraries should take. Librarians have (to me) more of a function than libraries in SL. On the other hand, the "gathering space" role of a library seems to have a place in SL as in RL, whether for educational or community activities. There seem to me LOTS of questions to do with IL and SL (e.g. what IS information literacy in SL?) which has the researcher in me gleeful ;-)
- There are already examples of people in Higher/Further education taking their students into SL, an example is a chemistry lecturer (multiple choice quiz dressed up with obelisks). Most popular are subjects where being able to construct and manipulate things (sciences, engineering etc.), do stuff with artificial life, & explore social issues like identity.
- The business/economy aspect of SL seems to be a controversial, but possibly success-defining, aspect of SL. The Linden speaker gave the stats: that 41% of the 6 million people registered on SL are female (presume that means: claim to be female), the average age is 33 (except on the teen version of SL, of course) and US$6 million a month are changed into Linden dollars. There are two sides to it: the fact that the Linden/US dollar exchange means that the Real Life (RL) and SL economy are linked, and not just for the developers. You can become an entrepreneur in SL: also you can spend lots of money on casinos and "adult" activities. Stephen was arguing that this meant it was too comfortable and like RL, and also that the strongly commercial element meant conflicted with public service and educational aims. On the other hand, these RL monetary links encourage a diversity of people into SL and encourage more diverse activities (even leaving aside the sex and gambling). The second side is to what extent Linden are going to make everything Open Source.

- There were debates about whether SL was a game, and whether it was Web 2.0. I have my views on this, but am not clear why it matters so much to make a decision on these points. I suppose it might if you were facing misguided colleagues who thought All Games Were Evil.

- Privacy and confidentiality. There is commercial confidentiality (e.g. at IBM they have created a behind-the-firewall private metaverse, so they can have confidential virtual meetings) and also the privacy of individuals, including students. One question from the "backchannel" (participants in SL) was about whether students would want 2 avatars, one for class, one for themselves. Seems very likely to me, and my perception is that students may wish to keep private & academic separate, under their control (which is their right).

- Practical issues. There certainly are some e.g. apparently at the moment they are constantly updating the software you need to download to use SL; getting central computing to install software and then upgrade it once a year is hard enough. Diana Laurillard (who chaired the panel session at the end) seemed determined to accentuate the positive. Indeed, she appeared to be berating us for asking about “technical issues” and barriers rather than burbling with excitement about the new opportunities. However it seemed to me that this discussion of practical issues was a sign that people were contemplating using it with diverse cohorts of students (i.e. not just geeky/edtech students who are going to think it is interesting even if they are having to cope with stuff that doesn’t work). That there were practical issues in access was emphasised by some of the chat going on in 2nd Life about reception of all aspects of the seminar e.g. “I have nothing” “audio and video (but video is inverted)” “now white screen”.

This has now been an excessively long post. Perhaps I am burbling after all. At any rate I'm starting to get some SL/IL ideas.

New frontiers in user education

CILIP's UC&R Group (South West) has organised Go West! New frontiers in user education, a one day event on 21st June 2007 taking place at Exeter University, Exeter, UK. Topics to include: information skills for international students, working with postgraduates and academics, and the value of teacher training in delivering user education. Cost: £45 + VAT (CILIP members); £55 + VAT (Non-CILIP members). Contact Alastair Sleat, alastair.Sleat@UWE.AC.UK

Photo by Sheila Webber, near Hellingly, May 2007.

Latest new/updated tutorials

The latest batch of new of updated internet tutorials at Intute are: Internet Physicist, Internet Civil Engineer and Internet for Petroleum and Offshore engineering. Go to http://www.vts.intute.ac.uk/

Google things

Here is an article which does some quick evaluations and provides some thoughtful discussion, plus a couple of events.

White, B. (2006) "Examining the Claims of Google Scholar as a Serious Information Source." New Zealand library and information management journal, 50 (1) 11-24 http://www.lianza.org.nz/publications/journal/
files/TNZLIMJOctober2006v50i01.pdf (this is the web address for the whole issue)

Event on 6 June Beyond Google: Strategies for Finding Images Online in Bristol, UK, organised by TASI (Technical Advisory Service for Images). http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/training.html

Three day events in June, Summer Institute June 2007 - Google IT, led by Google Certified Teachers, organsied by the California Technology Assistance Project (CTAP), USA, (see http://www.ctap4.org/infolit/ -they also have some resources including IL leaflets to download, aimed at children).

I hadn't come across the concept of a Google certified teacher before, so I did some googling. Here is the webpage of the Google Teacher Academy. This initiative is aimed at schoolteachers, and "only K-12 educators within a 90-minute local commute of an Academy event may apply" (so that cuts out anyone from, say, Peckham, participating in the Californian one). http://www.google.com/educators/gta.html

Phot0 by Sheila webber: wild rose, Sheffield, May 2007.

A couple of recent articles

Johnson, A-M. and Jent, S. (2007) "Library instruction and information literacy: 2005." Reference Services Review, 35 (1), 137-186. This is their annual annotated bibliography - 288 items this time, divided into broad categories (Academic/Public/School/Special/All types). As usual there are loads more academic-sector articles than public library ones (131 vs 2!), and bias towards US material. Still very useful though, obviously.

Gómez-Hernández, J.A. and Pasadas-Ureña, C., (2007). “La alfabetización informacional en bibliotecas públicas. Situación actual y propuestas para una agenda de desarrollo”. ("Information Literacy in public libraries: current situation and proposals for a development agenda")Information Research, 12 (3). http://InformationR.net/ir/12-3/paper316.html In Spanish.

Photo by Sheila Webber: Strawberry flowers, May 2007.

Informs

Informs is "a flexible adaptive tool for the creation of interactive online tutorials. It consists of easy to use software and a database of tutorials. These tutorials have been created by users as a shared community resource, which can be re-used by other registered users". Its typical layout has an instruction frame on the left, with a second frame on the right that might e.g. be occupied by the source you are learning to search.
Informs started off as a JISC project some time ago, and almost disappeared because it wasn't clear who was going to continue to maintain it. However, a good number of people had found it useful and created tutorials using it, so fortunately now Intute have taken on its support. There is a new logon site and a little documentation. It is free to use for UK higher and further education. The Informs website is at http://www.informs.intute.ac.uk/ One article that mentions using Informs is: Fiander, W., Peters, L. and Sinclair, C. (2003) "Taking the pain out of network induction: using INFORMS to induct new first year students." SCONUL focus, (30), 17-19 . http://www.sconul.ac.uk/publications/newsletter/30/8.PDF
Examples of tutorials are e.g. at http://www.informs.intute.ac.uk/
informs_perl/portfolio.pl?folio=58
Photo by Sheila Webber: Pink hawthorn, April 2007.

Practical research for education

For people working in schools who are interested in doing more educational research, the following conference may be interesting: Practical research for education 2007 conference: Research is important because…. It is held on 11 July 2007 in London, UK. It is aimed at teachers etc.: librarians aren't mentioned but I am sure that is merely an oversight ;-) One of the workshops reports on a study of The impact of the play agenda and toy libraries in Wales, in fact (though the research doesn't seem to have involved librarians). http://www.pre-online.co.uk/pre_events07.asp There are the presentations from last year's conference at http://www.pre-online.co.uk/conferenceprogramme.asp

Another photo of Euuphorbia and garlic mustard by Sheila Webber, May 2007.

Eduserv/ 2nd life

Next Thursday I'm off to the Eduserv Foundation Symposium 2007 Virtual worlds, real learning? "This year's symposium will attempt to look past the hype surrounding virtual worlds such as Second Life and evaluate whether they offer real opportunities for learners at UK educational institutions." It is full with a waiting list, and is also being streamed into 3 venues in 2nd life (though with only 40 avatars allowed in each venue: shouldn't virtual lecture theatres be expandable things?) Evidently we are expected to be blogging, flickring and twittering away, using the tag efsym2007 and they've already tagged some relevant items on del.icio.us Website is at http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/symposium/2007/

Since I was attending this, I thought I ought to join 2nd life. Above is the obligatory photo of my avatar in 2nd life. She is still dressed as a standard Harajuku Female, since every time I tried to edit my appearance (4 times), the computer crashed into the blue screen of death. Be interesting to see what they say about the nitty-gritty technical issues on Thursday. When technologies start being just part of your pedagogy (rather than some whacky cool experimental thing) students (and I) expect the technology stuff just to WORK. This was a problem with LAMS last year - it just wasn't reliable enough, and I didn't feel why the students should feel experimented upon. Obviously I won't condemn 2nd life on one try though and I was happy enough bumbling around on Info Island, though I didn't pluck up courage to enter into conversation with the fellow-info-library-folk.

Web 2.0 meets information fluency

The Web 2.0 meets information fluency wiki (just one page at the moment) has a large number of links to: background resources relevant to information literacy/fluency and/or Web 2.0; material by Joyce Valenza; and resources relevant to teaching some aspect of information literacy (e.g. communicating with powerpoint, copyright, synthesis). In her article Information Fluency Meets Web 2.0 (on the wiki), Valenza says "Through my librarian visioning glasses, I see two threads—information fluency and Web 2.0-- beautifully woven into rich 21st century cloth as teachers and librarians who value inquiry, thinking skills, ethical behavior, and innovative student work hone their craft on a funky and vibrant 21st century loom, with learners as collaborators."
http://informationfluency.wikispaces.com/

Photo by Sheila Webber: Euphorbia and garlic mustard, Sheffield, May 2007.

ACRL online course

The US Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) are running an online seminar, Creating a Comprehensive Plan for Information Literacy, May 29-June 16, 2007. "This course will provide you with the information you need to create a comprehensive plan for information literacy for your institution. The course will cover: planning; setting goals and objectives; how to organize and prioritize ideas; the writing process; and the creation of a draft plan." Go to: http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlproftools/comprehensiveplan.htm

Libraries without walls conference

Interesting presentations at the 7th Libraries Without Walls conference, being held 14 - 18 September 2007 on the Aegean Island of Lesvos, Greece. Talks include: Libraries as a social space: enhancing the experience of distance learners using social networking tools (Gwyneth Price and Jane Secker); Developing re-usable learning objects to deliver information skills training: are they practical? (Nancy Graham); The LearnHigher CETL and Information Literacy Assessments (Bob Glass) ; Information skills through electronic environments: considerations, pitfalls and benefits (Cath Hunt); Development of information-related competencies in European ODL institutions (Sirje Virkus). Go to http://www.cerlim.ac.uk/conf/lww7/

Photo by Sheila Webber: Laburnum outside polling station, May 2007.

Representing learning designs

The Mod4L project final report (of about 100 pages) was published last month. "This final report refines the discussion of issues of representing learning designs for sharing and reuse evidenced in the interim report and highlights problems with the concept of practice models (section 2), characterises the requirements teachers have of effective representations (section 3), evaluates a number of types of representation against these requirements (section 4), explores the more technically focused role of sequencing representations and controlled vocabularies (sections 5 & 6), documents some generic learning designs (section 8.2) and suggests ways forward for bridging the gap between teachers and developers (section 2.6). "

An underlying message seems to be a) it would be useful to have a clear way of representing an intervention, or session plan, or learning sequence (or whatever) so that people could judge more quickly whether it had anything they could re-use or learn from, but it is time-consuming to do this effectively, and no one way can capture all the aspects.

I must say I have always been a bit sceptical of the pursuit of generic learning designs, because of the need to tailor learning to the learning & teaching context, but certainly I do learn things from other people's teaching (even if I don't want to copy it exactly). If there were clearer ways of presenting case studies about teaching information literacy that would be a help too.
Falconer, I. et al. (2007) Mod4L Final Report: Representing Learning Designs. Glasgow: Glasgow Caledonian University. http://mod4l.com/tiki-list_file_gallery.php?galleryId=2

Photo by Sheila Webber: Beech tree with new leaves, Sheffield, April 2007.

Webbed or WebSceptic: I guest on Brian Kelly's blog

Brian Kelly just posted a guest post from me on his UK web focus blog. I wrote a post called "Webbed or WebSceptic? You decide!", it's sort of about the information profession, and their media habits. One thing I found was that, in the end, I found I needed to draft it in blogger (i.e. here) and then copy it back into Word to send Brian to try and get that "blogly" feel. Anyway, please go along & add a comment to Brian's blog if you feel so inclined, as the previous guest blogger got quite a few comments added and I will feel mortified if I don't get any ;-) The post is at http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/2007/05/01/
guest-post-webbed-or-web-sceptic-you-decide/

Photo by Sheila Webber: Apple blossom in my garden, April 2007.

Online teaching and learning Initiatives

There is a half day event, Online teaching and learning Initiatives, organised by ALISS (Association of Librarians and Information Professionals in the Social Sciences) on 4th June 2007 in London, UK. Speakers include: Angela Joyce on Intute and Web 2.0 Developments; Sally Patalong and Olivia Llewellyn on the development and promotion of an online tutorial using macromedia at Coventry University. Free to all ALISS members Non-members may attend at a fee of £25.00. Contact Heather Dawson, h.dawson@lse.ac.uk, LSE Library 10 Portugal Street, London WC2A 2HD.

LAMS

LAMS (Learning Activity Management System) is software that enables people to design learning sequences; you may remember I mentioned trying it out last semester. Online proceedings of the LAMS conference held in December 2006 have been published. Information Literacy isn't mentioned specifically, but there a couple of papers dealing with student skills.

Philip, R., Voerma, A. and Dalziel, J (Eds) (2007) Proceedings of the First International LAMS Conference 2006: Designing the Future of Learning. LAMS Foundation
http://lamsfoundation.org/lams2006/papers.htm

I was using LAMS as part of the JISC funded DESILA project. I notice that the similarly-JISC-funded ALED project (http://aled.swancoll.ac.uk/mediawiki/index.php?title=Welcome_Introduction) was going to create some library-related LAMS sequences (using the catalogue etc.)

Photo by Sheila Webber: Violets, drybrush effect, April 2007.