Monday, October 22, 2007

Some recent articles

Pages Pinto, M. and Vinciane Doucet, A. "An Academic Portal for Higher Education Information Literacy: The e-COMS Initiativ." The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 33 (5), 604-611 "The e-COMS portal is generic and transversal, and is valid for all university students who need to acquire skills and training in information literacy, particularly in relation to the management of e-learning content. This initiative is a pioneer project in the field of library science and documentation in Spain, and is aligned with the commitment of the Spanish University Library Network (Red Espan˜ola de Bibliotecas Universitarias) to promote the creation and integration of useful teaching materials, to promote information literacy in students and to participate in autonomous learning. This is the philosophy behind the design of the e-COMS academic portal, freely available at http://www.mariapinto.es/e-coms ." I have not explored this portal, since my Spanish language skills are poor, but it is indeed accessiblee at that address for Spanish speakers.

Maybe, C. (2007) "Understanding our student learners: A phenomenographic study revealing the ways that undergraduate women at Mills College understand using information." Reference Services Review, 35 (3), 452 - 462. "This research project aims to provide an understanding of Mills College undergraduate students' experience of using information, which Mills librarians can use to develop effective information literacy instructional pedagogy. Using a phenomenographic methodology, 18 undergraduate students at Mills College in Oakland, California, were interviewed and the transcripts were analyzed to reveal the ways that undergraduates experience using information.... Four distinct ways that Mills undergraduates experience information use are revealed in the paper." (An interesting study, though I note that it only seems to have one phenomenographic dimension of variation, which seems suprising ;-)

Mokhtar, I.A., Majid, S. and Foo, S. (2007) "Information literacy education through mediated learning and multiple intelligences: A quasi-experimental control-group study." Reference Services Review, 35 (3), 463-486. "This paper aims to present the findings of a study that investigated the impact of information literacy (IL) teaching approaches, which are grounded in pedagogy, on students' level and applicability of IL competencies. A quasi-experimental control group study was carried out with 476 students, aged from 13 to 15 years old, from four secondary (high) schools in Singapore ... The results of the group reports and project evaluation done by three independent and neutral teacher-examiners, as well as those from the pre- and post-intervention tests, found that the application of either mediated learning (or close coaching) or multiple intelligences helped students perform better in the learning and application of IL skills."

Photo by Sheila Webber: Bookshops beside the Retiro, Madrid, October 2007.

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