At the Konstanz Workshop on Information Literacy on 9th November I gave a presentation on Information Literacy for Masters students. There were two parts to the presentation. In the first part I talked about an activity that I and my colleague Nigel Ford undertake with taught postgraduate (Masters) students taking our Information Management and Librarianship programmes (about 60 students). It is a formative activity, but involves peer evaluation. The task is to produce a brief written guide and a Squidoo lens or blog, relating to a specified database. The aims are to develop skills in the databases concerned (learning by teaching) and to develop skills in planning and writing material to support information literacy. It is part of a class "Information Resources and Information Literacy" that normally has a 2 hour lecture + a one hour lab each week.
In the first week of the cycle, the students are briefed, and they choose partners for the exercise (signing up using our VLE). They start working on the task by getting to know their database (e.g. Google Scholar or Web of Knowledge) better. In the second week, in the lab session, I and Nigel go over some material (some of which has been posted in advance) relating to production of documentation and to cognitive styles in learning. We answer questions and see how the pairs are working together. The next week there is no scheduled lab as the students should be working on the task, and the lecture session has presentations from practitioners working with information literacy. By the end of this week, students are to post their completed guides to discussion boards on our VLE. In the final lab session they swap guides with another group, and use a framework to evaluate each other's guides and provide feedback. We have a very short wrap up at the end. There is a slide in my presentation where I have a sort of flow diagram representing this process.
In the second part of my session I gave a very short overview of Second Life (SL) and what I'm doing there , including a demonstration. The questions from the audience were all about SL ;-)
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