I am blogging from the Lifelong Learning Conference in Yeppoon Australia. Today's first keynote is by Lana Jackman, co-Chair of the National forum on Information Literacy in the USA. I'm having a go at liveblogging it, though I will probably do a bit of editing afterwards. There is more info about her at
http://www.melangeinfo.com/
about.htmand about the NFIL generally at
http://www.infolit.org/.
She described work as chair as "one of my most passionate activities". It may be time of change for NFIL, since they are becoming non-profit corporation, with the current members serving in an advisory capacity as trustees and adopting a social enterprise structure. This is a movement from the current non-profit organisation. They are also likely to have a new home at Purdue University, which is already very committed to information literacy. The official announcement will be make n 2009. The mission of NFIL is "mainstreaming information literacy and lifelong learning philosophy worldwide" and she stressed need for IL and Lifelong Learning (LLL) abilities in current world.
Dr Jackman called IL an "all terrain vehicle that drives us over challenges" and later on she talked about Information as an "Asset based approach" toLifelong Learning (LLL). She identified competitive advantage, of interest to all countries, as dependent on IL and LLL. She also showed a video about "boundary crossing" leadership in the healthcare section, including looking across ethnic, sectoral and cultural boundaries, to address issues and achieve social change.
Dr Jackman saw NFIL as a boundary-crossing organisation: she wants it to move still further in this direction. She took the phrase "Leadership is hope in action" as inspirational in this context - and emphasised the need to go outside the library world to show how IL can impact in other spheres. Engaging the member 93 NFIL organisations "beyond allegiance" was challenging (i.e. beyond them just signing up to the idea of IL, but rather taking it up within their organisations in a more active way.
Dr Jackman talked about milestones of NFIL, founded in 1989 by Patricia Senn Breivik, who led NFIL until recently. These include being instrumental in setting up the Prague and Alexandria meeting that have been so important for the international development of IL.
One slide compared key skills as defined by the American Library Association with standards which are being drafted by the
National ICT literacy Policy Council. There is some information about this at
http://www.infolit.org/policycouncil.doc. I wasn't quite clear of why this was happening, as it seems to me to be taking IL back into the "part of ICT" area, which doesn't seem s agood thing. I may get a chance to ask Dr Jackman more about this.
The NFIL's challenges are: Getting more evidence based research; boundary crossing leadership; "community based participatory research" (involving the community itself in research, and adapting results to real-world environments see e.g.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/bv.fcgi?rid=hstat1a.chapter.44133); a diffusion strategy; National ICT literacy challenges (Apparently in the US the digital divide is now being underplayed by the US Government); an enhanced NFIL network. Dr Jackman's challenge to everyone was to go out, outside our comfort zones and do something about IL
Issue 42 of SCONUL Focus is now available. Articles include:
The latest issue of the journal Evidence Based Library and Information Practice (Vol 3, No 2) has just been published. The original articles are "An Evaluation of the Five Most Used Evidence Based Bedside Information" and "Non-use of Library Services by Students in a UK Academic Library" and there are a number of evidence summaries (summarising research evidence from other artilces) e.g. "Canadian Research Librarians have Little Time for Scholarship" and "Students with Non-Proficient Information Seeking Skills Greatly Over-Estimate Their Abilities." Go to
Just to say that I will be doing more reports from the Lifelong Learning conference, but doing these takes a bit of time and at the moment I'm concentrating mostly on preparing for an event in Second Life (see below) so the reports will come out over the next couple of weeks.
The latest issue of Information research has just come out. One article which caught my eye was:
On Tuesday I gave two presentations at the Lifelong Learning conference in Yeppoon, Australia (that's a picture of the tea tent). One presentation was on Second Life and Information Literacy (I might do another post on that), but the main one was Fostering Lifelong Learning through Information Literacy education: Exploring conceptions in different disciplines and framing pedagogies for lifelong learning. You will find it embedded below (or follow the link from the title): I have added an extra slide (compared with the actual presentation) to explain a bit more what we were doing in the presentation. The abstract for it was as follows: "Information Literacy (IL) has been acknowledged as a key element of lifelong learning (Candy et al., 1994). The aim of this presentation is to explore the lifelong learning dimensions of pedagogies for IL in different disciplines. Our starting points are the categories of pedagogy for IL identified in a research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). We will look at them in relation to: a.Candy Report’s attributes and qualities of the lifelong learner in relation to the ideal structure of the undergraduate curriculum described in that report. b.The competing models of lifelong learning identified with OECD and UNESCO respectively. The AHRC project investigated conceptions of UK academics in four disciplines: Marketing, English, Chemistry and Civil Engineering. It is notable that some conceptions of teaching IL focused on the requirements for the students’ course of study, whilst others focused on supporting students both in their course and for their life beyond university. For example, in marketing one conception of pedagogy for IL was Helping students understand how information literacy is critical to them, for marketing and life whilst another was of Upgrading students’ information toolbox at an appropriate point (of the course). We will reflect how these differing approaches relate to different aspects of Candy’s model/structure. Similarly, some conceptions focused more on students’ development as people and citizens (thus with more connection to the UNESCO view), and others on students’ development as practitioners. The discussion will be augmented by evidence from the literature and the authors’ experiences of implementing IL in the University curriculum, including Webber’s work as a CILASS (Centre for Inquiry-based Learning in the Arts and Social Sciences) Fellow at the University of Sheffield. 
I am blogging from the Lifelong Learning Conference in Yeppoon Australia. Today's first keynote is by Lana Jackman, co-Chair of the National forum on Information Literacy in the USA. I'm having a go at liveblogging it, though I will probably do a bit of editing afterwards. There is more info about her at http://www.melangeinfo.com/
The SLAMIT Course 2008, which focuses on School Libraries as Learning centres, takes place in Druskininkai/Alytus, Lithuania on 19th October – 24th October 2008. Ross Todd keynotes with "School libraries and learning - what are the challenges? "
The presentations from the CILIP Scotland conference are online. There are 2 directly concerning information literacy: Information literacy: tools and resources "An introduction to the Information Literacy Framework and Portal for health information. Presented by Eilean Craig and Rob Westwood" and Teaching information literacy to the net generation "A description of how the National Library of Estonia is teaching information literacy skills to young people, presented by Hela Ojasaar" All the presentations are on Slideshare at http://www.slideshare.net/scottishlibraries/slideshows, scroll down to see the Info Literacy ones.
Harris, B. (2008) "Communities as Necessity in Information Literacy Development: Challenging the Standards" Journal of academic librarianship, 34 (3) , 248-255. "Contemporary standards suggest that information literate activity is a solitary process. As a corrective, research and pedagogical theories related to “learning communities” and “communities of practice” have become valuable sites of inquiry for librarians. The author provides strategies for making community a topic of instruction."
More about digital literacy than information literacy - but I thought this Center's website had some interesting stuff on it (the Center was launched about 6 months ago). "Forty years after Joan Ganz Cooney's landmark study stimulated the creation of Sesame Street, Sesame Workshop has established a new center devoted to accelerating children's learning in a rapidly changing world. The Joan Ganz Cooney Center will focus new attention on the challenges children face today, asking the 21st century equivalent of her original question, "How can emerging media help children learn?" " A recent addition is a report rather off-puttingly entitled The Power of Pow! Wham!: Children, Digital Media and Our Nation's Future: three challenges for the digital age. One of the challenges is "Rethink literacy and learning for the digital age" and critical thinking (with information/data) is mentioned. http://www.joanganzcooneycenter.org/
Another new book:
A couple of interesting sites I came across recently:
The transcript of the discussion on Expanding/Enhancing Information Literacy Using In-World Tools, held on Infolit iSchool in the virtual world, second Life, is now available at http://sleeds.org/chatlog/?c=295
Thanks to Albert Boekhorst for drawing my attention to
