Empowering Future Generations: Information Literacy

The US National Forum on Information Literacy is having a 20th Anniversary Celebration on October 15 and 16, 2009: Empowering Future Generations: Information Literacy in Washington, D.C., USA. On the 15 there is an Anniversary Dinner with a Keynote Address from Arthur J. Rothkopf, Senior Vice President, U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The 16th includes a Panel Discussion: Empowering Future Generations: Information Literacy – A National Strategic Plan. Questions to the conference co-chairs: Dr. Lana W. Jackman, lj@infolit.org (also teh contact for sponsorship offers) or Dr. Sharon A. Weiner, sw@infolit.org More details regarding the conference agenda, keynote speakers, registration etc. will be available at http://www.infolit.org/


Photo by Sheila Webber: outside the Silver Pavilion, Kyoto, Japan, 2005

UK children's media etc. habits

The ChildWise Monitor is an annual (priced) publication from Childwise which identifies trends in UK children's consumption and activity habits. There is the methodology chapter and contents list on their website free, and some highights are mentioned in an article in the Guardian. They interviewed 1795 children and young people aged 5–16 years: the whole sample answered an initial set of questions, and then were split into 2 sub-samples for questions about various leisure activities (using the internet, reading, playing games, going to the cinema etc.) "The sample was drawn from 92 schools from within the ChildWise panel, selected to give a representative mix of demographics." Children from 7 upwards were mostly interviewed online.
Some points picked up in the Guardian article are:
- 84% said they read for pleasure in 2006, 80% in 2007, 74% in 2008
- children spend 6 hours a day in front of one screen or another
- internet is use more for socialising than for homework
- 1 in 3 said the computer is the single thing they couldn't live without
- "Pupils are using the internet less while at school, frustrated by the low-tech access and the restrictions put in place to stop them from accessing inappropriate material."
- girls are using games consoles more
- children's bedrooms are becoming media hubs
Contents, methodology & info on ordering: http://www.childwise.co.uk/monitor.htm
Curtis, P. (2009) "Internet generation leave parents behind." Guardian, 19 January,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/jan/19/internet-generation-parents

Photo by Sheila Webber: Vestmanna, Faroes, May 2007

The 'FILE experience': empowering medical librarians

There will be a talk from Susie Andretta The 'FILE experience': empowering medical librarians on 10 February 2009 at 6.30pm in The Sekforde Arms, Sekforde Street, London, UK: Map: http://digbig.com/3pmf "FILE (Facilitating Information Literacy Education) is a CPD course sponsored by London Health Libraries and the National Library for Health (NLH)." Just go along if you are interested, no booking needed.
Photo by Sheila Webber: flower arrangement, January 2009

New articles

The latest issue (102) of Library and Information Research is free on the web. It includes
Eve, J. (2008) "Writing a research proposal: planning and communicating your research ideas effectively." Library and Information Research, 32 (102), 18-28.
Crawford, J. and Irving, C. (2008) "Going beyond the 'library': the current work of the Scottish Information Literacy Project." Library and Information Research, 32 (102), 29-37.
http://www.lirg.org.uk/lir/ojs/
index.php/lir/issue/view/7

Photo by Sheila Webber: near Vestmanna, Faroes, May 2007

Information Literacy at the cross-road of Education and Information Policies in Europe

A new book: Basili, C. (Ed) (2008) Information Literacy at the cross-road of Education and Information Policies in Europe. Rome: CNR. (ISBN: 978-88-8080-096-5)
Chapters are: Information and education policies in Europe: key factors: influencing information literacy academic policies in Europe (Basili); Theorems of Information Literacy (Basili); Development of information-related Competencies in European ODL Institutions (Virkus); Information literacy programmes in higher education in the Czech Republic: The path of theory and practice (Landová et al); France: the courage to say "Documentation" (Reggiani); Information literacy activities in Germany between the Bologna process and the web 2.0 (Hapke); Joined Planning and Development - Customized Solutions: the North-Rhine-Westphalian Network on Information literacy (Nilges); Information literacy as National Assets: Individual and Cooperative Activities (Katsirikou); Information literacy education of pupils and students in Poland - diagnosis of the educational situation (Cisek et al); Information literacy and Romanian Higher Education System (Rapeanu); The European Area of Higher Education (EAHE), Information literacy and Learning & Research Resource Centers: a triangle of excellence for the development of library services in Spanish universities (Cuevas Cerveró & Vives i Gràcia); Information literacy from the learner's perspective: a UK study (Andretta)
Main information is here: http://www.cnr.it/sitocnr/Iservizi/Pubblicazioni/
Catalogopubblicazioni/Catalogo.html?voce=13&id=612
The price is 20 Euro and the order page is here:
http://www.cnr.it/sitocnr/Iservizi/Pubblicazioni/
Catalogopubblicazioni/ComeAcquistare.html (unfortunately it is payment by bank transfer)

Learning, Information behaviour & Second Life

The last thing I did, whilst going down with appendicitis, was give a talk about Second Life, and the first thing I did when starting my return to work was give another one. I haven't yet put these in my own slideshare space, but there is a slidecast of one talk and a video of the other.
Firstly, slides (in some cases - including my own - with audio) are available from the one-day JISC-CETIS event Maximising the effectiveness of virtual worlds in teaching and learning (held 16 Jan 2009) are now available on the event website at http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/CETIS-Eduserv-VW2009. My own talk was Approaching learning and teaching in Second Life. In it I talked about the way in which approaches to teaching and learning (e.g. those approaches which have been identified in educational research) can be interpreted and observed in Second Life. I also talked a little about collaboration with others in SL. I gave a couple of examples related to information literacy (the first picture shows my model of the 7 Pillars of information literacy in Second Life). Other talks at the JISC-CETIS event included ones about Open University and Edinburgh University activities, and an overview of what British unis were doing in SL.


The earlier talk was given at the Relive08 virtual worlds conference held on 20-21 November 2008. Although you will see that the image I used on the title slide (shown above) is the same for both presentations, the content was different . The webcast of this presentation, Inquiry and information behaviour in Second Life, (video, including slides) is at http://stadium.open.ac.uk/stadia/preview.php?whichevent=1248
In this talk I explained what information behaviour (IB) was & why it mattered, described the activity that my students were carrying out to investigate IB in SL, and talked a bit about results from last year. Other videocasts on this page include some interesting panel discussions and a presentation of doctoral work - in which a non-information scientist is using faceted classification to categorise virtual worlds. You can find links to videocasts from the first day of Relive08 at http://www.open.ac.uk/relive08/

Information Literacy in transition

Moira Bent's National Teaching Fellowship report sounds very interesting. There is the full text on the Newcastle University eprints server.
Bent, M. (2008) Perceptions of information literacy in the transition to higher education. (National Teaching Fellow Project Report). "The aim of this piece of research was to investigate the conflicts and congruencies between staff and student perceptions of information literacy in the transition to higher education, particularly in Chemistry and English. The project comprised four main strands: perceptions of information literacy, library and information aspects of the transition into Higher Education: study tours and networking, and the impact of the National Teaching Fellowship."
http://eprints.ncl.ac.uk/deposit_details.php?deposit_id=6052
Photo by Sheila Webber: Signs of spring, Sheffield, Jan 2009

Wikipedia & original research

The journal RNA biology is requiring potential authors to create a wikipedia entry about their research as well as submitting a manuscript as normal. It does not appear to be the top of the peer reviewed journal tree, but this is an interesting development. The guidelines to authors is at http://www.landesbioscience.com/
journals/rnabiology/guidelines
There is a short article about this in the Times Higher: different views are given and there is also an interesting comment pointing out that Wikipedia policy is "no original research" (see here)

Newman, M. (2009) "Journal authors must also post to Wikipedia." Times Higher. 12 January. http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=404956&c=1

Photo by Sheila Webber: Cat, Lille, France, October 2008.

Online tutorials

While I was off sick, there was an interesting set of posts on the lis-infoliteracy discussion list about online tutorials. Several people mentioned tutorials that others could look at/use. These included
Trinity College Dublin: (produced using Captivate) http://www.tcd.ie/Library/help/tutorial.php
University of Sussex (also with Captivate): http://www.sussex.ac.uk/library/electronic/
University of Birmingham (Captivate again): http://www.elibrary.bham.ac.uk/guide.shtml#demo
Tutorials for law students at City University: Learnmore, part of a portal Using Articulate and/or Captivate): http://learnmore.lawbore.net/
Waterford Institute of Technology: http://library.wit.ie/olas/

LILAC conference programme available

The conference programme for the LILAC (UK information literacy) conference (30 March -1 April in Cardiff, Wales) is online. If you click on any of the places where it says parallel session you get the same document, which you can scroll through to see all the parallel session details from the 3 days of the conference. http://www.lilacconference.com/dw/2009/Conference_programme.htm

Knowledge Networking in ICT Era

Information and ICT literacy is one of the themes of the International Conference on Knowledge Networking in ICT Era taking place in Chenai, India, 22-24 January 2009. As well as the main conference, there are:
Pre-Conference Tutorial (22nd Jan): e-Learning: Creating online virtual courses using Moodle and UNESCO Session (23 Jan): Information, Media and Digital Literacy
More info at http://crescentlib.googlepages.com/knict or http://autolib-india.net/salis/salis2008.asp
Photo by Sheila Webber: Blackheath, Jan 2009

Weasel Dialogues

The next Staffordshire University Information Literacy Community of Practice workshop is on 4 March on the Leek Road campus of Staffordshire University, UK, 1.30-4.30, costing £30.
Gareth Johnson, University of Leicester. The Weasel Dialogues: From script to screen for Information Literacy."Time and again it is advocated that librarianship is the communicating profession. But for many librarians communication is just something that we get on and do, but seldom take the time to think about in any great detail. ... In this session Gareth, and friends from Weasel Televisual Enterprises, will examine how it is possible to communicate with greater impact through the use of carefully planned videos, flavoured with humour and irreverence, but containing good educational content nevertheless. He will illustrate how they can be used and share some of the success stories from his work."

Chris Wakeman, Staffordshire University. "He will be examining how we can teach IL through a range of pedagogical methods such as, problem-based learning, dialectical learning and web quests. This will be an interactive session with plenty of opportunity to discuss the issues surrounding actively engaging our students."
More information: http://www.staffs.ac.uk/suilcop/events/index.php
Photo by Sheila Webber: Door, Blackheath, Jan 2009

Journal of Information Literacy

The latest issue (volume 2 issue 2) of this open-access journal, the Journal of Information Literacy, came out whilst I was off sick. The articles include the following:

Karen Bordonaro: Exploring the connections between information literacy and writing for international students
Diana Garfield: A Reading Strategy for a UK university: Reviewing the literature on reading, literacy and libraries, with particular regard to the HE sector
Abrizah Abdullah: Building an information literate school community: approaches to inculcate information literacy in secondary school students
Philip Russell: Information literacy support for off-campus students by academic libraries in the Republic of Ireland
J.P. (Sam) Saunders, Janet Coles: Report on user trials for a new BEI database
Chrys Senaka Gunasekara: Fostering independent learning and critical thinking in management higher education using an information literacy framework
Hannah Hauxwell: Information literacy at the Service Desk: the role of circulations staff in promoting information literacy
Kathleen Morgan, Geoff Walton: InfoZone: an enticing Library and IT induction?
There are also book reviews. This is all at: http://ojs.lboro.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/JIL/index
The journal once again has an RSS feed, and is also avialable via ticTOCs. TicTOCS is also something that emerged while I was away: "ticTOCs is a new scholarly journal tables of contents (TOCs) service. It's free, its easy to use, and it provides access to the most recent tables of contents of over 11,000 scholarly journals from more than 400 publishers." I haven't investigated it yet myself. It is at http://www.tictocs.ac.uk/ and there is a blog at http://tictocsnews.wordpress.com/
Photo by Sheila Webber: trees and telegraph wires, Blackheath, Jan 2009

Information Literacy awards

There are a few days left to apply for the free student place at the UK's information literacy conference, LILAC - the closing date is Friday 16 January 2009. This award is sponsored by The LearnHigher Information Literacy Learning Area at Manchester Metropolitan University. Applicants need to write a statement about the importance of information literacy and how attendance at the LILAC conference will benefit them in their future career. It is open to students registered on a library qualification (full or part-time) at a UK university. More details at http://www.lilacconference.com/dw/2009/award.htm

There is also info there about the CSG IL Group Information Literacy Award for the most inventive initiative in the sphere of information literacy. The IL Award is open to all working in the IL arena and from any sector and nominations are welcome for individuals or groups (you may not self-nominate). The nomination should comprise 3-4 pages of description and any supporting evidence. Closing date for this is 31 January 2009. Winners receive £500 to spend on their favourite charity and £500 to spend on themselves.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Tree (sideways), Blackheath, January 2009

Libri

There is a new issue of Libri, which contains an article on information literacy:
Edzan, N. (2008) "Information Literacy Development in Malaysia: a Review." Libri, 58 (4).
The current issue is only available to subscribers, though anyone can see the abstracts at:
http://www.librijournal.org/2008-4toc.html
Once Libri issues are a year old they are free. Newly free online is vol 57 (4), which includes:
Austria, J. (2007) "Developing Evaluation Criteria for Podcasts." Libri, 57 (4), 179-272. "The purpose of this study is to determine whether or not evaluation criteria used to assess print material transfer to podcasts. The author surveyed eleven library graduate school students and one library graduate professor over a four-week period. Respondents listened to either Nature Podcast or Science Talk and filled out a two-part questionnaire. Analysis of the data demonstrated respondents experienced difficulty in assessing audience, bias/point of view, scope/coverage, and accuracy in podcasts using print evaluation criteria. The results of this study indicate additional research is needed to clearly define evaluation criteria for podcasts. "
http://www.librijournal.org/pdf/2007-4pp179-207.pdf
Photo by Sheila Webber: Festive doors, Blackheath, January 2009

Online course about online teaching

An online course for academic and related staff (including librarians) is Online Education & Training, run by the Institute of Education, University of London, UK. "The course deals with general issues of teaching online including social networking, with regular practical tasks, and has a choice of optional topics on using the internet to enhance internet teaching." It next starts on 9th March and is a 10 week study course. More information about the course at http://www.ioe.ac.uk/english/OET.htm

i3 Call for papers

The second Information: Interactions and Impact (i³) International Conference takes place at The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, Scotland on 22-25 June 2009. There is a call for papers which closes on 6 February and conference registration starts on 19 January. "i3 is concerned with the quality and effectiveness of the interaction between people and information and how this interaction can bring about change in individuals, organisations, communities and society. The conference will look beyond the issues of use and accessibility of technology to questions about the way people interact with the information and knowledge content of today's systems and services, and how this might ultimately affect the impact of that information on individuals, organisations and communities."
Key themes are: quality / effectiveness of user/information interactions (e.g.
information literacy); patterns of information behaviour in different contexts; impact of information or information services on people, organisations, communities and society (e.g. social, learning, cultural and economic outcomes of engagement with information); more effective decision making.
The website is at http://www.i3conference2009.org.uk/and info on the call for papers at http://www.i3conference2009.org.uk/call09.htm

Photo by Sheila Webber: Door, Blackheath, Jan 2009

LOEX registration opens 6 February

The US information literacy conference, LOEX, opens for registration on February 6th. It apparently sells out more or less at once, so you need to be at your keyboard at 1pm EST (I think that is 6pm UK time) and preferably already a LOEX member to have a chance of a place. It is April 30- May 2, 2009 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. http://www.loexconference.org/
registration.html
Photo by Sheila Webber: Door, Blackheath, Jan 2009

LILAC registration

Early bird registration for the LILAC conference is available until 30 January 2009. LILAC is the UK's information literacy conference, this year taking place in Cardiff, Wales, 30 March-1 April. The programme will be announced later this month: it will include a symposium on Second Life & information literacy that I will be doing with colleagues from Sheffield, St Andrews and Edinburgh universities. http://www.lilacconference.com/dw/2009/register/index.php
Photo by Sheila Webber: tree, Blackheath, Jan 2009

Return to blogging

I am not yet fully recovered from the appendix operation, and am not back at work yet, but I'm starting to feel better - so I will resume information literacy blogging tomorrow! Since I have only been out of the house so far to go to visit the nurse and to walk a few blocks, my photos for the next week or so will be "Xmas wreaths and winter trees in and around Couthurst Road" plus this one of a local cat on a roof.