A progress report from the American Project Information Literacy is available at http://projectinfolit.org/progress/ It is called Finding context: what today’s College Students say about conducting research in the Digital Age and has findings from group discussions with 86 students coming from 7 US colleges or universities. It is talking about "those activities that commence upon receiving an assignment and continue through collecting research resources until the writing of the final paper." rather than actual research.
They asked students about everyday iunformation seeking as well as information seeking for academic work. They identify four types of context that the students need to have in order to work better: "Big picture" (i.e. the subject background); "Language" (jargon etc.); "Situational" (e.g. what is wanted from an assignment) and "Information Gathering" (understanding how to find their way round relevant sources). I think that a lot of this ties in with existing information behaviour research, but it will be interesting to see whether the Project Information Literacy material gets wider coverage.
Photo by Sheila Webber: warming homemade soup, Feb 2009
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