Thursday, March 12, 2009

Visit from Scottish Information Literacy Project

Today Dr John Crawford and Christine Irving (pictured), of the Scottish Information Literacy Project, visited my Department. They gave a seminar for our Information Literacy Research module (which is an optional module I lead, available on our Masters programmes). They also gave a research presentation to other staff and students, as part of the Centre for Information Literacy Research series. In both sessions they gave an insight into the development of the project and of the Scottish Information Literacy Framework, and described their valuable research into workplace information literacy. I have blogged their articles etc. as they came out, so I will just mention the home page of their project http://www.caledonian.ac.uk/ils/ and one of the things they mentioned, the Royal Society of Arts' (RSA) Opening Minds project.

This has been going for a number of years, so I imagine those in the UK schools sector will be familiar with it. Opening Minds "aims to help schools to provide young people with the real world skills or competencies they need to thrive in the real world. It is a broad framework through which schools can deliver the content of the national curriculum in a creative and flexible way so that young people leave school able to thrive in and to shape the real world. .... It is based on five sets of competencies, including Citizenship, Learning, Managing Information, Managing Situations and Relating to People". "Managing Information" is essentially Information Literacy (rather than Information Management), so the studennt should have "developed a range of techniques for accessing, evaluating and differentiating information and have learned how to analyse, synthesise and apply them; understood the importance of reflecting and applying critical judgement, and have learned how to do so."
http://www.thersa.org/projects/education/opening-minds

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