LILAC report: Learning literacies through collaborative enquiry #lilac11

Next report from the LILAC (Information Literacy) conference 18-20 April 2011 in London, UK! This next session was Learning literacies through collaborative enquiry; collaborative enquiry through learning literacies. from Jo Ashley, Freya Jarman, Tunde Varga-Atkins and Nedim Hassan (University of Liverpool). This is the abstract. The presenter highlighted:
Beetham, H., McGill, L., & LittleJohn, A. (2009). Thriving in the 21st century: Learning Literacies for the Digital Age (LLiDA project). http://www.academy.gcal.ac.uk/llida/LLiDAReportJune2009.pdf
The issue of a wider range of students - in terms of background and learning styles - was emphasised, as was the change in desired approaches to teaching. I was interested in this session because it mentioned Inquiry Based Learning, which blog readers will know is an approach that I aim for in a good amount of my teaching. I'll do an advert here and link to the website at Sheffield University that is devoted to IBL http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/ibl.
The workshop largely consisted of us working in small groups thinking (for example) of what kind of activities we could plan to address particular learning literacies. I think this material will be made available online later (I will link to it later if it is).
After we had done some groups exercises, the presenter explained what they had done: it involved radically revising a module. The module tutor firstly addressed study skills appropriate to the subject, and then facilitated students creating a wiki. Students had to work in groups to create a resource which would teach the next year's first years students study skills. One issue was that the students did not use all the functions of the wiki without prompting. Learning was supported collaboratively by a team including a librarian and a lecturer. The groups' wikis were summatively assessed (50% of their module mark). Aspects such as use of features (linking etc.), creativity (e.g including pictures and maps, colour) and use of other media (e.g. embedded videos) were considered when marking.