Report from #ckviii day 1!

My colleague Pam McKinney is supplying me with reports and pictures from the Creating Knowledge conference in Reykjavik. Here's her report on day 1!

"It is really exciting to be here in Reykjavik for the 9th nordinfolit information literacy conference. The theme of the conference is Practices, goals and visions for information literacy in higher education, and there is a truly international set of delegates and presenters a and I'm really proud to be representing the university of Sheffield information school. The opening keynote was given by Anneke Dirkx from Leiden University library in the Netherlands. Anneke gave a critical overview of the ACRL information literacy standards, which have widely used in the Netherlands, the new ACRL IL framework, which is still in development. The new framework reflect changing conceptions of information literacy, but universities are still determining if the framework will be as useful for them as it is more conceptual and less practical. She then went on to look at the SCONUL seven pillars model and how this has been mapped onto the vitae researcher development framework. This framework is more popular with the research led institutions in the Netherlands as it speaks to them from a researcher standpoint but in more practically oriented institutions it is less popular. It was interesting to reflect on the differing benefits and challenges of applying these models and frameworks in different contexts, and hear how they can be applied in a practical way."

"Employing students as "peer inquiry specialists" at UCLA was the focus of the presentation from Danielle Salomon, Julia Glassman and Simon Lee. It was interesting how much their positive experience of employing slightly higher level students to support the IL development of new students mirrored the experiences of project leaders in the CILASS projects (Centre for Inquiry Based Learning in the Arts and Social Sciences). They also spoke about The need for librarians to work in partnership not just with academics but also other professional groups in the university and many presentations from Gothenberg university, University College Norway, Copenhagen Business School and University of Alaska Anchorage reflected this theme. It seems that these collaborations are key to embedding IL in students' learning experiences and in making IL an integral part of curricula.

"The second keynote speaker was Alison Head from the University of Washington who gave an overview of the project information literacy research that has taken place in the US over the last 9 years. One of the striking features for me about Alison's presentation was the finding that students seem fairly confident with searching for information, but struggle with defining and narrowing a topic in order to start a search. This then needs to be addressed with IL teaching and reflects a change in emphasis from traditional approaches."
Pam has already sent me a few more reports, so I will post more from her today and tomorrow
Photos by Pam McKinney: Icelandic water, and the conference venue, June 2016