Information safety and citizen science: Sheila liveblogs from #ecil2017

Another presentation at the European Conference on Information Literacy is Integrating Citizen Science Elements into the Information Safety Lessons from Kristýna Kalmárová. She started by identifying the need for information safety education, and then talked about different ways to define and categorise citizen science. A lesson plan was drawn up so learner-citizens could understand basic concepts of information safety and apply them in their own lives, and their final goal was to gain some basic methodological literacy competences. The plan is four 4 hours, in a space that has computers and it is designed for small groups of citizens, to be implemented in public libraries.
The 1st lesson includes a pretest and introduction to research theory. The second has analysis of questionnaires (that have been completed by other library users, about information safety) and recording results. The third lesson is analysis and interpretation of results. Finally, there is a post test and discussion about their own choices and behaviour.
So, for example, the goal of lesson 3 is to understand the processes behind drawing conclusions from data, and assess their own ideas from a researcher perspective. By this means, the speaker hopes to engage higher cognitive processes - understanding and critiquing, not just rote learning and remembering. This class is about to be prototyped.
This reminds me of an exercise I used to do in an undergraduate research methods class, where students proposed questions about students' information behaviour, filled in a questionnaire compiled from the questions (before the class) and then analysed the questionnaire in groups the following week. This also could lead to discussion about their own information behaviour. I think it is a nice idea to use this in a wider citizenship context.
Photo by Sheila Webber, Saint-Malo, Sept 2017