Pam McKinney here live blogging from the final day of the ECIL conference. This presentation from Yelizaveta Kamilobva and Zhuldyz Orazymbetova from Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan is a country in Central Asia, and it is the 9th largest by area in the world. Astana is the capital city and is home to 19 million people.
There is a lack of state level standards for information literacy, and a deficit of materials in the Kazakh language. Materials that do exist, but they are often irrelevant to local user needs. These problems led to the creation of this social project “educated generation” to educate school children who will be the university students of the future. There was a small budget, but they tried to use it all wisely to support participating librarians. The aim of the project was to develop Media and information literacy skills in school librarians in Kazakhstan. A project team of 7 librarians, 2 experts and 3 partners was formed in October 2021, and the project began, it was completed in November 2022. The pandemic made it apparent that many children lacked digital literacy, and this was an important problem to solve for the project. 417 librarians registered for the programme, and in the end 365 librarians and 2500 children were trained, some librarians had issues connecting online for the workshops. 24 online and face-to-face workshops took place (majority online). The training materials and media and information literacy manual (180 pages) were provided online in Kazakh and Russian, to make them accessible to everyone.
In order to create the training materials they did a preliminary survey of librarians to understand their knowledge needs. They asked how confident librarians were with various aspects of media and information literacy, for example could they create graphics, how confident they feel in information search. The respondents said they are confident, but their responses revealed that their confidence was maybe misplaced. Based on these results a MIL training programme was created. Module 1 featured an introduction to MIL, module 2 featured specific competencies e.g. searching for information, evaluating information and the ethical use of information. Module 3 focused on the development and usage of media and information content, including creating interactive quizzes and tools, creating presentation and online graphics, and using Microsoft office and Google services. As part of the “homework” participants had to create their own MIL training event.
The MIL manual was based on the training programme, and it contained really practical guidance on how to create MIL training for children. School librarians then ran training sessions in collaboration with the project team, and were supported to develop engaging training materials. A post training evaluation survey was used to identify the 10 best librarians, who were then invited to the university for enhanced training, and their travel and stay was paid for out of the project funds. Another function of the project was to tray to break some of the typical stereotypes of librarians by encouraging them to create modern dynamic video content.
Academic librarians are not treated as faculty members, but they are trying to change this perception and be recognised as expert teachers. The project team won a university teaching award this year for their work on this project.
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