New articles: News literacy; Media literacy; Fact checking; Disinformation

The latest issue of the open-access Journal of Media Literacy Education (volume 18 no.1) comprises:
- Building resilience: The influence of the format on the effectiveness of news literacy messages by Patrick F. A. van Erkel, Peter Van Aelst, David N. Hopmann, Claes H. de Vreese, and Joren Van Nieuwenborgh
- Promoting News Literacy with epistemological beliefs, IFLA checklist and AI: Insights from a teacher training program in Italy by Flavio Manganello
- Don’t tell me how to fact-check; show me, and let me try! A media literacy intervention with sixth-graders by Thomas Nygren and Carl-Anton Werner Axelsson
- Productive Disruptions: An equity oriented framework for civic media literacy in the digital era by Carlos Jimenez, Lynn Schofield Clark, and Johnny Ramirez
- The Creative Participation pedagogical approach to media literacy education by Amanda Levido
- Teacher reflections on media and information literacy in Vietnamese K-12 schools: Current practices, challenges, and pathways for improvement by Tinh T.T Le, Minh Tran, Anh Dương, Huong T. Pham, Vy Tran, and Daniel Jackson
- From Y to Z: A cross-generational examination of new media literacy and online information searching strategy by Taibe Kulaksız, Ali Geriş, and Sena Özşirin
- From consumers to creators: Social media information literacy of university students by Thuy Thanh Bui, Quyen Trang Mai Nguyen, Tu Thi Thanh Nguyen, and Minh Cao Luu
- Leveraging critical social media literacy to safeguard youth against violent radicalization and extremism by Muhammad Akram, Adeela Arshad-Ayaz, and Muhammad Ayaz Naseem
- Didactic aspects of education of primary teachers with a focus on strengthening their media literacy and fighting disinformation. Experience from the Czech Republic by Kamil Kopecký and Veronika Krejčí
Go to https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/jmle/vol18/iss1/
Photo by Sheila Webber: border at the botanics, June 2026

Media Literacy Interactively and for All #ECIL2023

Pam McKinney blogging from day 3 of the ECIL conference. [Due to wifi issues at the conference we will post some liveblogs retrospectively!] Kristy Paulova from Czech university of Life Sciences Led this presentation.Some people still believe that the moon landings are fake, and that there are aliens living on the dark side of the moon. But the people in the audience did not believe these conspiracy theories.
We live in a world of fake news, and we will all know people who believe it. 10% of the Czech population regularly consume conspiracy web sites, and 10% support the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Chain emails are used to spread misinformation. Czech libraries have a range of media literacy training opportunities, and the university of life sciences is ready to help develop them further.
The main target groups are seniors and high school students. The courses should be completely free, easy to use and partially in English. MOOCs were created, as well as resources for teachers and librarians. 6 video-based courses for seniors were created, focusing on the history of mass media, critical thinking, manipulation in the media, and fake news. People would watch the video and then answer questions on it. It was hard to create the videos, it isn’t everyone’s preferred activity.
The course for high school students focused on traditional and new media, and critical media on the future books system that held the videos and interactive exercises. They also created an escape game, on the theme of “AI tries to take over the world”. They used an AI to generate fake images and videos and students were asked to spot the fakes. They have had some positive feedback already from students. The abstract for this talk is on this page (scroll down)
Photo by Pam McKinney

Design Thinking; Citation styles #ECIL2023

As my final session at ECIL I attended and liveblog Information Literacy in the Design Thinking process – A Preliminary Research was presented by Dorota Rak (Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland). She identified that design thinking can be seen as a mindset, a methodology or a problem solving philosophy. Rak say that it was “a manifestation of collective intelligence” where students are designers and also use innovative designs. There are three aspects – the institutional area, the operational area (e.g. with tools supporting the design thinking process) and the didactic area. Rak said that librarians had recognised the value of integrating DT, that DT can be a driver of information behaviour, and also that DT can be used to develop practice and learning. Rak identified that IL was “a vauable competency for nuturing social capital”. 
The research problems that Rak addressed were – what information competencies do students need for DT; what tools do they need; what skills do they need. Data was collected through a questionnaire administered to university students and also examination of the literature. The majority of the respondents had a good understanding of both “Information Literacy” and “Design Thinking”. The majority also were able to define their information needs across the DT process. However, some stages were seen as more difficult and in more need of support.
The students were asked how useful they found obtained information across the stages of the Design Thinking process. There were differencies across the stages and also between students on the 2 different programmes surveyed. There were also differences in terms of organising information, and use of different tools. Conclusions included designing a curriculum that effectively integrated information management principles with the dynamic iterative nature of DT. 

The second presentation was “Who Cares?” Defining Citation Style in Scholarly Journals from Pavla Vizváry (Masaryk University, Czech Republic) and Vincas Grigas (Vilnius University, Lithuania). Grigas started by identifying that there are more citation styles (10 thousand) than species of birds! The identified problem is that there are all these styles, you have to follow a style strictly in published journals, people are not expert in all styles, so so authors make mistakes. This is a problem as it’s a burden to authors, but inconsistency makes it more difficult to find articles etc. Their aim was to identify citation styles required by journals in SCOPUS. They had questions such as how cleraly the journals express their requirement. They analysed 270 journals, looking also for types of mistake in citation. They were aiming to understand how different stakeholders (e.g. authors, publishers) are affected. Also they used cognitive load theory – worries about formatting can divert energy from the main task of writing.
Vizváry took over to return to the question of “Who cares”? The answer included publishers, editors, librarians, authors and teachers. Introducing SCOPUS, they looked at Lithuanian and Czech journals and also sampled journals published in other countries, comparing their statistics (such as H index). From this statistical point of view the Czech and Lithuanian journals were similar to each other, but had a slightly different profile to the international sample. Vizváry also noted that there were more English-only journals published in Lithuania and Czech Republic than national language ones, and there were differences in the patterns of open publishing. Moving on to differences in form of intext references (numbers or author names) there were significant differences by subject, and this was more important than differences from country to country.
The most common journal reference style is, sadly, “unnamed” i.e. they just give examples, next was APA. They noted that the ISO format was strong in the Czech Republic, but not elsewhere. In social sciences APA was named a lot, but “unnamed” was the most common in some subjects. 84.4% of journals give example references (others tend to link to the style’s website). They also noted that not all journals include DOIs in their reference styles. There was a question afterwards about whether the “unnamed” styles were actually specific styles, and the authors said that they’d tried some unnamed styles in ChatGPT and it had said in each case that it was like style X, but with these differences. They were thinking of doing more of this ChatGPT-aided diagnosis.

Photo by Sheila Webber: sleepy pigeons in Krakow

Information Literacy Vis-a-Vis Epidemic of Distrust: Sheila liveblogs from #ecil2017

I haven't blogged much today because I was part of a panel this morning at the ECIL conference: Pam blogged something about that, and I will blog the slides later. However I just attended an interesting session (that Pam may blog too!) Information Literacy Vis-a-Vis Epidemic of Distrust from Helena Lipková (presenter), Hana Landova, and Adela Jarolimkova
In the Czech Republic, the issue of fake news is recognised at the government level (with this country and other perceiving a barrage of misinformation coming from another country). They decided to do an analysis of the literature, searching for items published 2007-2017 in library and information databases. 555 unique items realting to trust and reliability of information sources were discovered. They used a three level coding structure, based on examining abstracts (mostly) or full text, with the aid of Atlas/TI text analysis software.
One coding categories related to "Trust in relation to an object, a person or an institution". They found no articles about trust of librarians or libraries (but there were some about trust of other professions, such as a doctor). There is a lot of research about trust in online shopping, often discussed in relation to customer satisfaction or technology adoption.
A further major category was "Trust construction". Again there were many article related to online shopping, marketing, and also construction trust in social media. In terms of the category "Trust in information sources" there was a dominance of articles about trust in online sources, but little on trust in traditional media. Another dominent theme in this category was trust in health information.
In conclusion: they identified research gaps as regards: trust in librarians, trustworthiness of libraries, trust in traditional media (the speaker noted that there could be national/ cultural differences), violation of trust (there is little on reconciliation after trust has been impaired).
Photo by Sheila Webber: Brasserie du Sellon, Saint Malo

Vitenamese immigrants; international workshops; Street lighting industry; Open access book on infolit in Portuguese: Sheila blogs from #ecil2017

This morning I presented on behalf of Dr Batool, a former PhD student, in a pecha kucha session at the European Conference on Information Literacy in Saint-Malo, France. I will blog this separately, but are some notes on other presentations in the session (the slide is from the first talk):

Dominant Traits of the Information Behavior of Vietnamese Immigrants in the Czech Republic: Influences on Building Their Information Landscapes – Preliminary Paper from Petra Cernohlavkova (presenter) and Helena Lipková
Vietnamese have migrated for various reasons to many countries, and in the Czech republic they are concentrated particularly in cities. The extent of integration (contact) depends on the age of both Vietnamese and Czechs (e.g. older people mostly encounter in shops as seller/customer). Because incoming Vietnamese may have low literacy and Czech language skills, and need to earn money, they are liable to exploitation. Collective coping strategies are important to them. Vietnamese will use personal networks rather than social media etc. which they have not used in Vietnam (see slide), and they don't use libraries, and distrust services provided for free (as they might have had poor experiences with NGOs). She recommended a closer cooperation between libraries and NGOs to help introduce the Vietnamese to the new information landscape.

Information Literacy for Scientific Organizations: Progress by International Co-operation from Paul Nieuwenhuysen
"Scientific organisations" included, here, universities: the main focus is on international cooperation (between the host country here, Belgium, and other countries). They aim to bring together experts from different (mainly developing) countries. They aim to confront the experts witheach others' views to surface problems, challenges, hopes and expectations. There have been training programmes of a few months, hosted at Belgian universities, with the target group young information professionals mainly from Africa, Asia and Latin America. There are also workshops so far in India and the Philippines. There is some material from the author e.g. here and here

Information Literacy in Portuguese University Context: a Necessary Intervention by Carlos Lopes, Tatiana Sanches (presenter), Maria da Luz Antunes, Isabel Andrade, Julio Alonso Arevalo
They had noted that not everyone had access to the new forms of creation and publishing (so had difficulty building digital identities); also the large flow of information; and the need to adapt to new ways of interacting, knowing and thinking. Library professionals in Portugal had posed themselves the question of how to address these issues. They identified two goals: reaffirming the importance of IL/transversal competencies amongst university colleagues, and the second developing librarian skills. They have responded by developing a book: chapters include an infolit self-evaluation framework, a smmary of existing models, best practice examples, material relatting to intergration of IL in the curriculum, and current and future trends/issues. This is the first open access book on information literacy in Portuguese. The book is at http://repositorio.ispa.pt/handle/10400.12/5067

Information Literacy in Street Lighting Industry: Content curation with Scoop.it by Gilbert Charles Faure
This was characterised as a niche industry with a major global impact. There are tech innovations, but also e.g. environmental concerns. Knowledge management and infolit is rather poor in these companies. Informal communications, product and industry publications etc. are important. Scoop.it is being used here as a curation tool for knowledge management. Content hubs have been created related to the Lighting industry and curated for four years. There can be a watch on technical aspects (e.g. LEDs, solar power) and societal aspects (e.g. light pollution, effect on ecology). The speaker also highlighted the topic of lighting in art - that lighting may be installed as an art work (so serving a dual purpose). He noted that he collaborated with others to share resources, both companies and agencies.

Storytelling for reference and information #wlic2017

At the 2017 World Library and Information Conference in Wroclaw, Poland I attended yesterday a session on Storytelling for Sustainability and Solidarity - Reference and Information Services. The photo is of one of the dwarf statues that are a feature in Wroclaw: I'm not sure if she's telling a story or casting a spell.
The WLIC session was chaired by Marydee Ojala, and I'll say something about each of the papers. It started with an introduction to storytelling from Erik Boekesteijn (National Library of the Netherlands), which I have to confess I missed. However I discovered this article in which he talks about using stories in libraries:
Boekesteijn, E. (2008). Discover Innovations at DOK, Holland’s 'Library Concept Center'. Marketing Library Services, 22(2). http://www.infotoday.com/MLS/mar08/Boekesteijn.shtml
and this short interview with him Connecting people to stories with library innovation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH529HcXeeU I
n fact there is loads on storytelling for librarians eg this and this.
However, I did hear the rest of the talks! Most of them had already deposited full text papers in the IFLA library, and I'll link to those.

Raymond Pun (Fresno State University, United States) gave a talk Telling First Year Experience: Visual Techniques to Assess First Year Students and Their Information Seeking Behaviors (coauthored with Yujin Hong (Kyung Hee University, Republic of Korea) and Minsun Kim (Sogang University, Republic of Korea). Their strategies included using photovoice with first year students. photovoice means asking people to take photos on the topic you are interested in, for example you might say "take photos of places, things etc. that help you write your essay". You then use the photos as a focus for discussing the topic with the students. This can give you insight into their world and narrative. I will add (from a talk I attended at another conference) that you also need to brief the students about the ethics of taking photos (in particular asking people's permission to take photos).
Ray talked about getting students to share on instagram etc. and this use of social media being a good way to share and get feedback/reaction. He also talked about ethno-mapping, i.e. using mapping as a way to understand people's conceptions of something. For example, you could ask students to draw a map of the library or a picture of the library website. From that, you can get an idea of how much and what they use, and possibly how they feel about it too. His library had drawn on the research they had done to develop a video 10 Things You Should Know About the Henry Madden Library https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwyBTJK6cJs

The full paper is available here: http://library.ifla.org/1634/1/122-pun-en.pdf

The next paper I heard was: Crisis of Professional Identity or Challenge for Personal Development : My Story as a Reference and User Services Librarian. Maja Krulić Gačan talked about how they had used marketing strategies to develop services in her library to meet users needs (Public Library "Fran Galovic" Koprivnica, Croatia). For example, she talked about services for babies and parents, and campaigns using social media. The paper is here: http://library.ifla.org/1638/1/122-krulic-en.pdf

This was followed by Before and Beyond Embedding: A Reference Fable from the National Library of Technology in Prague authored by Martin Stehlik, Sasha Skenderija and Tomas Houdek.
Their initiative was triggered by an impressive new library building: on the one hand the new building was an apparent success, but there was a disconnect with academic life. The librarians identified a narrative disconnect, which included library-centred narratives, librarians' lack of experience with research environments and low subject knowledge, and low expectations of reference services.
By identifying different discourses, they aimed to get into the academic narrative.To pull out a key sentence from their paper "we now present our services using vocabulary and messages that make more sense to our users, employing both “small” narratives surrounding individual user tasks (need help writing your thesis?) to “grand” or “meta” narratives regarding fundamental values and beliefs shared within academia (e.g., research integrity)". The slide includes an interesting thought, that to say you are "embedded" implies that you are are still an outside observer. The full paper is here, and it gives numerous concrete examples: http://library.ifla.org/1636/1/122-skenderija-en.pdf They also played this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXCB2ZZgiRI

The final paper in the session was Why Horror Stories Don’t Lead to Nightmares, by Helen Morgan and Heather Todd (The University of Queensland Library, Australia). They had been trying to find ways to make researchers interested in the rather dry subject of Research Data Management. They had done this by collecting real-life horror stories of people losing their research data (e.g. losing the data stick; having your computer lost in a fire) and having the research rejected because they couldn't produce the raw research data. They started with examples from elsewhere, but now have stories from within the University of Queensland, and found some senior researchers very helpful in sharing stories. This has indeed helped to make researchers more engaged with the issue.

IL at the Czech Technical University & California State University

The October issue of the new open access journal Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Libraries includes:
- Vera Pilecka and Ludmila Ticha: Improving the information literacy at the Czech Technical University in Prague: support of study and research (pp 155-162)
- Aline Soules: Is It Really on the Web and What Does That Mean for Instruction and Reference? (pp 177-183)[she is based at California State University]
At time of writing the journal website did not seem totally stable: if you can't get the link immediately then try again later. http://www.qqml.net/October_issue.html
Photo by Sheila webber: Winter tree, central London, December 2013

NAKLIV (National Cluster of Information Literacy) Czech project

The NAKLIV (National Cluster of Information Literacy) project aims to "establish informal partnership of institutions which are dealing with information literacy and which decided to gain profits from mutual cooperation. As the output of the project the modern environment for communication and education of non-pedagogical employees (librarians), academic employees and graduants. The effective cooperation will be supported, the sharing of materials is expected and so is the exchange of knowledge between cooperating institutions.  This includes running seminars and workshops, and creating and sharing material." The partner universities are: Masarykova univerzita (leader); Mendelova univerzita; Moravská zemská knihovna; Obchodní akademie, SOŠK A VOŠKISS; Slezská univerzita v Opavě; Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci; Univerzita Karlova v Praze; Vysoké učení technické v Brně.
The main website is: http://www.nakliv.cz/
If you can speak Czech (there is only a basic explanation of the project in English), there is useful material already e.g. a guide to various web-based tools and applications, in Czech, dated 2011 and uploaded in February 2012.
Photo by Sheila Webber: poppy after rain, July 2012, Sheffield

Czech IL group: IVIG

Yesterday I attended the annual seminar of IVIG (Odborná komise pro informační vzdělávání a informační gramotnost na vysokých školách: Information Education and Information Literacy working Group): It is a group of ALCU (The Association of Libraries of Czech Universities). In this post I will mention something about IVIG itself. The Czech for information literacy is Informační gramotnost. They carry out a survey about information literacy in Czech universities every two years and have other strategic actvities.
The main website is here http://www.ivig.cz/index.html: mostly it is in Czech, but if you look at the list of past seminars you will see that one or two of the powerpoints from previous years are in English (you only find those in the full Czech version of the website). They have held an annual seminar for nine years, and in recent years they have had a theme for each seminar (this year it was "new technologies".
Also on the Czech website I will pick out the list of links to definitions, standards and projects worldwide: http://www.ivig.cz/odkazy.html. Obviously if you can speak Czech there is lots more there, such as the list of publications, and full text reports and minutes and presentations.
The home for the reduced size English version is here: http://www.ivig.cz/e-index.html. Particularly interesting is the English-language document Information education strategy at Universities of the Czech Republic (published 2008) which reviews the situation and makes recommendations.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Prague, May 2010.

Department creating their own "library"

Another snippet from the INFORUM conference: Antonie Doležalová, University of Economics, Prague - Faculty of Public Administration, Czech Republic talked about “A Little Bit Different Seminar: To Be His Own Librarian”. (Links to paper and presentation (in Czech) and English abstract at http://www.inforum.cz/proceedings/2010/62)
This presentation was in Czech, and I listened to simultaneous translation, so this is only a short summary. This described a project where the Economics Department at the university put material online at http://www.bibliothecaeconomica.cz/ with various kinds of material. They were digitising the material and also “cataloguing” it though I think the library intervened a little in terms of improving keywords etc. It seemed interesting in terms of an academic department and a library cooperating, with useful new material being added to the collection and using the subject expertise of the staff and students in the Department. Also it gave some opportunity (I think) for on-the-spot information literacy education, in terms of legal issues to do with publishing information, and issues of findability.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Transport, Prague, May 2010

Inflow

Keeping to a Czech theme, the annual meeting on information literacy in the Czech Republic is the IVIG conference. The next IVIG conference is on 23rd September in Prague with a theme of using technologies for learning (I have been invited ro talk about my experiences teaching using Second Life). There is a report on the 2009 IVIG conference (in Czech):
Jankovská, B. (2009) "IVIG 2009 – Informační vzdělávání a informační gramotnost v teorii a praxi vzdělávacích institucí". Inflow. 2 (10) http://www.inflow.cz/ivig-2009
-informacni-vzdelavani-informacni
-gramotnost-v-teorii-praxi-vzdelavacich
-instituci Inflow seems an excellent publication (if you can read Czech): its home page is at http://www.inflow.cz/ and as well as the regular "journal" it has a very active blog http://www.inflow.cz/blog, a facebook page and all the other things you expect of a modern publication ;-)
Photo by Sheila Webber: Peacocks only allowed, Prague, May 2010

Information Literacy at the cross-road of Education and Information Policies in Europe

A new book: Basili, C. (Ed) (2008) Information Literacy at the cross-road of Education and Information Policies in Europe. Rome: CNR. (ISBN: 978-88-8080-096-5)
Chapters are: Information and education policies in Europe: key factors: influencing information literacy academic policies in Europe (Basili); Theorems of Information Literacy (Basili); Development of information-related Competencies in European ODL Institutions (Virkus); Information literacy programmes in higher education in the Czech Republic: The path of theory and practice (Landová et al); France: the courage to say "Documentation" (Reggiani); Information literacy activities in Germany between the Bologna process and the web 2.0 (Hapke); Joined Planning and Development - Customized Solutions: the North-Rhine-Westphalian Network on Information literacy (Nilges); Information literacy as National Assets: Individual and Cooperative Activities (Katsirikou); Information literacy education of pupils and students in Poland - diagnosis of the educational situation (Cisek et al); Information literacy and Romanian Higher Education System (Rapeanu); The European Area of Higher Education (EAHE), Information literacy and Learning & Research Resource Centers: a triangle of excellence for the development of library services in Spanish universities (Cuevas Cerveró & Vives i Gràcia); Information literacy from the learner's perspective: a UK study (Andretta)
Main information is here: http://www.cnr.it/sitocnr/Iservizi/Pubblicazioni/
Catalogopubblicazioni/Catalogo.html?voce=13&id=612
The price is 20 Euro and the order page is here:
http://www.cnr.it/sitocnr/Iservizi/Pubblicazioni/
Catalogopubblicazioni/ComeAcquistare.html (unfortunately it is payment by bank transfer)