LTEA conference: evlaution of information resources

Last week I was at the Learning Through Enquiry Alliance conference in Reading. Helen Hathaway and Sally Smith (Information Skills Coordinator & Learning Support Coordinator, at the University of Reading) talked about The Edge of reason supporting students in the critical evaluation of information resources.

Helen started by explaining that at Reading University there is a liaison librarian for each school, who has responsibility for teaching Information Literacy. She then introduced the SCONUL 7 Pillars model of information literacy, which will be familiar to many readers, and mentioned challenges in students knowing what they need to know, and identifying the gaps in their knowledge.

She handed over to Sally to discuss the issue of information evlauation. Sally used the metaphor of shopping in a cheapo market vs. John Lewis (a reputable department store) and linked it with the need to raise awareness during the students' transition from school to university. As well as class size increasing, the size and complexity of the library also increases, so it is easy to see how students might become overwhelmed. They do organise visits for schools to library, including a quiz.

Students studying English are asked to think of reasons why they need the library, and ideas include needing to compare your views with those of credible authors. In another case, in Chemistry, students have to find one site they would recommend and one site they would not, with reasons, and they use Delicious to share. What was difficult was to judge was the impact in the modules, since the librarians would not see the work that the students have done: feedback from academic staff was valuable in this context.

Helen and Sally mentioned a wide range of support and training, including the online Cyberlibrary module - which is at http://www.reading.ac.uk/library/finding-info/training/lib-cyberlibrary.aspx but you need to be registered at Reading University to use it.

At the end of the session Helen and Sally circulated mini questionnaires and asked people to chat in pairs or threes to identify ways in which librarians could be more effectively involved in information literacy in the curriculum. A number of groups handed back sheets before they left, so this seemed a good way to gather ideas even though there wasn't much time left at the end (most of the presentation sessions at this conference were only half an hour)

I also noted a reference to the Thanks Wikopedia graduation t-shirt ;-) http://www.flickr.com/photos/techfever/3512595402/

Photo by Sheila Webber: Friendship Bridge at Reading University, July 2009.

LTEA conference: Information Literacy at Sheffield

Last week I was at the Learning Through Enquiry Alliance conference in Reading.

Vicky Grant and Maria Mawson (Sheffield University Library, pictured right) presented a paper Information rich and knowledge poor? Information literacy as a core asset for inquiry based learning (IBL).
Firstly Vicky sketched out the information rich world and highlighted that the library is communicating in many different ways e.g. via Twitter, blogs, Facebook. She identified librarians as teachers of information literacy, emphasising that way that they do things has changed although the role remains. Vicky showed how their work as librarians links in with the Sheffield Graduate Attributes, and other institutional skills-based developments e.g. TASH and Sheffield University's focus on Inquiry Based Learning.
Maria took over and started by talking about McGuinness (2007) and she went on to talk about the IBL prject Developing a library community for IBL 2007-8 which was a development series that took place over a number of months, with lunchtime sessions that the librarians participated in to develop their ideas and practice of IBL.
Then she talked about the way in which IL was integrated into a core module Understanding Law, that is taken by several hundred students each year. An electronic workbook was developed, and there was collaboration between the Law School and the librarians in developing the material. As a support mechanism, a discussion board is very actively used - with thousands of posts each year. Sudents are encouraged to answer each others' questions, but Maria is also part of the team that monitors postings and answering ones where she can help. Thus librarians are visible as team members from the start of the law degree. There is a case study here: http://www.shef.ac.uk/cilass/cases/ul1.html (there are links to articles on the right of this page)
Vicky resumed to talk about her work in the medical school. She had been involved in a less effective way introducing the library early on. Now she gets engaged early on, and Vicky has a joint lecture with an academic, talking about medical evidence, which is followed up by a workshop that helps students identify good evidence for a coursework assignment. At the end Maria also mentioned work with MBA students that had again moved away from the traditional model.

LTEA conference: academic literacy

Here is another report from the Learning Through Enquiry Alliance conference in Reading 14th-15th July.

Cathy Burnett, Fufy Demisse, Mary Haynes and Sheila Sharpe (Sheffield Hallam University) presented "Now I feel like I'm really at University": using a community of enquiry approach to promote enagement and academic literacy amongst undergraduate students.
The approach they used was adopting the idea of "philosophy for children in schools", feeling it was actually useful for their grown-up students (trainee teachers). The idea is to probe concepts (e.g. "friendship" or "beauty"), encouraging children to form and chose questions for discussion. Underlying the approach are the principles: Critical, Creative, Collaborative and Caring (the 4Cs): there is a society to support this approach SAPERE.
The role of the tutor is to set ground rules and to encourage the "4Cs" in discussion (so students ask critical questions, solve problems collaboratively, are creative in approaching the questions, and caring with each other).The role of students is to pose questions, chose questions and offer suggestions and justify viewpoints using the 4Cs.
The presenters then talked about using it in teacher training at Sheffield Hallam University. At the time celebrity chef Jamie Oliver was doing one of his meals investigations in Rotherham (which is near Sheffield and some students came from there). The general issue of children and junk food was proposed as a topic, then students had to generate a number of possible questions in the first stage, and choose between the possible questions to determine the one they would debate in depth. The question "Is this child abuse?" (i.e. giving them junk food) was chosen.
Ranging through the discussion were issues to do with the value of fast food and it led to debate about what could be done about these issues in the actual school curriculum (i.e. the curriculum the students would in future be contributing to).
Students commented on the seating format (in a circle) and the process structure, as enabling more people to feel it was OK to contribute without anxiety. There was also an interaction between what happened in this seminar and what happened outside: students felt they were learning more about each other as developing professionals and people. Students also noticed the ownership they had of the process, finding information themselves and presenting it to each other (rather than relying on the teacher givingthem material). The multiple perspectives encouraged them to think critically about their own perspective. Therefore this exercise seemed powerful in a number of ways.
If you have sufficient time and control, this seems a good framework for an information literacy exercise, since probing the information need ("what is the question") is prominent, and if information literacy is the focus there could be a particular emphasis on finding and sharing evidence to support your (or other people's) viewpoint.

Photo by Sheila Webber: Pre-conference-dinner - Pimms on the balcony at Henley-on-Thames.

LTEA conference: Using Delicious

A session that I missed at the Learning Through Enquiry Alliance conference in Reading was by a colleague in The Centre for Inquiry Based Learning in the Arts and Social Sciences (CILASS), Jamie Wood. He was talking about using delicious with history students. I have been meaning to link to his PowerPoint on Slideshare about this for a while: so here it is http://www.slideshare.net/cilass.slideshare/
jamie-wood-delicious-050508-presentation

Photo by Sheila Webber: Thames at Henley, conference dinner.

LTEA conference: Phil Race

I have been at the Learning Through Enquiry Alliance conference in Reading. I will provide a few reports.

The keynote today was from Phil Race. He was aiming for us to learn about "7 straightforward factors which underpin successful learning". He posts his main slides on his website at http://www.phil-race.co.uk/ so they will be there soon and there are lots of sets of slides there already.
He did not reveal the 7 factors until the end of his talk, but for people who don't want to read any further they are:
- learning by doing;
- learning from feedback;
- wanting to learn;
- needing to learn;
- making sense of things;
- learning through coaching & explaining teaching;
- learning through assessing: making informed judgements.

He did a post-it exercise, where we had to complete the sentence "Teaching would be much better for me if only I.." and then swap round our post-its and a few people read some out (wanting more time and connecting with/ understanding students were themes). His point was really about the post-its as "non threatening space" for people to express their thoughts.

He then talked about assessment as learning (rather than of learning or for learning). He felt that assessment in Higher Education was "broken": there was strong awareness of what we ought to be doing (and research backing that up) but it doesn't always happen.
Another point was "Timing of feedback is critical", I think in particular criticising people who ask questions in class and don't wait long enough fot answers, or don't stimulate activity to answer the qustions. I must say that I stopped just asking questions like that in class some time ago, since I don't find it terribly productive. Interestingly to me, Phil Race was framing that as getting students to handle this as information and process/communicate it.

In terms of what helped people learn something they were good at: practice, trial and error often emerged as key. This led to Professor Race identifying Inquiry Based Learning as helping people to make mistakes in the right place, at the right time, so they can learn from them.

Two items he recommended at the end of his talk were:
Sadler, D.R. (2009). Indeterminacy in the use of preset criteria for assessment and grading in higher education. Assessment and Evaluation in higher education, 34 (2), 159 - 179
Coffield, F., Moseley, D., Hall, E. and Ecclestone, K. (2004) Learning Styles and Pedagogy in post-16 learning: a systematic and critical review. London: Learning and Skills Research Centre http://www.lsda.org.uk/files/PDF/1543.pdf
Photo by Sheila Webber: Professor Race asked us to put post-its we'd swapped on the wall as we went out, so we did.