Pecha Kucha session #ECIL2025

 Hi, Pam McKinney here live-blogging from the second day of the ECIL conference. This dedicated session features six Pecha Kucha presentations which each last only 6 minutes, so I will do my best to keep up!

Photo: drawing of a cat and a rainbow on the glass wall of the conference venue (Pam McKinney)

“Make students leaders of their learning” Elena Collina, Paola Rescigno, University of Bologna, Italy

This is a presentation about a course that is offered to all students at the university,  which focuses on creative learning and learning by doing. The class is divided into groups, each group has a teams channel and work together on a research task, then each group must evaluate the work of another group. This is peer-topeer learning is an interactive process, and mirrors peer review in academic publishing. Feedback from students was very positive; they liked working collaboratively and liked the active nature of the learning.

Adapting Infosphère: Leveraging an OER Information Literacy Platform, Miriam Petrilli, Vincenzo Palatella, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland

The project to adapt the infosphere took 4 years. The training team wanted to develop an online self-paced learning object for students to develop competencies in information literacy. Other institutions had used fact sheets, interactive tutorials, videos, etc. The infosphere, an OER, was developed in Montreal, and the team thought it looked perfect for their needs, and seemed better to focus on adapting the resource rather than starting from scratch. The Lausanne team worked closely with colleagues from Montreal to adapt the resource, learning from their experiences They developed a number of improvements to the Infosphere resource to tailor it to their situation. Infosphere is promoted to students and teachers and is integrated into a MOOC. Analytics demonstrate that students access the resource following face-to-face classes, and support their learning. There are 4 sections: prepare to research, research, analyse information and finally citation and referencing.

Citing AI with Zotero: Academic Integrity and Information Literacy Paschalia Terzi Georgetown University in Qatar, Qatar

Zotero is a free, open-access reference management software application that supports citation practice for academic work. It is a program that is downloaded to a computer, and also works on mobile phones, and has a browser extension. It is a research tool, it can work as a personal digital library, it also supports note-taking and collaboration (e.g. for student group work). The team at the university recommends the use of Zotero to support students in avoiding plagiarism. Since the growth of AI, some academic staff have banned the use of AI, some advise cautious use, and some have completely adopted AI use. Students are encouraged to cite their use of AI to be transparent, but how to do this? The team created a workshop to support students to cite their AI use, to keep records of their interactions with AI, and how to cite in various reference styles. The components of an AI entry of Zotero include the prompt text, the prompt description, the discussion snapshot, the tool, version, company, date and link to the conversation.

Do AI Research Assistants Live Up to their Hype? An Exploratory Study of Some Freely Available Tools Luis Machado Publications Office of the European Union, Belgium

This presentation is about a project to test AI tools that perform search functions. There are 2 types: Standard search, which presents a short answer, and deep search tools that present a longer answer. They tested the search tools with a specific set of prompts to find a specific paper. Some tools were more successful than others; some tools didn't find the paper and invented one, illustrating the issue of AI hallucination. This is a problem as these tools are marketed as academic research assistants. AI research assistants can be useful for initial topic exploration, but need to be treated with caution - They are "super" but not "out of this world"

Doctoral Students Getting Support from University Library: Two Courses as Cases from Linköping University, Magdalena Öström, Kerstin Annerbo, Linköping University, Sweden

Linköping University has around 40,000 students, and the library provides help and support to all of them! There are 3 physical libraries, and of course an online library. Information literacy is recognised as a key competency by the Swedish government. Doctoral students have often been overlooked for IL support, with much support focusing on undergraduate students. The library wanted to enhance support for doctoral students and meet their needs. They developed a course for science and technology students to help them search for literature and undertake a literature review. The content covers search strategies, how to prepare for a search, how to choose sources and how to construct search strings using Boolean operators. AI-based search tools have become more common, e.g. Scopus AI, and the course covers how to use these tools ethically. They also run an open-science PhD course that is credit-bearing if all components are completed. It covers issues such as copyright, bibliometrics, publication, research dissemination and research data management. 

Information Literacy Tasks in Quebec French Schools: Conception and Validation of a Questionnaire addressing Teachers’ Practices Joannie Pleau, Anne-Michèle Delobbe, Chantale Laliberté Université du Québec à Rimouski, Canada

This presentation focused on the need for research on the provision of information literacy in French-speaking schools in Quebec. School librarians are only found in city schools, so teachers must deliver IL teaching at other schools, but they don't receive any training in IL. They are currently revising the teacher education in Quebec. There is a survey to investigate the extent to which IL is taught in Quebec schools. A lot of work went into the design of the questionnaire, taking a multidisciplinary perspective. It was validated through 3 cycles of development with experts from a range of backgrounds e.g, primary education, digital education, collecting both qualitative and quantitative data. Some questions required clarification, and there needed to be more detailed definitions of what was meant by an "IL task". The data revealed that teachers were doing "IL tasks" but they didn't realise it!

MIL workshop in Qatar

The Ministry of Education and Higher Education of Qatar last week held a workshop on Media Information Literacy (MIL), discussing development of MIL in Qatari primary and secondary schools. This is part of a study commissioned by UNESCO Gulf States & Yemen Office in Doha, Qatar. See the release & photos at https://en.unesco.org/news/unesco-gulf-states-yemen-office-helm-advanced-discussion-media-information-literacy-qatari

Photo by Sheila Webber: Chapelgarth, tree and sky, December 2021

New articles: reflecting on IL instruction; librarians as teachers; flipped classroom; copyright; learner confidence; data literacy; IL design

There is a new issue of the open-access Journal of Information Literacy (volume 15 issue 1). The articles and project reports are: 

- Critical discourse analysis as a reflection tool for information literacy instruction by Devina Dandar, Sajni Lacey
- Librarians’ development as teachers by Andrea Baer
- Copyright Dough by Hannah Pyman, Katrine Sundsbø
- A flipped classroom approach to teaching search techniques for systematic reviews to encourage active learning by Karen Poole
- Teaching a one-credit course on data literacy and data visualisation by Tatiana Usova, Robert Laws
- Evaluating confidence in information literacy by David Bedford
- Information-Wise by Jaro Pichel, Barend Last, Julie de Ronde, Alicja Garbaciak, Henrietta Hazen, Stefan Jongen
Go to https://ojs.lboro.ac.uk/JIL/issue/view/223   

Photo by Sheila Webber: ex-Xmas trees of South London, January 2021

Approaches to Integrating Media Literacy in the K-12 Curriculum: The Case of Qatar #FOILresearch #GlobalMILweek

The second free webinar that the University of Sheffield Information School (my department) was involved with for Global Media and Information Literacy was today, entitled Masters’ Class: Emerging Voices in Media & Information Literacy Research. This was hosted by Dr Drew Whitworth (University of Manchester). This session was another event organised by the Forum on Information Literacy (FOIL), which is committed to sharing Information Literacy research and providing opportunities for new researchers to participate. I'll blog a little bit about each of the presentations. The first was:

 - Dona Fernandes (working at Hamid Bin Khalifa University, dissertation submitted to University of Manchester): Approaches to Integrating Media Literacy in the K-12 Curriculum: The Case of Qatar  

She started with an introduction to Qatar and the schools (K12) sector. There are a range of curricula in independent and private schools, catering to the different nationalities in the student body. Fernandes presented a timeline of Media Literacy in Qatar, relating it to other developments in education, politics (e.g. the opening and closure of the Doha Centre for Media Freedom & Doha News, issues to do with fake news) and outlined her conceptual frameworks e.g. aligning with local interests. Fernandes' research questions focused on the challenges to developing media literacy in the school curriculum and she explored them by analysing the literature. She identified the overarching challenges as. The first was lack of media freedom (although by itself it does not enable media literacy (ML) education) - from that point of view it is important, therefore not to import unrealistic Western models of ML curricula. The second challenge was an absence of national policy for ML, linked to the third challenge, a lack of multilateral colaboration in the region. The fourth challenge was a lack of technical training opportunities, including the contextual ML skills of being able to navigate the media landscape of Qatar without breaking the laws. In her final slide, Fernandes presented a diagram linking the conceptual framework and these challenges.

Research on academic reading format - print wins! Sheila blogs from #ecil2017

Another liveblog from the European Conference on Information Literacy in Saint-Malo, France. Next for me, Diane Mizrachi chaired a panel on the Academic Reading Format International Study (ARFIS). This project actually started at ECIL, as Mizrachi presented the results of her study into students' preferences between print and online, in 2014, and now the study has been replicated in over 30 countries (unfunded!!). I have reported on findings presented at previous ECIL conferences, and the impressive finding is that the findings from the small scale studies in all these countries demonstrate that students prefer print over online, although they see the advantages of online for some things. The website is here http://arfis.co/
The panel talked about various aspects about this international collaboration: both issues concerning with doing the survey in different countries, and discussion of the findings. Firstly Serap Kurbanoglu (Turkey) talked about adapting the instrument for different countries. For exaample, the original survey asked about Grade Point Average, and this question has to be removed for cross-study comparison (e.g. we don't use GPA in the UK). Also undergraduate study lasts a different amount of time in different countries, departments are called all sorts of different things in different countries: even classifying disciplines (to social sciences, humanities etc.) is not straightforward. The open ended questions were also an issue, since they were difficult to analyse to cross-compare. Altogether a lot of checking and coding was required. Incomplete answers, and identifying and removing them, was another issue.
Translating the survey instrument was a delicate task, to make sure that the meaning of the original was correctly interpreted. As an example, initially it looked as though (different from all the other studies) students preferred online to print, but this turned out to be because the question had been asked the other way round (so in fact the results DID agree). Getting a sample might need different approaches in each country, but in all countries is challenging, getting participation from students. In terms of communication between the researchers, this was also not straightforward since e.g. Chinese colleagues could not use Google groups.
Secondly Elena Collina (University of Bologna, Italy) talked about the challenges of doing the study in a huge university with many campuses, where the administration (Executive Board) did not approve the study. Collina had to restrict the study to one campus, where the rector was supportive. Once it was completed, the study's findings were welcomed by colleagues locally, but the Executive Board was still cold about it! Collina identified a message that shifting everything to the digital does NOT answer all the students' needs. She saw this message as important for improving the situation for students.
Thirdly, Nicole Johnson had carried out the study in Qatar and then in Perth, Australia. She emphasised that a lot of conversations and permissions had to be obtained before the survey was sent out to the total population at Perth (27,000 students: there was a response of just over 500): in Qatar she only got permission to distribute to a sample of students. Johnson had talked to the librarian at the University of Perth, where there was "interest in the results and then the reality of what they do with results". In other words, although the students expressed preference for print, there was not a budget for both print and online, and also there was pressure from the university to go digital. Pragmatically it may then be a matter of trying to get the students more familiar with online texts, and getting the texts easier to use. In terms of challenges, just getting the survey out was a challenge, and one university wanted extra questions answered.

Fourthly, Alicia Salaz mentioned that what was common across the studies was that you tried to distribute as widely as you could, and the aim was to recruit similar samples from every country. She was the joint researcher in Qatar. She was interested in whether culture, socio-economic or technological development etc. would affect results. Qatar was a richer country which was technologically advanced - but still, in fact, students preferred print, consistent with the global sample. The interesting the things was the response: what do you do about the results? There were varying responses, with people seeing what they want (e.g. if they like books - let's go back to books; if they are committed to online - how can we make the online experience better).
Finally Angela Repanovici (Romania) reported that in her country language (Romanian vs, say, English) influences preference. There had been an issue in getting ethical permission (this was not required in her university, but was required for open access publication, though this was resolved in due course).
There were interesting questions after and during the session. For example: what is the research about learning and understanding from print vs. online (the clear results from this study were that students THOUGHT they learned more from print). Also research on notetaking (on paper vs electronically was discussed: people may be bypassing the processing stage if they take notes electronically). There was also a point about connecting this with epistemological development and metacognition. There was also the issue of students working collaboratively (where again they wanted to use physical methods of reading/writing, not just online). Collina also mentioned sharing of print books being seen as an ecological choice. I suggested it would be useful to create some attractive media (e.g. videos of students) to communicate results to university managers (who may be brainwashed by pro-digital hype) and also mentioned research into students using print and online together as they worked. Another audience member raised the issue of students having digital devices, but not necessarily ones which made it convenient to read online, or they might not have data plans to download etc.
Mizrachi touched on a few more issues in the final minutes e.g. a "print divide" (students who can't afford textbooks); whether emotional attachment to print comes for reading books with your parent/caregiver; the issue of "screen time" for the very young.
The second photo is a slightly rough sea at Saint-Malo yesterday

Infolit of migrant workers; library in a box; preserving memories; librarians' role #wlic2017

Because I'm at an offsite session today, I'll miss these papers at the 2017 World Library and Information Conference, but I'll mention them since you can look at the full text papers if you are interested.
- Role of Information Literacy Services in Moulding Developing Countries into Knowledge-based Economies: A Case of Migrant Workers in Qatar by Zenab Ahmed (University College London, Qatar) Paper at http://library.ifla.org/1714/1/189-ahmed-en.pdf
- Pustaka in a Box: Bridging the Digital Gaps by Japri Bujang Masli (Sarawak State Library, Malaysia), Johari Abdullah (University Malaysia Sarawak, Malaysia) and Musa Ayub Abd Rahman (Sarawak State Library, Malaysia)(this is a very short paper, but a useful idea "Microcomputer is used as a server to store digital resources including e-books, articles and videos. The system is called Pustaka in a Box and it was tested in remote areas of Sarawak. Access is via local wifi from the microcomputer.") http://library.ifla.org/1609/1/198-bujang-en.pdf
- Where Should the Culture of Our Lives and Memory be Preserved? Rethinking the Role of the Library by Jaesun Lee (National Library of Korea, Republic of Korea) http://library.ifla.org/1691/1/189-lee-en.pdf
- "Time Is Out of Joint". The Impact of Digimodernism on the Transformation of Librarian’s Role by Olga Einasto (University of Tartu Library, Estonia)- chosen for the part at the end "I believe that the promotion of information literacy training as the basic library service is very important today ... The task of the academic librarian is in facilitating student critical thinking skills and not the teaching our tedious classification schemes." http://library.ifla.org/1834/1/187-einasto-en.pdf
Photo by Sheila Webber: tea house, Japanese Garden, Wroclaw, August 2017

Italics special issue

I think I missed the Italics special issue in December 2006 (Volume 5 Issue 4) which had articles for the eLIT conference. These include Peter Godwin's "Information literacy in the age of amateurs: How Google and Web 2.0 affect librarians’ support of Information Literacy"; Anne Dickinson's "Transition to the next generation of e-learning: using mind mapping and accessible web pages as part of a university’s academic staff training"; Hesham Azmi's "Teaching Information Literacy Skills: A case study of the QUcore program in Qatar University"; and Ruth Hunn and Darien Rossiter's "Design and development of an online information literacy tutorial: evaluation and lessons learnt (so far) ." http://www.ics.heacademy.ac.uk/italics/vol5iss4.htm

Photo by Sheila Webber: Owl fountain, Geneva, February 2007.