#ECIL2023 Building knowledge across the curriculum

Pam McKinney live blogging from the ECIL conference. This is a panel session led by Emily Zeken Brown and Susan Souza-Mort, with the directive energy of Laura Hogan who could not be here today. They started off by asking the audience about the flavour of their information literacy training, and how it is delivered e.g. as a one shot session, or a multi-session format, or as a credit bearing course. There is a lack of time for librarians to deliver comprehensive information literacy education for community college students. The presenters work at Bristol Community College in Massachusetts in the US. Students are often 1st generation, non-traditional and working full time, and 68% graduate without debt. A recent law has made it possible for any 1 year resident without a degree can go to community college for free, which has massively improved access to education in the state. Many learners need a lot of support with digital and information literacy, the college is open for everyone, including students who really struggle with formal learning. This affects the library IL offer, as it has to be tailored for a large range of abilities. 

There is a first year seminar course in study skills a college success seminar, and this seemed like an ideal place to develop information literacy. The class can be attached to any research heavy course, and the library team offered to tailor it to different subject contexts. The focus was on scaffolding the research process, and also promoting  academic writing support. Research help, writing help and academic support is provided in the library. Many students think these services have to be paid for, but in fact they are free. The ACRL framework was used as a guiding principle for the course. There was a lengthy administrative process to go through to create this as a credit bearing course in the college, which involved getting feedback from a variety of teachers and administrators in the institution. The way that courses are designed at community colleges in the US seems quite different from the way that courses are designed at British universities!

There was a remuneration issue in that if librarians are going to lead a credit bearing course they should be paid as adjunct teaching staff, and these librarians requested this increase in pay for this course. In order to be a librarian in the US, you are required to have a masters qualification in library and information science. This course was positioned as not needing students to buy text books, so all the resources were open educational resources. The course will hopefully  run for the first time in spring 2024, but there seem to be some issues with the placing of the course, and proposed changes to how it is positioned in the context of other courses at the college. The abstract of the panel is here.

Photo by Sheila Webber: cafe window in Krakow

Recent articles

Bennett, O. and Gilbert, K. (2009) "Extending liaison collaboration: partnering with faculty in support of a student learning community." Reference Services Review, 37 (2), 131-142.
Collins, B. (2009) "Integrating information literacy skills into academic summer programs for precollege students." Reference Services Review, 37 (2), 143-154
Oud, J. (2009) "Guidelines for effective online instruction using multimedia screencasts." Reference Services Review, 37 (2), 164-177.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Ashridge Management College, May 2009

LILAC report: designing modules

One session I enjoyed at the LILAC conference, but have unfortunately lost my notes for, is Sally Patalong’s account of introducing modules as part of Coventry University’s programme of employability-led modules called “Add+Vantage”. Sally led the design and (with subject librarians) delivery of a level two undergraduate module “Information: Fact or Fiction?” and a level 3 module “Information in the workplace”. If I get a copy of the slides from Sally I may add to this post, but she provided very valuable reflection on what had been successful and what had needed revising.
One message is not to believe generalised myths like “students like guest lecturers” as she got poor attendance from students. This chimes in with my own experience, where Masters students generally do appreciate these, but in undergraduate courses the relevance has to be crystal clear to the students. We do have some extremely popular guest lecturers for our undergraduates, but they are guests who are clearly vocational role models and who also discuss the students own work with them in a useful and unpatronising way.
Another point that emerged from Sally’s talk was the problem of being associated with a programme or development that is generally unpopular with students. In this case, there was a lot of positive feedback on the information literacy modules, but they were suffering a bit by being part of a less popular development (having to take employability modules that they didn’t perceive as being “relevant”)
Photo by Sheila Webber: blossom and fountain by Sheffield Town Hall, March 2009

Representing learning designs

The Mod4L project final report (of about 100 pages) was published last month. "This final report refines the discussion of issues of representing learning designs for sharing and reuse evidenced in the interim report and highlights problems with the concept of practice models (section 2), characterises the requirements teachers have of effective representations (section 3), evaluates a number of types of representation against these requirements (section 4), explores the more technically focused role of sequencing representations and controlled vocabularies (sections 5 & 6), documents some generic learning designs (section 8.2) and suggests ways forward for bridging the gap between teachers and developers (section 2.6). "

An underlying message seems to be a) it would be useful to have a clear way of representing an intervention, or session plan, or learning sequence (or whatever) so that people could judge more quickly whether it had anything they could re-use or learn from, but it is time-consuming to do this effectively, and no one way can capture all the aspects.

I must say I have always been a bit sceptical of the pursuit of generic learning designs, because of the need to tailor learning to the learning & teaching context, but certainly I do learn things from other people's teaching (even if I don't want to copy it exactly). If there were clearer ways of presenting case studies about teaching information literacy that would be a help too.
Falconer, I. et al. (2007) Mod4L Final Report: Representing Learning Designs. Glasgow: Glasgow Caledonian University. http://mod4l.com/tiki-list_file_gallery.php?galleryId=2

Photo by Sheila Webber: Beech tree with new leaves, Sheffield, April 2007.

Management Development Programme

Today I'm in Glasow, as External Examiner on the Management Development Programme of the University of Strathclyde's Business School. This is an interesting programme with modules in the first 3 years for all undergraduate students in the business school. It covers key areas such as teamworking, problem solving, information handling, business ethics, leadership, and it is delivered in a problem solving approach. Students work in teams, there are few large plenary sessions and there is a variety of coursework: learning diaries, presentations, online statistics tests etc. There are over 500 students taking it in each year. The site for the programme is here. An article about it is:

Johnston, B. and Watson, A. (2004) "Participation, reflection and integration for business and lifelong learning: Pedagogical challenges of the integrative studies programme at the University of Strathclyde Business School." Journal of Workplace Learning, 16 (1/2), 53-62.

Photo by Sheila Webber: the grand former Post Office on George Square, Glasgow, has been empty for years. They have now gutted it entirely inside (I think it will be "lifestyle apartments")

Recent articles, mostly academic libraries

Stevens, C. and Campbell, P. (2006) "Collaborating to connect global citizenship, information literacy, and lifelong learning in the global studies classroom." Reference Services Review, 34 (4), 536 - 556.
"The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the concepts of lifelong learning, information literacy, and global citizenship, making explicit connections among them via theories of social capital. It then presents a model of librarian-faculty collaboration that relies upon information literacy as a framework for fostering lifelong learning and global citizenship." (I thought this paper was particularly interesting, and it describes the tasks and assignments in some detail.)

Boyd, J. et al (2006) "The One-Box Challenge: Providing a Federated Search That Benefits the Research Process." Serials review, 32 (4), 247-254.
Five US librarians briefly describe comment on their institution's implementation of federated searching, including some observations about the relationship with information literacy.

Harrison, J. and Rourke, L. (2006) "The benefits of buy-in: integrating information literacy into each year of an academic program." Reference Services Review, 34 (4), 599 - 606.
"The purpose of this paper is to describe the integration of information literacy into each year of a Bachelor of Arts and Science (BAS) program at the University of Guelph, Ontario, and to explain the role of librarian mentors in this program. "

Jackson, L. and Hansen, J (2006) "Creating collaborative partnerships: building the framework." Reference Services Review, 34 (4 ), 575 - 588.
"The paper seeks to explore the nature of a collaborative relationship among school and academic librarians in order to enhance the information literacy skills of students as they matriculate to college ... [it] discusses collaboration among school librarians in Madison County, Illinois and one academic library."

SCONUL web addresses

Since SCONUL redesigned its site a few months ago the web addresses for key publications have changed (I was just checking one I was citing). Here are the current web addresses of:

Peters, J. (ed) Learning outcomes for information literacy. London: HEA/SCONUL. pp22-30. http://www.sconul.ac.uk/groups/
information_literacy/papers/outcomes.pdf

SCONUL (1999) Information skills in higher education: a SCONUL position paper. London: SCONUL. http://www.sconul.ac.uk/groups/information_literacy/
papers/Seven_pillars2.pdf

The section which has the downloadable "7 Pillars of IL" graphic and other 7 Pillars material is at http://www.sconul.ac.uk/groups/
information_literacy/seven_pillars.html
Photo by Sheila Webber: Zemlinksy's grave (composer of the opera "The dwarf" etc), graveyard, Vienna, Austria, December 2006.