DELILA discussion

Another report from the Developing Educators Learning and Information Literacies for Accreditation (DELILA) project dissemination day in London, UK.
I'm just going to highlight some of the issues that came up in the discussion at end of this event. Some of these are questions, not answers!
- whether takes as much time to adapt something to your context as to start from scratch (it can do!)
- information overload: may take time to sift through potential resources
- creating a culture/ attitude for creating reusable material
- are you "re-using" something if you are using it as inspiration and source of ideas? And if that is how it is being used, then has it been a waste of time making it fully and legally reusable?
- what types of open educational resource are useful - a quick show of hands showed that people were more interested in worksheets, lesson plans, activities and videos than powerpoints.
- value of having more coordination about where to find/ where to get advice about open educational resources about information literacy
- there was an interesting suggestion about making the paradata (the texts etc. about open educational resources, in this case) more easily identified/ searchable
- different terminologies and research areas (new literacies, digital literacies etc.)
- value of having information literacy identified as such as part of teacher education courses (whilst recognising challenges), including librarians role as teachers if they have taught on the course
- issue of how librarians can acquire teaching expertise (e.g. via librarianship, via experience, exchange of experience, through a PG certficate at your workplace (if it's a university).
So, finally, this was an interesting day, and thanks for the DELILA team for organising it.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Bread at the farmers' market (ran out of DELILA-related pictures)

PG Certficate in education perspective #delila

Another report from the Developing Educators Learning and Information Literacies for Accreditation (DELILA) project dissemination day in London, UK.
Elizabeth Cleaver (University of Birmingham/ Newman College) and Claire Gordon (LSE) talked about OERs : A PGCert Perspective. After an introduction highlighting different approaches to developing skills within a course (identified as bolt-on or embedded), Gordon then went on to talk more about the LSE context: a postgraduate Certificate taken by about 100 Graduate Teaching Assistants a year, comprising of six modules. A decision had been taken to integrating educational technologies, and the initial approach was to add new sessions, but aiming for full integration in due course. Within this, academic and digital literacies are a small element. They are addressed particularly in the context of reflecting on student learning; discusing whether there is a "net generation", introducing models of information and digital literacies, and debating of how these literacies should be developed within courses.
Some challenges or lessons from this experience were:
- Importance of collaboration across departments;
- need for institutional (and departmental) buyin;
- constraints of the PG Certificate: since the digital and information literacy elements were quite small;
- also since the course was mostly taken by GTAs, they didn't have that much power over what happened in the curriculum.
Photo by Sheila Webber: conference freebies

Info Skills website at UEL #delila

Another report from the Developing Educators Learning and Information Literacies for Accreditation (DELILA) project dissemination day in London, UK.
Ella Mitchell and Cathy Walsh (University of East London) gave an Introduction to InfoSkills. They talked about a resource they developed at their university, Info Skills: the website is at http://infoskills.uelconnect.org.uk/. An inspiration was UEL's Get that job website http://employability.uelconnect.org.uk/.
Info Skills is aimed at level one learners. The focus is information skills and academic integrity. To give an impact, they have included student voices, as videos, talking about why they thought it had been important to use the library or not plagiarise. Academics have also contributed. They used Captivate to create tutorials etc.
They were presenting at the DELILA seminar because the Info Skills website was open to everyone to use, and some individual resources are available (e.g. videos on Youtube, see http://www.youtube.com/user/UELconnect). Spinoff benefits have included that pre-entry students (in further education) and international students have found the site useful, so it aids transition into higher education. The initiative has fitted in with skills initiatives within the university, and the speakers also felt that the site could help "address the expectations gap for academic staff" (helping academics understand teh support that the students needed).
The website has four key sections "What information do you need", "What are the best tools and ways of searching" "How do you decide what to use" and "What are the rules on naming your sources". If you look at the website you can see they have used a good deal of carefully selected graphics (e.g. of other students), to draw people in.
One of the resources the speakers mentioned was an academic talking about using Wikipedia http://infoskills.uelconnect.org.uk/pages/videos/97/using_wikipedia.html
The speakers also talked about the planning and development process. They are aiming to improve the mobile aspect of the site (e.g. so quizzes work on phones).
Photo by Sheila Webber: A busy bee at the station this morning

CPD4HE: Digital Literacies in disciplinary learning & teaching #delila

Another report from the Developing Educators Learning and Information Literacies for Accreditation (DELILA) project dissemination day in London, UK.
Jane Hughes (an Educational Developer/ Technologist at University College London) talked about her project CPD4HE: Digital Literacies in disciplinary learning & teaching. The website is at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/calt/cpd4he/.
Similarly to DELILA they wanted to convert material into open educational resources. These came from a variety of modules, and were divided into 10 topic headings including: Quality, Values in Higher Education, Designing the Curriculum, Academic Literacies. In terms of the way in which digital literacies were addressed (since the topics are mostly not directly about digital literacies): in some cases the subject coverage included digital literacies (e.g. concerning e-learning, or inquiry based learning), in other cases (if I understood correctly) the teaching, learning & assessment strategies included a digital literacy element.
Four elements that are important in their Postgraduate Certificate in Education for Higher Education course, that the material is of part of, are:
- "Disciplinarity addressed both explicitly and through experiential learning"
- "Digital literacies and e-learning addressed both explicitly and through experiential learning."
- "The individual's experience of teaching is viewed as a resource central to learning
- "The HE teacher viewed as part of a community: interaction with this community is part of learning."
Hughes talked about (my interpretation) the various problems of decontextualising an educational resource, when it starts as part of a carefully designed course. The experiential aspects are ones which the speaker felt became more problematic when you were thinking about making educational resources open. As well as this contextual issue, another issue is the way in which particular resources will be used within a specific tool (e.g. Moodle, a wiki) which has been selected because it is suited for that particular outcome/place in the course.

Therefore they have added some text and audio commentaries to say what the original context was, to help others contextualise the resource into their own course design and practice. In the end, a good number of the resources that they have made open are textual, but they may be textual items describing/ supporting an interactive intervention that involves use of technology (for example, an activity which develops use of networks and mailing lists).

I would say that this decontextualisation/ recontextualisation issue is vital (and challenging) when you are an educator. As well as the website linked above, there is also a blog http://www.ucl.ac.uk/calt/cpd4he/ and they can be followed on twitter at CPD4HE
Photo by Sheila Webber: Waiting for the train this morning

DELILA dissemination day #delila

Today I'm attending the Developing Educators Learning and Information Literacies for Accreditation (DELILA) project dissemination day in London, UK. This project focuses "on converting existing content to ensure that it is openly licensed and adaptable by other users." In its second phase it aimed to "extend the range of materials openly available, document benefits offered by OER [Open Educational Resources] to those involved in the learning process, and promote collections of OER materials."

The day started with an introduction from Ruth Stubbings, representing the CILIP Information Literacy Group. She highlighted some of the open educational resource projects that they have supported.
Then Jane Secker (LSE; DELILA Project manager) led off the main proceedings with Why, why, why DELILA? . The project is funded by JISC and the Higher Education Academy. The project partners are the University of Birmingham, the CILIP IL Group and the Londone School of Economics. The project is paired with the CPD4HE project at University College London.
The aims of DELILA are "To provide a model of embedded digital and information literacy support into teacher training at higher education level", to release some learning objects, and also to do work on making repositories for these resources more usable. They are hoping to develop a model for developing information literacy of new/trainee teachers.
They took account of the UKPSF (so they could identify which skills for teaching were being addressed) and the CORRE framework (which guides you through conversion from an item like a ppt to an Open Educational Resource).
One of the things they had noticed was that the resources were not very easy to find in repositories, just on the retrieval level. Therefore they decided to use the SCONUL 7 Pillars as a basis for tagging information literacy resoiurces, and FutureLab's digital literacy model (included in this document)as a basis for tagging digital literacy resources.

The project partners started with an audit of the resources they already had in their institutions, which were candidates for conversion to educational resources. They created some worked examples of the converted objects and put them on the DELILA website. In the process they discovered there were even more intellectual property issues than they had thought: in particular, there tend to be a lot of screenshots in these resources. Also Microsoft clipart cannot be used under a Creative Commons license. On the whole the decision was to take out screenshots (as, e.g., someone might want to update them anyway). They have developed a sheet for evaluating the educational resources, too.
One thing I didn't know was that you could include licence information in the properties of a Word or PowerPoint document (which is useful if the statement in the text of the document gets removed). As already noted, they also worked on the interface to the repository, e.g. so it includes a thumbnail of the resource.
I should also mention that the idea is that, as well as local repositories, items should also be submitted to the national repository JORUM.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Checking details of the workshop and having a coffee in Pret this morning.