Do take advantage to download the 700 page ECIL proceedings (published by Springer) which has lots and lots of interesting articles about information literacy. You can do this by following the Proceedings link in the menu at the top of the ECIL 2021 website or going straight to the Springer page https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-99885-1. This will be available for a limited time only (1 month).
There is a bounty of video recordings presented at the European Conference on Information Literacy (ECIL) in September 2021. These are the prerecorded videos (not videos of the sessions) so they are mostly 20 minutes long. Browse them here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb2mDRVfxpW5oTOneSj77SQ/videos - I will highlight a few of them individually in posts after Global MIL week.
On the second day of the virtual European Conference on Information Literacy (ECIL2021) I presented as part of a sesion focusing on older people and information literacy. My presentation, Older People in the “Post-Truth” Era: Countering Ageism by Developing Age Friendly Media and Information Literate Cities (#AFMIL), was co-authored with Bill Johnston and the slides are here https://www.slideshare.net/sheilawebber/older-people-in-the-posttruth-era-countering-ageism-by-developing-age-friendly-media-and-information-literate-cities-afmil. I will say more about this when I post the link to the video of the presentation. We were talking about the model that we outlined here.
There were two other presentations. After me, Kristina Eriksson-Backa (Finland) presented on Everyday Health Information Literacy and Attitudes towards Digital Health Services among Finnish Older Adults (coauthored with Farhan Ahmad, Isto Huvila, Heidi Enwald, and Noora Hirvonen). It presents results from a study which was part of the project Taking Health Information Behaviour into Account (2015-2020). Eriksson-Backa quoted some previous findings about older people and the digital e.g. in a Swedish survey those aged 65+ thought digital health services useful, but thought tech was difficult to use; that in a Norwegian survey those 65+ used electronic health services less than younger people. For this project, 373 Finns aged 55 or over responded to a survey (25% response rate) to measure their Everyday Health Information Literacy (using the EHIL survey instrument, see reference Niemelä et al. (2012) below) and attitudes towards aspects of digital healthcare (see screenshot).
The last speakers were Iva Zadražilová and Pavla Vizváry (Czech Republic), talking on Digital Literacy Competencies and Interests of Elderly People. They emphasised the importance of developing the ICT skills of this group, and that education and libraries can provide a crucial role. The aim of the research was to collect information on perceived digital IL and what the participants' interests were in further education about the internet etc - this could then be used to develop training sessions. A 27-item questionnaire was developed based on findings from previous qualitative research and administered to people aged 65+ and with basic computer skills. There were 717 respondents, average age 71, 81% female. Because of the latter characteristic, and also as the education level was not representative of the general population, thus the results cannot be generalised.
Participants self-evaluated their skills - the lowest self-evaluations were for communication and content creation. The researchers had hypothesised that younger respondents would have higher confidence in their digital skills, and this was demonstrated by the data at a statistically significant level. The researchers also asked whether people had learnt through self-study, with help, or through computer self-study. Contrary to what they had expected, those who had taught themselves had the most confidence. The presenter connected this finding with being able to learn about what you really needed. Asked if they were interested in further education, those participants who were confident about their skills had the most interest, rather than those who had rated their skills lower (some had no interest, and some had interest but couldn't pursue further education for personal reasons). Additionally, the higher level of completed education, the more likely the person was to be interested in improving their skills.
Asked to identify areas of interest for further education, the top 4 were: editing & sharing photos; evaluating information; dangers of information misuse; downloading photographs. Thus the interest was in active ageing topics and a recommendation was for classes which "positively reflect the elderly gaining skills to encourage active ageing". There is a role for libraries in adapting and tailoring their offerings to these more active topics, rather than just basic ICT classes.
1st image: Centre for Ageing Better: published under CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) https://ageingbetter.resourcespace.com/pages/home.php 2nd impage: screenshot of the 2nd presentation.
Chris Thorpe (City, University of London, UK) and I presented on the first day of the virtual European Conference on Information Literacy (ECIL2021) on Fake news: has it changed UK academic librarians’ ideas about teaching Information Literacy? The slides are embedded below.
Today is the first day of the European Conference on Information Literacy (ECIL2021) which takes place virtually from today until Thursday. I am presenting in three sessions, and also chairing the doctoral forum, and I will be doing a little liveblogging. Today is busy as I am presenting with Chris Thorpe, and running a workshop with Pam McKinney. I will blog separately about those. So here's my first liveblog. The day began with introductions from the conference committee, Serap Kurbanoğlu (Hacettepe University, Turkey), Sonja Špiranec, (University of Zagreb, Croatia), Joumana Boustany (Paris Descartes University, France) and Fabian Franke (University of Bamberg, Germany, which was to have been the conference venue). It included an introduction to the conference theme Information Literacy in a Post-Truth Era which was set for the original (postponed) 2020 conference. The speakers noted that it could have been feared that this theme would have gone out of date, but (sadly!) that is not the case.
The first keynote session was Information Discernment in the “Post-truth” World from Stephan Lewandowsky (University of Bristol, UK). He started by giving a "brief history of lies, taking the example of US presidents and explaining how he thought that the lies had changed both quantitively and qualitatively: from carefully curated "systematic lies" to "shock and chaos" information (so the shift is from creating lies which the president wants to be believed to creating noise and confusion). This can change the nature of truth itself, and enable people to ignore challenges. Lewandowsky cited Hahl who coined the concept of the "authenticity of the lying demogogue" - that you show you are "of the people" by rejecting elitist norms, including what truth is and how you tell what is truth (or even the meaningfulness of truth). This can happen if people are questioning a system's legitimacy (as many people are questioning the legitimacy of governments in various parts of the world). Lewandowsky showed results of an experiment in which 26% of highly educated Trump voters identified a photo showing Trumnp's inauguration as having more people in it than a photo of Obama's (when it is very clear there are more people in the Obama photo - so this has to have been a deliberate decision).
Lewandowsky went on to discuss how "misinformation sticks" and he talked about experiments in which people say that they know something is false, but the experiment shows that the misinformation is still informing their decisions. He talked about experiments in "inoculating" people against misinformation through the means of short videos which focus on explaining the manipulation techniques that are used. So this focused on exposing the manipulative techniques, rather than providing "the facts". There were ones on emotional language, false dichotomies, scapegoating, incoherence and ad hominem (attacks on a person) techniques. The experiments Lewandowsky and his colleagues conducted showed that the participants' information discernment increased (see the graphic at the top). In response to a question after the talk, he also talked about "booster shots" (video reminders) and they needed to have more research into how long the inoculations lasted.
One of the publications from this research is here (I think I blogged this previously). A recent experiment has used Islamist radicalising and Islamaphobic material, and also showed that this approach had a positive effect. Lewandowsky talked about addressing the issue more widely, and other work in the area (e.g. "lateral reading" and work by Geoff Walton & colleagues) and how you can go about debunking lies and liars.
Further experiments showed that changing beliefs did not necessarily result in changes in actions and decisions (this was an experiments to do with beliefs and voting intentions in the USA).
I was of course happy to see that "teaching information literacy" was listed as an element in the "toolbox of countermeasures" (plus inoculating and debunking) at the end of the talk. He also gave links to the Debunking handbook 2020 , COVID19 vaccine communication handbook, and a report Technology and Democracy: Understanding the influence of online technologies on political behaviour and decision-making
