i3 conference presentations

Some of the presentations from the i3 conference (held in Aberdeen in June) are on the conference website at http://www.i3conference2011.org.uk/
They include:
Dr. Marian Smith and Dr. Mark Hepworth "Young people: A phenomenographic investigation into the ways they experience information"
Fredrik Hanell "A situated view on Information Literacy: epistemological issues and practical solutions through analysis of participatory media in learning environments"
Professor Eero Sormunen and Leeni "Wikipedia articles as a genre for authentic learning-by-writing assignments"
Photo by Sheila Webber: another autumn anemone, September 2011

i3 report: everyday information practice #i3_conference

Camilla Moring (pictured right) talked today about Studying information practice from a practice perspective: Outlining an analytical model of information practice, at the i3 conference at the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen http://www.i3conference2011.org.uk
She undertook an ethnographic study of sales assistants who had just started working for the Danish train company. Her theoretical base was the work of Etienne Wenger, with focus on situated practice and communities of practice (CoPs). Moring emphasised that the theory of CoPs was really an analytical tool (rather than a management tool!) She talked about issues of negotiation (e.g. negotiation of meaning in whether to follow or bend the rules about railway ticketing) and identity (with the idea of "trajectories of participation", identity developing through time and through engagement with communities).
There were a number of interesting findings presented, but just to pick out part of this, Moring identified four focus points in development of the newcomers' information practice. These were about the participants:
- asking (which provided information about rules),
- observing practice (so they learnt sales behaviour and locally negotiated ways of doing things),
- overhearing conversations (learning norms and values) and
- seeking printed and electronic information resources (to explore possible identities as salepersons, and keeping track of news to keep up-to-date).
As I said, there was a lot more of interest in this presentation, including the diagram you get a glimpse of, above, I will add any links I find about her research.

i3 report: Forensic and Archaeological Human Identification #i3_conference

Caroline Wilkinson gave a keynote on Forensic and Archaeological Human Identification: Information Processing and Presentation at the i3 conference at the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen http://www.i3conference2011.org.uk.
She talked about recognition of people from human remains; what it was easier or reconstruct and what was more difficult. A lot of changes happen to a body immediately after death (apparently 10% of dead bodies in the 2004 tsunami were mis-recognised by relatives) and once you are reduced to bones or have decomposed further, the extent to which you can recognise or reconstruct will depend on various factors (e.g. gender is easier to judge from the fast once someone is past childhood and before they get ). Wilkinson gave some interesting insights into the extent to which faces can be reconstructed (for the purposes of publicising the reconstruction, so a body can be identified by the member of the public). Things like skin texture, modifications, weight changes, and habitual expressions can make faces look very different, and cannot be identified from the skull alone. If the person doing the reconstructed picture gets these kinds of detail wrong, it can make the person more difficult to identify.
Sometimes the final image might be given an artistic effect, so that people get an impression and don't fix to much on the detail. Also, several variations could be provided: however what the police like is one photo-like issue.
Wilkinson contrasted this with the process of archeological reconstruction, where the purpose of reconstruction is normally different (e.g. giving people a vivid impression of the person in their times, rather getting an individual identified). She gave a couple of specific examples, including discussing reconstruction of the composer Bach's head.
There is a little news item about her from the bbc and she has written a book:
Wilkinson, C. (2004) Forensic Facial Reconstruction. Cambridge University Press. 978-0521820035
Photo by Sheila Webber: Wilkinson presenting, our first keynote speaker Eric Meyer taking notes and (I think) tweeting in the foreground).

i3 report: source credibility, and using wikipedia creation for IL #i3_conference

I chaired a session with two research papers involving Wikipedia yesterday at the i3 conference at the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen http://www.i3conference2011.org.uk/. It’s rude (I think) to blog and chair at the same time, so I’m relying on my notes and the abstracts. Firstly Helena Francke and Olof Sundin talked about New media in the classroom: Challenged notions and transformed practices?
New media here in particular means social media. This presentation drew on two pieces of research, one investigating teachers and librarians notions of credibility, and the other investigating students’ practice in making decisions about credibility. Previous studies have indicated that teaching credibility of information is a difficult issue.
The presenters had examined curriculum documents for upper secondary schools in Sweden (where they are based); aspects of IL are included in various subjects, including the pupils being required to search for and evaluate information in different media, so that the information could be used (e.g. to make arguments).
In their first research study, they had focus groups with 9 school librarians and 8 teachers, and six interviews. The participants expressed varying views of what a credible source was. Wikipedia was a source that there was a particularly wide variety of opinions about. For the second study, they undertook an ethnographic study of students gathering information for class projects in two Swedish schools ; sources of evidence were diaries from pupils (aged 17/18), documents, interviews, and observation.
The four notions of credibility which were discovered through their research were:
- Credibility as control of sources (stability, known author/publisher)
- Credibility as comparing sources (double-checking sources that are seen as doubtful; or checking facts: underlying this is an assumption that something is ok if found in two places)
- Credibility as relational and partial (credibility depending on the purpose and situation; a pragmatic view of web credibility, which requires knowledge of what kind of information is available on a topic);
- Credibility in multiplicity (which has the underlying idea that there are different perspectives on a topic, and many people contribute to provide a good picture of a subject)
All four notions of credibility were found, but the teachers and librarians focused primarily on control (for example, in their instructions for the task). In the blog dairies, there wasa tendency for students to record what they found where and how, rather than how they evaluated the sources.
Conclusions included: the difficulty in making information literacy a subject of teaching, that social media bring new challenges in judging credibility, and that the notion of control seems to dominate practices of credibility, a “discourse of control”. It was suggested that the four notions could be used as repertoire in teaching. It was also noted that teaching of information literacy will be dependent on the educator’s pedagogic approach in formulating the task.
Relevant references are:
- Francke, H., Sundin, O., and Limberg, L. (2011) "Debating credibility: The shaping of information literacies in upper secondary school", Journal of Documentation, 67(4) [an “earlycite” with no page numbers at time of writing].
- Sundin, O. and Francke, H. (2009)"In search of credibility: pupils' information practices in learning environments." Information Research, 14(4).

The second paper, by Eero Sormunen and Leeni Lehtiö (presented by Lehtiö ) was on Wikipedia articles as a genre for authentic learning-by-writing assignments. This was investigating several instances of using wiki article creation as a framework for IL instruction. Potential advantages included: that the form of Wikipedia articles is familiar to students; there is a real reason for writing, so students may pay more attention, and feel more responsibility to the reader, encouraging a high quality response. There were two pilot studies, in both of which the students were working in small groups over a period of 8 weeks to create wikipedia articles:
Pilot 1: 10 pupils (data was gathered through questionnaires and interviews either side of the activity, and non-participatory observation of students)
Pilot 2: 16 pupils (using the same methods, except replacing the observation – it had proved hard to be unobtrusive – with context inquiry interviews)
The researchers examined the number of sources used: there were 70, 13 of which were not referenced. The largest categories were: 26% government sources, 27% “communal” (e.g. organisations), 9% Wikipedia, 10% reference sources. The researchers checked 230 sentences to see whether pupils had plagiarised. They found 6% had been copied, 21% had minimal change, 30% had been rewritten, some were merged from (14%) single or (11%) multiple sources, 13% were direct translation, 4% edited translations of material not in Finnish.
From the data collected, pupils felt they had learnt about Wikipedia itself (the mechanics and process of how to write) and the appreciated the difficulty of good writing for Wikipedia. Pupils had learnt about their own Wikipedia topics, but not about other groups’ topics. They had also learnt about evaluation of sources (including English-language sources), copyright (e.g. though trying to get pictures for articles), and information seeking .
The pupils had been careful with use of information (one said he wouldn’t have been so careful if just giving it to the teacher) – using citations, verifying facts, and mostly avoiding copying. Thus the Wikipedia learning task did increase motivation & commitment; students worked on selecting sources (with relatively little word-for-word copying) and had relevant learning experiences
The main study for this research was carried out in April-May this year. They were studying a Wikipedia-article project in a literature class, and a project on history, creating an article to include in the school wiki. The data collection was the same as for the pilot but also included examining wiki material and pupils’ self-assessment and teachers’ assessments of the wiki material. This is part of the Know-ID project, and progress can be followed at https://www12.uta.fi/blogs/know-id/
Photo by Sheila Webber: piper at the reception on Tuesday evening

i3 report: development of LIS research in the UK #i3_conference

Hazel Hall talked about Coalition and collaboration: supporting the development of LIS research in the UK, at the i3 conference at the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen http://www.i3conference2011.org.uk/. In particular, she was talking about the UK's Library and Information Science Research Coalition. Hall, who heads up the Coalition, started by outlining the history of research funding in the UK: after having some library & information-specific bodies, now the major funding body is the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which makes it difficult for non-academics to apply for research funding.
The idea of forming a new body emerged about 5 years ago, and this developed into the Library and Information Science Research Coalition. Some problems it strives to address are:
- identification of sources of funding,
- accessing previous research output (in contast to previous requirements to publish a substantial report from projects),
- practitioners who are not very engaged with other people's research and lack confidence in research skills,
- need to demonstrate impact of libararies, and get better at using non-tangible evidence,
- also there is an underlying belief that engaging with research can enhance practioners' job satisfaction etc. and enhance career progression and retention.

The research Coalition has funding for 3 years, with support from JISC, British Library, CILIP, MLA and the Research Information Network, and it was launched in 2009. Hall was keen to get more practitioner groups involved e.g. public librarians. There is a lot of information about the Coalition on its website (linked above) so I won't repeat too many basic details. In particular, Hall highlighted the resources about the 2010 conference, the events listing, the HEALER research toolkit, and their Twitter stream (an interesting sidenote is that Hall started by giving about whether she should be tweeted in her individual or organisational capacity (LISRC). She also talked about the DREAM (Developing Research Excellence and Methods) project http://lisresearch.org/dream-project/
including the upcoming conference and the RiLIES (Research in Librarianship – Impact Evaluation) Project http://lisresearch.org/rilies-project/
Hall also mentioned the Scottish Graduate School of Social Science, which is one of the ESRC-funded doctoral training centres (Sheffield University belongs to a regional consortium for this). They have succeeded in getting an information science pathway within this, which is an achievement, since normally it would just be the AHRC (rather than the ESRC) offering doctoral awards in the library and information field (that is how we get our awards in Sheffield).

i3 report: screening everyday health information literacy #i3_conference

Raimo Niemelä presented a paper, coauthored with colleagues, Designing a self-assessment tool for screening everyday health information literacy, today at i3 conference at the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen http://www.i3conference2011.org.uk/
A simple screening tool was needed to identify people who needed health information literacy counselling, as part of a wider health project involving hundreds of people.
They started with the definition of Health Information Literacy by the Medical Library Association, http://www.mlanet.org/resources/healthlit/ and from that developed the idea of Everyday health information literacy puts HIL in everyday life contexts, a "concept for studying layperson's general and non-professional abilities related to health information."
They developed a 10-item questionnaire, with questions like "It is difficult to get health information from printed sources", "Terms and sentences of health information are difficult to understand", "I apply health related information to my own life or those close to me" plus additional question asking what type of health related issues people had searched for and asking how people evaluated information.
They used this with a sample of 217 students 17-20 years, and found a normal distribution on the EHIL scores. Findings included that: there were gender differences, with females more interested in health information than males and using information from various sources. First year students were more likely to disagree with the statement that it was difficult to know who do believe in health issues than older students. Some broader constructs, such as "confidence" could be identified through analysis of responses. In terms of how the participants evaluated health information, authority of the writer or publisher was top, followed by sources from scientific research. Things like blogs and chat rated very low.
The interesting question for EHIL follow up was: what would be the key indicators of a need for EHIL counselling? From this initial pilot study, they decided they could reduce the questionnaire to key statements (likert scale, strongly disagree to strongly agree)
- I know where to seek health information
- It is easy to assess the reliabilityof health information on the internet
- Terms and sentences of health information are difficult to understand
- It is difficult to know who to believe in health issues
In discussion afterwards, the point was made (by researchers working in the health informationbehaviour field) that people may have a lot of information, but they may have a problem with (or reluctance to) contextextualising the information to their own situation and health. Also there was discussion around the gender differences (other studies have shown that females are higher users ofhealth information).
I'll be catching up with blog posts from yesterday, this afternoon, by the way.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Scottish dancing last night

i3 report: Exploring Undergraduates’ Information Worlds #i3_conference

Lisa M. Given and Heidi Julien (University of Alberta) talked about Exploring Undergraduates’ Information Worlds: Conceptualizing Information Literacy from the Ground Up, at the i3 conference at the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen http://www.i3conference2011.org.uk/. One of the goals of the study (which had other team members, including librarians) is to improve teaching of IL pedagogy in their library and information programme and they started by talking about current influences on librarians' teaching practice.
This study assesses skill development (in students in the final school years and post-school) and explores their "perceptions of how IL contributes to their academic engagement and success". This is looking at the transitional period which, I would add, is an increasing area of research interest. The focus in this research is on arts and social science students. The researchers wanted to assess students' preparation for study at university and then follow them through the first year of university study, although for practical reasons they had to use different university students (rather than following students from school to uni).
They used mixed methods:
- The "James Madison University Information Literacy Test" with more than 100 students.
- Audit of existing IL practice at Alberta University
- Qualitative study of new university students. After taking the IL test, they are using photovoice (students telling the story through photographs) and participating in focus groups.
In terms the Alberta context, a document Focus on Inquiry (2004) sets an inquiry based agenda for educators. The researchers also drew on the library's Libqual (library service quality) results, previous information literacy surveys, documentation, and eliciting student and librarian views on IL activity.
The result from the IL audit indicated that students value IL but are not aware of the support available. Although there were useful course and subject guides, it seemed they were not much used. There are IL courses, but they are targetting specific kinds of student or particular subject disciplines. A survey in 2009 had indicated that three quarters of the IL teaching was done as part of credit classes, not involving librarians.
In terms of the James Madison IL test results (this test is based on the ACRL standards) from this research project, Julien and Given reported that the results were "not encouraging" since it indicated that students were not very proficient. The strongest results were around ethical and legal issues of information.
Julien and Given presented some of the photographs from the student photovoices (they have not yet undertaken the focus groups). There was one of a student on the phone, one of a noticeboard, one of someone indicating bewilderment in library stacks, a photo of a clock, of a smartphone.
It was obviously too early for firm conclusions, but it was evident that students were arriving at university without well-developed skills (which means there is a gap between reality and the curricula mandate in the state). The upside was that this gave plenty of the University to develop skills with evidence-based pedagogy!
Photo by Sheila Webber: Civic reception last night

i3 report: Uncovering Information Literacy: mythology, myopia and movement #i3_conference

Ross Todd (Rutgers University) gave a keynote on Uncovering Information Literacy: mythology, myopia and movement at the i3 conference at the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen http://www.i3conference2011.org.uk/ He is Director of the Center for International Scholarship in School Librarianship. He gave a very stimulating talk, and I can only provide a glimpse of it.
He examined the 1989 ALA definition of the information literate person, and questioned whether it was something of a myth: could someone really conform with all these requirements, and was this "information literate person" really what information literacy was about?
Todd talked about information literacy "going global" in the 2000s e.g. with the Prague Declaration and the Alexandria proclamation, which indicated politicisation of IL, and bringing in a more humanist approach (positioning IL as a basic human right). At the same time there was the confusion about terms, and the issue of the extent to which IL was the same as, or overlapped with, various literacies or literacy itself.
He welcomed the discourse around the nature of information literacy, which was challenging and probing meaning and experiences of IL. However, the research seem to still consist of jigsaw pieces. He felt that there was a "terratorial battleground for intellectual possession" with competing or conflicting models, most of them not generated by research. Those models that there were, tended to be based on quite small scale pieces of research. There waso the issue that skills-based models were generally built on "assumption of well-formed statement of need".
So Todd advocated "getting beyond model mania" and engaging in constructive critique of each others' work. He wanted more meta-analysis of the research, to develop, collectively, a "formal theory of information literacy as an active experience", working towards a metatheory of information literacy. He also also critiqued a pedagogical approach where IL was treated as "a separate skills-based discipline", with finding information, rather than understanding it, being celebrated. Todd felt that more attention should be paid to information use, and sense making: both in terms of research to probe this area, and pedagogic approaches which engaged with it. He refreed to a couple of surveys of school librarians in the USA. In a recent one, of school librarians in New Jersey, there were "high umbers of collaborations with classroom teachers", but these collaborations did focus around finding and critically selecting infortmation (rather than using information, which can be the most challenging thing).
Todd also talked about a study by Kerr comparing academic librarians' espoused conceptions of IL, and actual practice of IL. The investigation was through examining IL tutorials and structured interviews, and she did find a gap between what was being said about IL (which included generating knowledge etc.) and what was being taught (which focused on searching. I will mention here that there is a good paper by Olaf Sundin, published some years ago, which analysed IL tutorials in a valuable way.
Todd said he believed that the information behaviour/ information literacy field did provide a basis for developing pedagogic approaches in IL. In particular he highlighted the work of Carol Kuhlthau on the information search process, which he particularly valued because it had been tested and critiqued over a period of time.
I'm trying to liveblog the conference, so I haven't much time to add my own comments. I thought this was a valuable talk; I suppose because I agree with a number of points, and also feel I have made my own research contribution in this area ;-) I might come back to it in a separate post, as it is worth engaging with.
Rather poor photo by Sheila Webber: Theresa Anderson and Ross Todd taking photos in the Town House, Aberdeen, last night

i3 report: young people's experience of information #i3_conference

The next report from the i3 conference at the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen http://www.i3conference2011.org.uk/. This paper continued the theme of young people's information behaviour.
Marian Smith presented the paper co-authored by Mark Hepworth on Young people: A phenomenographic investigation into the ways they experience information. This was her doctoral research. She was identifying the qualitatively different ways in which they experienced information. She had some focus groups to familiarise herself with the young people's world. She conducted 18 long interviews, and short interviews from the other participants, and collected 41 drawings from 23 young people from year 7 and 18 from older students (the interviews started with the young people doing a drawing of "information").
There were six categories:
- "knowledge of sources of information" (information resides in the sources). It can be noted that there were a range of sources experienced (e.g. family members), and no awareness of information use.
- "receiving information" (information is experienced information as something that was received): this might be receiving knowingly (e.g. at school) or encountered.
- "process of finding information" (information is experienced as something that is found). This might not be a planned process, and it was mostly unsupported (i.e. they weren't being educated to develop a process, and in school they might usually "receive" information)
- "store of unprocessed information" (information was experienced as something that was internalised, stored and unprocessed: it wasn't necessarily understood, but it could be retrieved). This was associated with factual information, and regurgitation of information e.g. for school tasks.
- "processing information" (information was something processed): they said that they were interpreting, seeing information in a new way, and linking up with other information. Participants mentioned motivation e.g. projects they were interested in.
- "use of information" (information is experienced as something that is used); this included information shared or passed on.
Insights that Smith highlighted included that processing of information is not always considered important, and other implications for teaching information literacy.
Discussion afterwards included the extent of similarity and difference between different phenomenographic studies of information/ information literacy, the issue of whether information literacy education should pay more attention to these conceptions (unsurprisingly, I think they should) and (from the previous paper) people's news habits and the attachment and affective issues to do with print news.
Photo by Sheila Webber: wild rose, Garthdee campus, Aberdeen, June 2011.

i3 report: young people's use of news sources #i3_conference

Another report from the i3 conference at the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen http://www.i3conference2011.org.uk. Kirsty Williamson talked about the research carried out by her and her research partner Asim Qayyum: News Seeking: Young Adults and Everyday Life Information. The research questions included the types of news used, their preferences, what they trusted, which sources they used purposively, and which they used incidentally. Previous research by Savolainen, McQuail ("uses and gratification" theory) and Williamson informed their research.
The sample was 34 students aged 18-15 studying at Charles Sturt University (Australia), 20 being interviewed and 14 being subjects of observation ("thinking aloud" tasks comparing print and online newspapers).Findings included:
Local news was of high interest. Experiences in the past, and potential impact on their own lives, affected current news interests. There was a range of source preferences. The internet was the primary source for only a few (although for a large number it was common to come across news stories whilst browsing), with print newspapers popular, and TV, radio and word of mouth were also used. Therefore it was evident that people were using a mix of sources to get a picture of what was going on. Reasons for a preference for print included convenience, or it was part of the lifestyle (e.g. liking visiting the library), or because it was readily available in the places they relaxed or lived. TV was liked because it enabled news sharing with others.
Social networking tools were mostly used for communication rather than news, and blogs were distrusted, since participants didn't want "just anyone's" opinion. In contrast, major national TV and newspaper online sites were trusted. There seemed to be a good deal of incidental information acquisition (encountering as I would call it, using Erdelez' term)
Finally, for everyday life information, "the majority were more likely to use Google"; some were unaware of newspaper features like job listings, and they might search for things like "what's on" or used cars, rather than thinking of these as things covered by newspapers.
These finding contradict the literature or opinions that sees traditional media having a steeply declining role. The sample was well educated, which may have an influence. The aggregation of news into personal communication seems important.

i3 report: Opening keynote #i3_conference

I am attending the i3 conference at the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen http://www.i3conference2011.org.uk/ and I'll be doing some reports from it.
The first keynote was from Dr. Eric Meyer, on Engaging with Information: Knowledge in the Digital Age. I won't try to summarise all of his talk, but just pick out a few things. He works at the Oxford Internet Institute. Meyer is particularly interested in e-research. He has proposed a matrix, with collaboration complexity on one axis and computational complexity on the other axis. For example face to face meetings are lower in computational complexity and high in collaboration complexity, and text mining tools are high in computational compelexity and lower in collaborative complexity. He thinks this could be one way of looking at e-science behaviour and they used it in the study of humanities scholars that I blogged about a little while ago.
He cited a paper
Wuchty et al (2007) "The increasing dominance of teams in the production of knowledge." Science, 316 (5827), 1036-1039.
looking at the size of teams writing academic articles: which is increasing, even (slightly) in the humanities. Meyer highlighted a couple of examples of scientists or scholars "harnessing the power of the crowd", or "distributing brainpower": one was members of the public helping to idenify the form of items in the huge number of pictures taken of far galaxies (including a Dutch primary school teacher identifying a new phenomenon), another was a wiki on Pynchon's books, and another was being able to (effectively) track whales by getting people to submit whale pictures, and matching them up visually. Formalising the latter initiative into a project "SPLASH" with 500 identified observers, they have got some good data on migration patterns and a better idea of whale numbers. Meyer is also interested in the changes that takes place when people move from analog/print to digital and he talked about that in the context of a couple of his studies (including the whales).
Meyer mentioned a research approach that he uses in social informatics research, and I am going to follow up on. It sounded interesting, and there is an explanation here:
Meyer, E. (2005) "Socio-Technical Interaction Networks: A Discussion of the Strengths, Weaknesses and Future of Kling’s STIN Model." In Berleur, J., Numinen, M.I., Impagliazzo, J., (Eds.), IFIP International Federation for Information Processing, Volume 223, Social Informatics: An Information Society for All? In Remembrance of Rob Kling (pp. 37-48). Boston: Springer. http://mypage.iu.edu/~etmeyer/files/HCC7_STIN_Meyer.pdf
Photo by Sheila Webber: Hanging basket, St Nicholas, Aberdeen, June 2011.