LILAC impressions

The chatlog (transcript) of the discussion Impressions from the LILAC (information literacy) conference, held in Second Life on Infolit iSchool on 23rd April, is available. Three of us each highlighted a session we'd enjoyed. Vicki Cormie talked about Andrew Walsh's session on using mobile phones, Marshall Dozier talked about Peter Godwin's, which also focused on mobiles, and I talked about Sally Patalong's account of two information literacy modules (credit bearing) that she runs. The chatlog is posted at http://sleeds.org/chatlog/?c=397

Information Literacy/ Second Life event today

This takes place within SL, the virtual world, and you need a SL avatar and the SL browser installed on your computer.
Impressions of the LILAC conference.
Thurs 23 April, 12noon - 1pm SLT (8-9pm UK time)
Infolit iSchool, http://slurl.com/secondlife/Infolit%20iSchool/130/241/21/
Some LILAC participants will highlight sessions they liked. Share your impressions too!

LILAC reports: other people's blogs

I'm still away on holiday for a few days. I think I have pretty much finished up on my LILAC conference reports: you can find them all with http://information-literacy.blogspot.com/
search/label/lilac09. Additionally, here are some links to other people's LILAC blog postings. If I haven't picked yours up, do leave a comment (I moderate comments, so they may take a day to appear).
Firstly, a number of postings at http://lilac09.blogspot.com/, written by Information Advisers from Learning and Academic Services, Sheffield Hallam University.


Then there are a number of other individuals:
Sarah Faye Cohen
Sarah Whittaker
Vicki Owen
Katie Fraser
John Wright
Jane Secker who also does a blog round up
Moira Bent here and here
Photo by Sheila Webber: Cherry blossom on boat, Amsterdam, April 2009

LILAC report: Information Literacy and Second Life

At LILAC I gave a symposium about information literacy in virtual worlds, together with Vicki Cormie (St Andrews University), Denny Colledge, Marshall Dozier (both Edinburgh University), and Lyn Parker (Sheffield University). Lyn and Denny participated in Second Life and so we did a lot of technology fiddling beforehand: on the day we used Marshall's laptop (connected to Edinburgh University VPN) as the most reliable connection for the main screen, and Vicki and I also logged in so that we could switch round if there were any problems with Marshall's computer.
The two themes were: what does it mean to be information literate in Second Life, and how can virtual worlds be used to develop real life information literacy. I talked first of all about some forms of information in Second Life, and drew some implications from a study carried out by my students. Next, Lyn contributed her thoughts on information literacy in SL, typing into text chat (which was legible on teh big screen). Finally on this theme, Vicki showed people round the St Andrews University management school area on their Second Life island.
For the second theme, all those in SL teleported over to Infolit iSchool and I showed my model of the SCONUL 7 Pillars of information literacy in Second Life and talked a little about using it to develop information literacy. Then Lyn again contributed from within SL and finally Marshall talked about intellectual property issues, and how discussion about copyright can be stimulated by looking at copyright issues within SL.
We didn't show powerpoint, but we used some slides for a handout and that is linked below. We also created a delicious set of bookmarks, which we will add to. That is at http://delicious.com/LILACSL
The link to the powerpoint is: http://www.slideshare.net/sheilawebber/aspects-of-information-literacy-in-virtual-worlds

Aspects of information literacy in virtual worlds

View more presentations from sheilawebber.

LILAC conference: Sheffield University

There was a good participation from Sheffield University at the LILAC conference, and I might as well trumpet that here. I gave a symposium about Information Literacy in Second Life (together with Vicki Cormie, Lyn Parker, Marshall Dozier and Denny Colledge). I intend to blog that separately.
Three of the five free student places were taken by students on our MA Librarianship programme: Samantha Abrahams, Susan Clayton and Katie Fraser. Another one of my students, George Davies, also came down for the day to collect data for a mini-project that he and another of my "Information Literacy Research" module students are doing: asking delegates "What book, article or web resource do you think has been the most inspirational for your teaching and learning philosophy?" This parallels a study done at the US "LOEX of the West" conference, so they will be comparing results.
Students from outside our Department participated at LILAC, as the CILASS student film team had produced a film about students and information literacy: the session from Alison Bestwick, Claire Taylor, Adam O’Leary and Tanya Murphy was called The reality of information literacy: does Joe Student actually understand what’s going on?. This will be on Youtube and I will post the address when it goes on.
My colleague Sheila Corrall and CILASS’ Pam McKinney ran a session on Exploring Information Literacy through inquiry. Finally, we had two posters: Pam McKinney compiled one on our information literacy week, and Claire Scott (Library) and Bob McKay (School of English) provided one on An information Literacy intervention in the School of English at the University of Sheffield using IBL workshops.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Tulips in a Radford vase, March 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

LILAC report: Patricia Iannuzzi

I said that I would provide some notes from Patricia Iannuzzi’s keynote at the LILAC conference, but I will make them very brief! She was mainly emphasising the need to keep in touch with wider developments in Higher Education (rather than just library developments). She then summarised some important developments of this kind in the USA. Iannuzzi highlighted how she identified statements that were about information literacy in high level documents and influential books (even when that wasn’t the term used). One title she referred to here was Derek Bok’s Our underachieving colleges (Princeton University Press, 2005). She also referred to a couple of studies from the AAC&U, including one which was surveying employers’ views on what skills and knowledge graduates should have/more of. Items she mentioned included the LEAP initiative (http://www.aacu.org/leap/index.cfm) and the publication: AAC&U (2007) College learning for the new global century. http://www.aacu.org/advocacy/leap/documents/GlobalCentury_final.pdf

LILAC report: Research informed teaching

I was one of the judges for the CILASS “best Inquiry Based Learning” paper at the LILAC (information literacy) conference last week (photo taken as everyone was leaving...) The highly commended paper was Research informed teaching, information literacy and the inquiry-based learning nexus, from Geoff Walton and Alison Pope at Staffordshire University. It made the connection between information literacy and inquiry based learning clear, and we also liked the way that it addressed the strategic issues as well as giving examples from practice.
The presenters cited both Healey’s matrix of the research-teaching nexus and the one developed by my colleagues in CILASS, Phil Levy and Bob Petrulis (CILASS, 2008, link below). These highlight the different roles and approaches that a student may have, from being more passive recipients of research content in their subject, to being active researchers and thus discovering new areas of the knowledge base for themselves.
At Staffordshire they had managed to hook information literacy learning outcomes into a major learning outcome that had been identified university-wide, namely “enquiry”. The presenters noted that getting information literacy explicitly mentioned was less contentious than they thought it might be. It was obviously useful having information literacy identified at this top level, since Departments have to identify that they are addressing these top level learning outcomes.
They gave several examples of work with information literacy in specific courses: Sport and Exercise; Art and Design; Law and Sociology and Psychology. Different approaches emerged in different courses, from integrated exercises and use of discussion boards, to use of assessments which explicitly address ability to use library resources effectively. Another notable thing was the value of having library staff seconded as teaching fellows. As well as freeing up time to develop initiatives, it also signalled that library staff are educators too.

Centre for Inquiry Based Learning in the Arts and Social Sciences. (2008) Inquiry-based Learning: a conceptual framework. Sheffield: CILASS. http://www.shef.ac.uk/content/1/c6/07/93/44/Microsoft%20Word%20-%20CILASS%20IBL%20Conceptual%20Framework%20_Version%202_.pdf
Walton, G. et al (2007) “Using online collaborative learning to enhance information literacy delivery in a Level 1 module: an evaluation.” Journal of information literacy, 1 (1), 13-30. http://jil.lboro.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/JIL/article/view/RA-V1-I1-2007-2/3

LILAC conference: using research trails

I'm back from the LILAC conference and will finish up reports from it over the next few weeks. In this post I will summarise some points from a presentation by Rebecca Mogg, Senior Subject Librarian at Cardiff University: The pathway to success? Using research trails for summative assessment. She was describing work she had done with the School of Journalism in a core year 1 module of 129 students. Students were assessed by an essay, a portfolio, seminar contributions and - for 15% of the class marks - a research trail. It was this latter part that Rebecca taught and assessed (and she noted how much time marking takes up - too true!)
She had 3 x 50 minute workshops and a one hour lecture (in which she explained what would happen in the workshops). For the research trail, the students had to provide a full reference for each item in the essay's bibliography, say how they found it and say why they selected it. Thus it was tied in with the other parts of the assessment, but Rebecca emphasised that you "need to make the relevance of the approach clear to students".
There was discussion afterwards about consistency in marking: to make this assessment viable with large classes the marking load needs to be spread, and this can introduce inconsistency, even when there are clear criteria for assigning marks. People agreed that training those who were marking, and those who were teaching, was important, when it moved beyond being one person's job.
One improvement for next time was going to be marrying up the research trail and the essay of the same student. Certainly I find this useful: indeed be able to cross reference the two is one function of asking for a reflective search report, since it can help in (hopefully) detering or (at worst) identifying plagiarism (we use a reflective information literacy report in a few of our modules).
Photo by Sheila Webber: Cardiff gardens, April 2009

LILAC conference: needs of PhD students

Jane Secker and Rowena Micrae-Gibson were talking on Tuesday about Reflecting on the needs of PhD students: developing information skills at the London School of Economics. They started by referring to the RIN report and the CIBER report. At LSE there had been provision of various kinds for PhD students, but they felt they could improve. They had revamped a Moodle course, and a focus group gave some useful feedback on this, but was also a catalyst to do even more. They already had an information skills class in place, but it was in need of thorough revision to make it a coherent class. It is called MI512 Information Literacy: Tools for Research : http://www.lse.ac.uk/library/insktr/methinst.htm

The revised class is a six week programme of 2 hour workshops, supported by Moodle. It has an introduction to literature searching, and sessions on using different kinds of literature, citing and referencing, managing references using EndNote, and keeping up to date. The course has proved popular, and they are doing it in each one of their three terms. It has proved useful to have feedback from people in their teaching and learning centre (teaching observation), and the speakers were also reflecting on their practice for the teaching certificate that they were taking. Changes they have made include having less powerpoint, a clearer structure to each session, more detailed workbooks which include exercises for more advanced students, and other strategies to help students who have diverse backgrounds, skills and needs. They have had some excellent feedback from students and noted that librarians shouldn't be shy about publicising the good feedback they get.

They summing up what they've learned about what researchers need. One thing was that this was not a Google generation: students were struggling with concepts like RSS and the presenters had overestimated people's familiarity with library services. However, the students were very motivated to learn and valued the librarians expertise. Thus it became evident that this type of course can make a difference and change researchers' behaviour.

Photo by Sheila Webber: weeeping cherry, Cardiff, March 2009

LILAC conference - ARGOSI

On Tuesday I was in a session at the LILAC conference about the ARGOSI project. This was a JISC funded project to support student induction via a gaming environment - to give students a focus and context. There is a website here: http://playthinklearn.net/argosi.htm. The aims of the project were to see whether an alternate reality game could:
- meet the intended learning outcomes of the library and information skills induction;
- create social networks during the induction period;
- improve students' confidence in navigating the city and university campus;
- engage in, and enjoy, the induction experience.
An Alternate Reality Game (ARG) does not have to be wholly online, but rather has real world and online aspects, unfolding over time and with material built by the players as they go along and a lot of collaborative work. There's also the idea that people "discover" the ARG, to make it more attractive & exciting.
Bob Class (ictured at the conference, with Christine Irving), Emily Shields and Rosie Jones described the "Viola" game, an induction activity they had developed for students. It starts with a postcard from "Viola" saying "please help me" and pointing students to a blog where the problem is described (http://violaquest.blogspot.com/ , although this is not yet set up for the next induction). It poses a series of challenges to help Viola find the pieces of a map.

The challenges make students learn about the City of Manchester, and learn some information skills, and they need to collaborate to achieve things (e.g. to prodce pictures of someone standing beside a landmark in Manchester starting with every letter of the alphabet). There is thus an overarching storyline (which lasted 8 weeks) and customisable sub-plots.
In our session at LILAC we were divided into teams and we tackled some of the challenges that were wholly online, which involved puzzling skills and a variety of other skills/knowledge (e.g. recognisingthe pitch of a musical note, or knowing how to show the source code of a web page). I proved to be pretty dreadful at this and was soon wanting to google for the cheat sheet ... in the real exercise, students can use the online forums to share tips. It did get us interacting and sharing ideas of how to solve the problems!
The team handed out a sheet which showed how they had mapped information literacy learning outcomes onto some of the puzzles, including ones which were about using the library (e.g. one puzzle was solved by finding the Dewey number of a book and adding together the numbers, giving practice in searching the catalogue and awareness of the numbers).
Different students respond to different motivators so, for example, there is a leaderboard for those who like competition and the discussion forums for people who like sharing. The students needed to know why they were doing the challenges (what was in it for them), and writing challenges/puzzles that were both enjoyable and meeting learning outcomes was hard work!
The team noted that it was best not to start this exercise in induction week as so much else was going on. Instead they aimed next time to start it pre-induction and resume after induction week.
The ARG engine itself is open source so others can take it, put it on their server and customise it. The team are also writing support documentation

LILAC report: using student learning journals

Claire McGuinness was talking today about using student journals to develop an information literacy module. I use students' reflective reports as assessment in a number of modules, so I was interested to hear about Claire's experience.

Students are required to write reflective research journals which Claire sees as authentic assessment, encouraging students' reflection on their learning. This also encourages a reflective approach to teaching practice, since the student reflections can stimulate the teacher to change his or her learning, teaching and assessment methods. Caire talked about how reading the student journals can challenge your assumptions and trigger changes in your teaching practice.

Claire emphasised the need fornauthentic assessment: this concept is described by Callison as "an evaluation process that involves multiple forms of performance measurement reflecting the student's learning, achievement, motivation, and attitudes on instructionally-relevant activities." (taken from the article here: http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/aasl/
aaslpubsandjournals/slmrb/editorschoiceb/
infopower/selectcallison85.cfm)
When discussing the need for reflective learning Claire referred to the different kinds of knowledge: declarative knowledge (knowing what to do); procedural knowledge (knowing how to use strategies and skills in a given context) and conditional knowledge (knowing when and why to use the strategies). Planning, monitoring and evaluating are seen as skills that can help you develop this metacognition.
Claire referred to the work of Jennifer Moon who is a key person in the field (e.g. A Handbook of Reflective and Experiential Learning: Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2004) and to some recent articles from librarians e.g. Diller, K. and Phelps, S. (2008) "Learning Outcomes, Portfolios, and Rubrics, Oh My! Authentic Assessment of an Information Literacy Program." portal: Libraries and the Academy, 8 (1), 75-89.
Claire herself runs a first year class in information literacy. To start with she used Stripling & Pitts' model of the search process as the structure, but now she has backgrounded this. Assessment is by essay, journal, and (15%) tutorial attendance. There are weekly diary entries over 6 weeks, with goals, activities, readings, and at the end questions such as "What did I enjoy most" "what have I learnt". Reading about what they found problematic or enjoyable was useful feedback for teaching.
One area that students had problems was narrowing down the topic for their essay. Students were given broad topic areas and had to each choose a narrower topic to focus on. At that point she reviewed whether this was central to the aim of the class, or whether this was something that was providing an unneccessary barrier to confidence and development. Therefore she now gives more clearly defined topics, so they can focus on other important areas. This shows the need to review even those subjects or activities that you start by thinking is essential. The other change that she picked out was using e-portfolios, with different types of material included, such as class exercises, with more specific requirements for the reflective postings.

An article that Claire wrote a couple of years ago on this subject is:
McGuinness, C. (2007) "Using reflective journals to assess the research process." Reference services review, 35 (1), 21-40.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Tulips and pink forget-me-not in Cardiff today.

LILAC Day 2: Lesley Burger

There were two keynotes today, from Patricia Iannuzzi, Dean of Libraries at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and Leslie Burger, who has been director of the Princeton Public Library since 1999. I'll make some notes about Patricia's talk in another post. I missed some of Burger's talk, unfortunately, as I was testing things out for our Second Life session, but I did catch some of it. She was emphasising the role of public libraries, but also the need for school libraries and information literacy in schools. In the US this has been hindered by the closure of quite a number of school libraries, because of changes in education policy, pushing resources elsewhere.

She gave some examples of public libraries offering services supporting lifelong information literacy skills, including IT skills (Princeton have a Technology Center which offers a lot of training sessions). Burger highlighted that there is currently an enhanced role in helping the increased number of job seekers - for example people suddenly neding a job and out of touch with the need for online seeking and job application. In summary she emphasises monitoring trends in information consumption, Web 2.0 and so forth, the need to "market your heart out", making information seeking real fun, helping people solve real life problems (like helping people cope with the economic downturn and its impact on their lives), investing in technology, collaborating in the "village" (community you are in), and be in unexpected places (where people will be pleasantly surprised to see you).

Photo by Sheila Webber: haven't taken many in Cardiff yet, so this is another of Spring in Sheffield

LILAC conference

Monday was the first day of the UK's LILAC conference, the UK's main information literacy conference. I arrived a bit late, as I had been involved in moderating sessions in a big education conference in Second Life at the weekend, which had gone on rather late (since most of the rest of the organising committee were from North America). Anyway, I missed the opening keynote, but may be able to pick up some views on that elsewhere. (Just seen a good long post about it from Sarah Cohen here: she is doing numerous posts at the Sheck Spot http://thesheckspot.blogspot.com/)
The conference website is here, the conference is in Cardiff, and there are several tracks on at once so it is hard to choose! My choices this afternoon were:
Christopher Walker, talking about his PhD research into parents' use and understanding of information. It is a qualitative study, involving interviews with parents from a mix of socio-economic groups. Christopher has done the interviews and transcription, and he is analysing the data.
Various themes are emerging (the analysis is not finished yet) including the importance of trusting the source - or choosing someone you trust (it is often a person) as a source of information (rather than going to a book or un-known/un-trusted expert). "The system" (e.g. finding your way through the health system to get you child care) is a hindrance and causes fear - a divide emerges between the professionals who can and do use their knowledge and contacts to get on top of the system, and those from lower socio-economic classes who don't/can't.

After this talk, I went to support one of my PhD students, Shahd Salha, who was talking about her research into Syrian school librarians concepts of information literacy. She explained the situation in Syria, where there are few professionally qualified librarians in schools; it is more often school teachers moved into the post. Shahd has done interviews with school librarians and followed this immediately with a one week training course in information literacy that she organised. She is following this up with a second round of interviews in a few months time, to see if if ideas about information literacy have changed.

Finally, I attended a session from Moira Bent, a librarian, and Elizabeth Stockton, a lecturer in Environmental Science, both from Newcastle University. They have collaborated to create a "golden thread" of information literacy through the Environmental Science course, with aspects of information literacy progressed and assessed explicitly through the three years of the programme.
They mentioned what I think is a sensible use of a pre/post questionnaire: students self assess their information at the start of the class, but Moira and Elizabeth expect that the self-assessment will be lower at the end of the first year than the beginning. This doesn't mean the students' information literacy is worse, but rather that they are getting better able to reflect on and judge their own abilities.
Moira also mentioned the information skills kit at Newcastle: http://www.ncl.ac.uk/library/staff/infolit/toolkit/
This rather oblique photo of Moira (right) was taken when she came tospeak tomy students 10 days ago, and she is shown with our visitors from Warsaw University.