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

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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SUILCoP workshop

The next Staffordshire University Information Literacy Community of Practice (SUILCoP) workshop is on 29 April 2009 at Staffordshire University from 1.30-4.30 pm. Nancy Graham, University of Birmingham: Designing Reusable Learning Objects for Information Literacy: the BRUM project at The University of Birmingham. Keith Puttick, Staffordshire University: The 'Enquiring minds project': information literacy and research-informed teaching.
Book a place: on-line booking form: http://www.staffs.ac.uk/suilcop/bookingform
Photo by Sheila Webber: Sheffield, March 2009

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ISIC - past proceedings

A Website for the ISIC (information Seeking in Context) information behaviour resaerch conference is now at http://informationr.net/isic/ It has links to the papers from 2004, 2006 and 2008 that were published in Information Research, and also scans of the proceedings of the 1996 and 1998 conferences. The latter were not so easy to get hold of, and have papers which are still of interest. The scans are not top quality, but legible.
The 2010 ISIC conference will take place in Murcia, Spain from 28th September to 2nd October, 2010. A call for papers will be issued shortly.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Sheffield, March 2009

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Nordic Journal of Information Literacy

The first issue of the Nordic Journal of Information Literacy in Higher Education is online. The three main articles are:
Uncertainty Dimensions of Information Behaviour in a Group Based Problem Solving by Jette Hyldegård
A New Conception of Information Literacy for the Digital Environment in Higher Education by Sharon Markless
Google Scholar compared to Web of Science. A Literature Review by Susanne Mikki
http://noril.uib.no/

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Digital Britain

The Digital Britain report that was published by the UK's Department of Culture Media and Sport at the end of January has received a good deal of attention. I notice that the article that was printed in Information World Review has been published on the web in a different magazine. Comments from Lynne Brindley and Tim Buckley-Owen are featured. '“There are deep-seated information literacy challenges to be tackled,” said Buckley Owen. “It’s not just a question of people knowing what buttons to push. We need to ensure everyone has the skills to recognise what is worth having and what’s garbage.”'
Venkatraman, A. (2009)"Britain creeps towards digital destiny." Personal Computer World, March 9. http://www.pcw.co.uk/information-world-review/analysis/2238091/britain-creeps-towards-digital
Photo by Sheila Webber: Sheffield, March 2009.

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Young People and Emerging Digital Services

A recent publication, presenting a survey of about 5,000 young people from 4 countries (France, UK, Spain and Germany), is:
Lusoli, W., & Miltgen, C. (2009). Young People and Emerging Digital Services. An Exploratory Survey on Motivations, Perceptions and Acceptance of Risks (JRC Scientific and Technical Reports; EUR 23765 EN). Sevilla: EC JRC IPTS. http://ipts.jrc.ec.europa.eu/publications/pub.cfm?id=2119
It surveys attitudes and behaviours with electronic identification systems. They found that young people were aware and concerned about risks, although they have low awareness of data protection laws and varying understanding of different kinds of technology, and it also identifies young peopel as "Web 2.0 experts". However, there were different attitudes and behaviours in different groups by country/ gender.
Photo by Sheila Webber, Euphorbia, March 2009

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Visitors from Poland

Last week we were happy to host Zuzanna Wiorogorska and Agnieszka Wrobel, from the University of Warsaw Library, in my Department , supported by an ERASMUS grant (the previous week they were with Sheffield University Library). They observed some of our classes, including the Information Literacy Research class that I coordinate (and which this week featured Moira Bent talking about her research, and her experience as a practitioner-researcher). Zuzanna and Agnieszka said that at present there is no specific phrase for Information Literacy in Polish and there isn't a conference devoted to information literacy (although the topic is covered in other conferences).

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German IL study

An item mentioned on Thomas Hapke's blog recently is a report (in German) from academics at the University of Augsburg
Heinze, N., Fink, J., Wolf, S. (2009). Informationskompetenz und wissenschaftliches Arbeiten: Studienergebnisse und Empfehlungen zur wissenschaftlichen Recherche im Hochschulstudium. Augsburg: Universität Augsburg,
Medienpädagogik. (Arbeitsbericht; 21) (Information literacy and academic work: results and attitudes towards research in academic studies)
http://www.imb-uni-augsburg.de/files/Arbeitsbericht_21.pdf

Photo by Sheila Webber: Western Park, Sheffield, March 2009.

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Delicious

I was just searching Delicious (the social bookmarking website) and was noting again that because you can't tag phrases as phrases, information literacy comes up in various guises e.g.
http://delicious.com/tag/
informationliteracy
http://delicious.com/
popular/information_literacy
http://delicious.com/tag/information_literacy (that's actually the same tag as the previous one, but a different display)
http://delicious.com/tag/infolit

A recent bookmark I happened to notice was: Millennial Students’ Mental Models of Search Tools, a poster presented at the ACRL conference 2009 by Lucy Holman, University of Baltimore, USA. This reports on a survey/observation of a small sample of students.
http://langsdale.ubalt.edu/ACRL/millennials.pdf
I don't have my own delicious page, by the way, as I tend to use this blog for my information literacy bookmarking (you can of course search the blog using the box in the top left of the home page, and I have been using tags for a couple of years, although I haven't yet put the tag list on the home page).
Photo by Sheila Webber: Daffodils (and the odd beer can) outside the star and Garter pub, Sheffield, March 2009.

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EnIL International School on Business Information Literacy

An EnIL International School on Business Information Literacy is being held in Rome, Italy at the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, 13-17 October 2008. Participation is open to European citizens - from both EU and non-EU countries - and to North American, and Australian citizens. http://enil.ceris.cnr.it/SummerSchool/index.htm

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OCLC Report Highlights Scholarly Behavior in Virtual Environments

Published in January, on a commision from OCLC Research:
Palmer, C.L., Teffeau, L.C. and Pirmann, C.M. (2009). Scholarly Information Practices in the Online Environment: Themes from the Literature and Implications for Library Service Development. Dublin, Ohio: OCLC. http://www.oclc.org/programs/
publications/reports/2009-02.pdf
It focuses in particular on highlightling disciplinary differences revealed in the literature, and organises the report by focusing on particular information activities (using Ellis' model of information seeking as a key starting point). At the end it draws out recommendations for how libraries can best contribute to teh process.
It is a useful review, although I think it is a pity that, whilst including reference to the extent to which scholars use people (peers etc) as sources of information, when it comes to aligning scholarly activities with library services, the library services are all (I think) to do with published sources. I would have thought there could have been some recommendations about how librarians could be using their information management and Web 2.0 skills to support/ facilitate informal scholarly information exchange.
Photo by Sheila Webber: March 2009

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Academic copyright revealed

Lordllama has produced some information & library related Youtube videos featuring hand puppets: Goose the librarian, Professor Weasel the academic etc. They include Librarian's Guide to...Understanding Academic Copyright http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7giW7efQggo
Thanks to Daniela Petrelli for spotting this one

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Educator's spotlight

Educator's Spotlight is the free online publication of the SOS project. The Fall 2008 / Winter 2009, Volume 3, Issue 2 includes accounts of a couple of summer college initiatives for students, in information literacy and reading. http://www.sosspotlight.org/
Photo by Sheila Webber: Muffins for breakfast, March 2009. (I hope I'm not becoming a food blogger)

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Clever.com

Thanks to Richard Wakeford for alerting me to Analysis: Clever.com - part of the Analysis series on BBC Radio 4. There is a transcript and at the moment you can also "listen again" (this will change when the next episode in the series is broadcast, you can only listen again to the current one)
"A growing number of scientists are concerned that we are creating a digital generation, growing up online but unable to think, concentrate and learn in the way that their forebears did. Kenan Malik examines the latest research to ask whether they are right to worry - or whether we should we asking wider questions about how we all use new technology." It includes contributions from Tara Brabazon and David Nicholas.
In my superficial Generation V way I skimmed a bit at a start and a bit at the end. The end says "Old-fashioned abilities to read deeply, research thoroughly and think broadly were embedded in a culture that valued such reading, researching and thinking. One does not have to be nostalgic about a mythical golden age to recognize that that culture itself has become eroded. Flicking and bouncing may be a reflection of the character not of video games or the Internet but of the culture that we now inhabit, a culture that increasingly celebrates banality and shallowness. Perhaps we should worry less about the technology, and more about the culture that shapes the way we use it. "
Go to: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/analysis/7935725.stm
Photo by Sheila Webber: On Friday some colleagues and I were recording our reflections on a module we team-teach. Ruby the plush red squirrel proved the perfect microphone-holder.

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Using Netvibes In a business Intelligence class

This semester one of the modules I coordinate is a Business Intelligence module taken by level 3 (final year) undergraduates. The assessment is producing an analytical business report about a company (together with a reflection on the student's information literacy in carrying out the assignment). As part of a session on environmental scanning & keeping up to date I put together a Netvibes page illustrating how you can use a free application like Netvibes to monitor news. Then I asked the students to create their own Netvibes page, with the aim of identifying sources that have news feeds, to help them monitor their company whilst they are preparting their assignment.
My Netvibes page for this class is at http://www.netvibes.com/inf304#General It has feeds from some general business sources (e.g. a Financial Times twitter feed and news feed), specialist sources (e.g. Talking Retail news), offical agencies (e.g. the London Stock Exchange and Ofcom) and local news (in this case, the Sheffield Star). I also put on feeds from a couple of blogs (Karen Blakeman's and Phil Bradley's), a journal (Business Information Review) and a website (FUMSI) that have information about business information. The tab on this Netvibes page has links to pages that list some RSS feeds (e.g. the relevant page on the FT site). In case you wonder why the page is called inf304, that's the module code.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Killiney, Ireland, September 2003.

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Visit from Scottish Information Literacy Project

Today Dr John Crawford and Christine Irving (pictured), of the Scottish Information Literacy Project, visited my Department. They gave a seminar for our Information Literacy Research module (which is an optional module I lead, available on our Masters programmes). They also gave a research presentation to other staff and students, as part of the Centre for Information Literacy Research series. In both sessions they gave an insight into the development of the project and of the Scottish Information Literacy Framework, and described their valuable research into workplace information literacy. I have blogged their articles etc. as they came out, so I will just mention the home page of their project http://www.caledonian.ac.uk/ils/ and one of the things they mentioned, the Royal Society of Arts' (RSA) Opening Minds project.

This has been going for a number of years, so I imagine those in the UK schools sector will be familiar with it. Opening Minds "aims to help schools to provide young people with the real world skills or competencies they need to thrive in the real world. It is a broad framework through which schools can deliver the content of the national curriculum in a creative and flexible way so that young people leave school able to thrive in and to shape the real world. .... It is based on five sets of competencies, including Citizenship, Learning, Managing Information, Managing Situations and Relating to People". "Managing Information" is essentially Information Literacy (rather than Information Management), so the studennt should have "developed a range of techniques for accessing, evaluating and differentiating information and have learned how to analyse, synthesise and apply them; understood the importance of reflecting and applying critical judgement, and have learned how to do so."
http://www.thersa.org/projects/education/opening-minds

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NES Information Literacy Framework

The NHS Education for Scotland Information Literacy Framework is in its final revision stage and comments are welcomed. The Framework is divided into a series of 8 booklets. There is an introduction to information literacy, a glossary, a booklet on IL's relationship to occupational standards, one looking at information literacy from a patient's perspective, and so forth. There are links to the booklets from the following page, and a questionnaire at the bottom of the page for you to give feedback.
http://www.infoliteracy.scot.nhs.uk/information-literacy-framework.aspx

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53 things

There was a "53 things" series of short books produced by some prominent educational developers a while ago, which still have a lot of value in their advice and approach. The ones which are still in print are now being sold through Amazon for £6 each through the "53" storefront
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/
shops/storefront/index.html?ie=UTF8&
marketplaceID=A1F83G8C2ARO7P&
sellerID=A1IKK8YGON0GEG

Titles include:
Habeshaw, S., Habeshaw, T. and Gibbs, G. 53 Problems with Large Classes – making the best of a bad job
Habeshaw, S., Habeshaw, T. and Gibbs, G. 53 Interesting Things to do in Your Seminars and Tutorials
The money from sales will "contribute to raising funds for Academic Staff Development Centres in African countries and, where contacts are made, further afield."
Photo by Sheila webber: Saturday lunch, March 2009.

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WILU registration opens

Registration for the Canadian Information Literacy conference, WILU 2009 (38th Annual Workshop on Instruction in Library Use), opens on March 17th.
The conference takes place at Concordia University, Montréal, Québec, Canada May 25-27, 2009. The programme can now be viewed at http://library.concordia.ca/wilu2009/programme-en.php
Photo by Sheila Webber: Crocus, Sheffield, March 2009.

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International Women's Day

Tomorrow is International Women's Day: lots of information here: http://www.international
womensday.com/

Photo by Sheila Webber: there was voting for Student Union reps this week on my campus

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Mentoring between students

Thomas Hapke mentions an initiative at the Technische Universitat Hamburg-Harburg where older students of engineering and IT mentor younger students as regards study skills including information literacy "StartING@TUHH : Tutorien zum selbstorganisierten Studieren und Lernen für das erste Studienjahr" (tutoring for self-managing your studies and learning in first year). There is info in German here . Mentoring programmes seem increasingly popular in the UK, and I think I have mentioned before the initiative in the English Department here at Sheffield University where 3rd year students mentor 1st years in their information skills (see http://www.shef.ac.uk/cilass/cases/historyofenglish.html - the links to the full documents are on the right of the page). This seems to be a good way of improving skills of both sets of students and increasing their enthusiasm.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Feb 2009

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New articles

Wales, T. and Robertson, P. (2008) "Captivating Open University students with online literature search tutorials created using screen capture software." Program, 42 (4), 365-381. (This includes a description of the production phases and reflection on the challenges)

Mansourian, Y., Ford, N., Webber, S. and Madden, A (2008) "An integrative model of 'information visibility' and 'information seeking' on the web." Program, 42 (4), 402-417. (This documents the key models arising from Yazdan Mansourian's doctoral research, for which Nigel Ford and I were supervisors. Yazdan maintains his blog at http://invisibleweblog.blogspot.com/)
Photo by Sheila Webber: It's tough out on the streets, Sheffield, Feb 2009

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New book: Information skills for education students

A recently published book:
Richardson, L. and McBryde-Wilding, H. (2008) Information skills for education students. Exeter: Learning Matters. ISBN 978184451906 (paperback, 104pp, £10) info@learningmatter.co.uk (As the title implies, this is specifically for students studying education)

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Librarian's guide to gaming

On Monday the American Library Association launched the Librarian’s Guide to Gaming: An Online Toolkit for Building Gaming @ your library . "The toolkit includes a wide range of resources to help librarians create, fund and evaluate gaming experiences in the library." It refers to traditional games, board games, and not just computer ones. "Games of every type play an important role in developing fundamental competencies for life,” said ALA President Jim Rettig. “They require players to learn and follow complex sets of rules, make strategic and tactical decisions, and, collaborate with teammates and others, –all things they will have to do in college and in the workforce." There is an FAQ, resources, examples etc. The home page is at http://librarygamingtoolkit.org/ and there is a section about the connection between gaming and literacy at http://librarygamingtoolkit.org/literacy.html
Photo by Sheila Webber: Not sure if it's authorised, Sheffield University, February 2009.

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Moving Information Literacy Forward in Canada

The Canadian Library Association conference takes place in Montreal, Canada, 29 May- 1 June 2009. One of the pre-conference events is Moving Information Literacy Forward in Canada on 29th May 2009. http://www.cla.ca/conference/2009/

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Assessing the Nation’s Health Literacy

In late 2008 was published for the first time a full report on the 2003 study which included investigation of health literacy in the USA. Three types of task were used to measure health literacy: Clinical tasks (e.g. involving medication; Preventive tasks (selfcare, healthy habits etc.); Navigation tasks (negotiating your way round the health system - which in the USA includes more stuff to do with health insureance).
White, S. (2008) Assessing the Nation’s Health Literacy: Key concepts and findings of the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL). National Center for Education Statistics. http://www.ama-assn.org/ama1/pub/upload/mm/367/hl_report_2008.pdf
I found out about this from: http://healthliteracy-forhealthandwellbeing.blogspot.com/

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