Web 2.0 Untangled: 1

Today I'm at the #web2untangled Web 2.0 Untangled conference in Oxford, organised by UC&R and COFHE. Peter Godwin started off the day with a talk entitled Library 2.0: bah humbug?. He began by highlighting how the number of older (50+) users has increased dramatically, and that we are finally entering a phase where e-books are getting used and not just hyped. Talking about the pervasiveness of mobile technology, he mentioned the ECAR study of undergraduate students and technology.
Peter thought it was the time to reflect on how useful Web 2.0 was, and what it was really for, as librarians tend to be enthusiatic about it, but students don't really use the range of Web 2.0 tools (e.g. are less likely to blog and use social bookmarking sites). He mentioned a new JISC report Managing students's expectations of university. One role of librarians is helping students to see how they can use tools like Netvibes to keep on top of material for their studies.
Coming to information literacy, Peter emphasised that librarians have a big role, but weren't the only people who were concerned with it. He felt that for information literacy in future, sifting and evaluation would be more important than search. Helping students to scope the topic was also important: students finding it hard to understand how they can home in on what they are supposed to be addressing.
In terms of creating material, Peter talked about Screenr (here is one of his videos), which I've been using for a while (though I've mostly used it to create videos about Second Life so far).
His final words were that for the social, mobile population, information literacy was about changing attitudes, not so much about skills.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Grounds of Wolfson College, Oxford, this morning.

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