Anthony Beal's Scoop.it page on Information Literacy education is a useful source to monitor. It's at http://www.scoop.it/t/information-literacy-education
Lots of material from Esther Grassian's keynote to the LOEX of the West conference this month (entitled Occupy Their Minds! The Politics of Information Literacy) is available. There is a link to her talk on Youtube, the powerpoint, the handout, links to various related documents and the full results of a survey she did of academic librarians, asking about assessment of information literacy, whether there were credit courses etc. https://sites.google.com/site/esthergrassian/loex-of-the-west-2012-materials
Today's #UKLibChat at 6.30-8.30pm UK time (that's starting 1.30 pm US Eastern time, see http://tinyurl.com/clelqbl for times elsewhere in the world) is on Information Literacy and Needs. The chat is hosted on Twitter by @UKLibChat. Everyone is welcome to follow #UKLibChat to see the discussion and to participate. They have put up some discussion questions at http://bit.ly/PsEVYV and you can add your own questions too.
I'm following the CPD23 (Continuing Professional Development) course this time around. I'm mostly doing it on my own reflective blog which is here: http://sheilawebbercpd23.blogspot.com/. However today I also did a post on the main blog, about CPD later in your career, here: http://cpd23.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/cpd-in-your-later-career.html CPD definitely isn't just for new professionals, so I will be interested to know whether many other course members are in the not-new category. Comments are welcome on the CPD23 blog, or here...
Feufel, M. and Stahl, S. (2012) "What do web-use skill differences imply for online health information searches?" Journal of Medical Internet Research, 14 (3). http://www.jmir.org/2012/3/e87/ This was a German study (undertaken by 2 researchers at the Harding Center for Risk Literacy, Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin) involving 10 people under 30 who were more skilled in web search, and 12 people aged 50 and over who were less skilled. Participants did a digital literacy test as well, and education was another demographic factor. The researchers observed participants doing 3 web searches "to identify health information seekers’ cognitive strategies and attitudes". There were differences between less skilled and skilled users e.g. before going online the less skilled were worried about overload and their ability, whilst more skilled expressed awareness of quality issues, but interestingly "although people voice concerns about data quality issues, once they access a website, even skilled Web users are preoccupied with processing website contents" (i.e. once they actually found something that seemed relevant, the quality issue faded to the background).
Creaser, C and Spezi, V. (2012) Working together: evolving value for academic libraries. Sage. This newly-published report is the outcome of a project for Sage (the publishers) undertaken by LISU at Loughborough University, UK. The report is fairly short (16 pages). The findings are based on investigating some "best practice" at 8 universities: 2 in Nordic countries, 2 in the UK and 4 in North America, plus a questionnaire which was publicised via discussion lists etc. and got 630 responses. There are short sections on "embedding information literacy", "integrated teaching", "other support services", and "integrated research services". There is also a chapter on marketing issues. Recommendations are made for individual librarians (including developing teaching skills), library managers, and the wider institution. I'm not sure there is anything startlingly new here, but the report and the examples it gives could be useful when planning or putting together a case about services. The report is free (you have to give your contact details before downloading the report), downloaded from the "Report" tab on the project blog at http://libraryvalue.wordpress.com/
At the Second Life journal club on Wednesday, Prof Diane Nahl (Hawaii University) led discussion on: Pegrum, M. and Kiel, R. (2011) "'Changing the Way We Talk': Developing Librarians’ Competence in Emerging Technologies through a Structured Program." College and Research Libraries, 72 (6), 583-598. This is open accesss at http://crl.acrl.org/content/72/6/583.full.pdf+html. I forgot to advertise this in advance through the blog, but this is an article worth reading, as it concentrates on talking about the evaluation and outcomes of a course that has been run several times at the University of Western Australia, mainly for librarians. That means you get an insight on how people applied their learning to real projects in the library, for example, with some interesting examples. At the journal club we agreed that the barriers to applying the pedagogical and technical skills etc. were pretty universal (they were identified as time limitations, constraints imposed by the IT department (so you couldn't be as innovative as you want), lack of reward and institutional support, and working with faculty/colleagues who had more limited ideas about teaching and learning).
Crawford, J. and Irving, C. (2012) "Information literacy in employability training: The experience of Inverclyde Libraries." Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 44, 79-89. This is a priced publication. The abstract reads "The study is an evaluation of an employability training programme provided by Inverclyde Libraries in West Central Scotland and the role of information literacy within the training programme. Inverclyde is an area with high unemployment and pockets of multiple deprivation. Modern, applicable skills are also lacking. The findings are based on interviews with five learners and also one with an adult literacies tutor. The interviews were conducted in August 2009 and a Learning Life Histories methodology was used. Interviewees had mainly previously worked in the service industries and none had post-school qualifications, despite which all the interviewees were highly motivated. Information literacy was found to between 30% and 60% of course content depending on learner needs. Family influence was found to be the main motivation to enrol on the course and the learners sought personal social development as well as employability skills. There was found to be a lack of appropriate, relevant training materials and a lack of collaboration between the LIS sector and Community Learning and Development in developing them. The article concludes with a number of recommendations including the need to improve recruitment and course scheduling and planning." 
The New Media Consortium, the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), and the International Society for Technology in Education just released the NMC Horizon Report 2012 K-12 Edition (i.e. the edition focused on school-level education, rather than higher education). "This fourth edition in the annual K-12 series of the NMC Horizon Project examines emerging technologies for their potential impact on and use in teaching, learning, and creative expression within the environment of pre-college education." As usual it identifies what it sees as key trends and applications. It sees cloud computing, collaborative environments, mobiles and apps, and tablet computing as the immediate adoption technologies. It forecasts that digital identity, game-based learning, personal learning environments and learning analytics will have a time-to-adoption horizon of 2 to 3 years. With a time-to-adoption horizon of 4 to 5 years are: Augmented Reality; Natural User Interfaces; Semantic Applications; Tools for Assessing 21st Century Learning Skills. 
The Yorkshire and Humber branch of the Academic and Research Library Group have organised a TeachMeet at the Headingley campus of Leeds Metropolitan University, UK, 31 July 2012. It is free. More info and booking at https://www.eventbrite.com/event/3495169145?nomo=1
On 28 June Karen Blakeman, at Reading University, UK, runs a workshop Beating Google into submission. Topics include: how Google works - what Google tells us and what we have to guess; latest developments at Google; how Google customises your results and can you stop it (etc.) Includes hands-on sessions. Cost: £150 +VAT (Total £180). A limited number of places for unwaged and students. Info at http://www.rba.co.uk/training/Google.htm
The results of a brief questionnaire on activities etc. in teaching by librarians (mostly from the UK) are reported in:
Some recent articles from Behavioral and Social Sciences Librarian (a priced publication at http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wbss20). We don't subscribe to it at Sheffield, so I can only go by the abstracts.
There's a new issue of the open access Journal of Information Literacy, volume 6, number 1 (2012) at http://ojs.lboro.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/JIL/index. It includes the following, plus a conference report and book reviews:
A new article I co-authored with a former PhD student (afraid it is a priced publication). Nazari, M. and Webber, S. (2012) “Loss of faith in the origins of information literacy in e-environments: Proposal of a holistic approach.” Journal of Librarianship and Information Science, 44 (2), 97-107. "The original concept of information literacy (IL) identifies it as an enabler for lifelong learning and learning-to-learn, adaptable and transferable in any learning environment and context. However, practices of IL in electronic information and learning environments (e-environments) tend to question the origins, and workability, of IL on the grounds that the generic models of IL are inadequate for the complex and evolving context of e-environments. Conducting an analytical review of the literature on the approaches taken to adapt IL in e-environments, we discuss how a failure in understanding the dynamic context and components of e-environments and IL have resulted in the emergence of a marginalised way of viewing and practicing IL in these environments. Drawing on Nazari’s (2011) contextual study of IL in an online distance learning programme, we propose a holistic way of viewing and practicing IL in EL environments which is aligned with IL origins; it enables the e-learner to conceptualise IL and customise it to their actual learning style and needs. This study can be of value to IL scholars and practitioners who are interested in the concept and practice of IL in e-environments."
Having highlighted an article from a current issue of College and Research libraries news (which is open acess) yesterday, here's a few articles from back issues, this year.
Dudenhoffer, C. (2012) "Pin it! Pinterest as a library marketing and information literacy tool." College and Research Libraries News, 73 (6), 328-332. Talks about use of Pinterest by the library at Central Methodist University (USA) and also more genrally how it can be used in teaching. http://crln.acrl.org/content/73/6/328.full I found the Pinterest of their careers centre here: http://pinterest.com/cmucareercenter/ 
Thanks to Eva Hornung for alerting me to a lively and interesting collaborative blog, Libfocus Irish Library Blog, that has a broad scope: http://libfocus.blogspot.co.uk/ The regular contributors are Eva herself, Michelle Dalton, Ronan Hegarty, Jane Burns and Alexander Kouker, and they also have guest bloggers.
