Chat Literacy Information Literacy discussion: day 1

Today was the first day of the information literacy discussion on Chat Literacy. It's been very interesting - 80 posts so far, from all around the world. This is the page for Day 1 http://community.eldis.org/.5b285b4d?128. You have to join up to Chat Literacy to contribute to the discussion. I thought I would post my own initial posting to today's discussion here, as well, so here it is:

"My own view of information literacy is that it is both a subject in its own right and contextual, and I don't think these two things are contradictory. By "subject in its own right" I Mean that it is already something that people can study in itself (there are journals, people get PhDs by studying it, there are conferences etc.; I argued this e.g. in this paper about IL as an international concept http://www.slideshare.net/sheilawebber/information-literacy-an-international-concept-presentation)

"I also think that learners need to be aware of information literacy as something each person has to develop for themselves through their lives, because information literacy will change for them through the course of their lives. In formal education, educators and librarians can support learners to develop the information literacy learners need to suceed in their studies and also to deal with the rest of their lives outside study. However, once they leave formal education, people tend to lack this support. They are lucky if they have a workplace that develops staff's information literacy. They are also lucky if they even have a public library system that helps them meet their changing information literacy needs. My information literacy/needs, at age 59, in 2012, are different from when I was (e.g.) 20, at university. I HAVE been lucky, because my jobs have given me the opportunity to develop my personal information literacy.

"Therefore I do not think it is a good idea ONLY to embed information literacy in another subject, in such a way that learners just tackle information literacy as part of the subject, without consciously developing their understanding of IL. I think that this is poor preparation for developing information literacy for the rest of your life. However, I'm not saying here that people shouldn't integrate IL into other subject teaching at all. This integration is sensible and useful, but I think that learners need to become aware of themselves as information literate people (indeed, take responsibility for themselves as information literate people)

"I said that I thought that information literacy was CONTEXTUAL, and part of what I meant was this need to look at your OWN context and diagnose how you need to develop new skills, knowledge and attitudes of information literacy. An important aspect is understanding how information itself is contextual (means different things to different people). One example is academic discipline e.g. "information" for a chemist is a different concept (e.g. molecular structures are very important) than "information" for a marketing person. Another difference is when looking at people of different cultures and nationalities.

"In the video http://youtu.be/hQn4OoSMF1M, which I prepared for the recent UNESCO meeting on media and information literacy, I quote from the work of one of my former PhD students, Dr Shahd Salha. She investigated conceptions of information literacy amongst school librarians in Syria. Some of their conceptions, for example with information literacy seen as illumination, and with a spiritual dimension, have not emerged in Western studies. Personally I do not think it is duplication for different countries and cultures to reflect on the meaning of information literacy for them, I think it is an important step in seeing how information literacy is relevant to you, in your own time and place and culture.

"To take that back to the "micro" level of what this means if you ARE teaching in formal education, with a bunch of students in front of you ... well, I do put forward IL as an exciting, international concept, as well as a very practical concept that they can use to get better marks! I have classes with an international mix (e.g. more Chinese than British students in my largest postgraduate class of 114 students last year).

"One exercise they did was to find material about information literacy in their own language and post a link to this in their team blogs that they were keeping. Then they had to explain what the material was to people who were from different countries/language. This exercise went well - it got students talking about what information literacy was (and so developing their own ideas), it got them talking to people with different first langauges, and it made them aware that IL was indeed international."
Photo by Sheila Webber: Wayside flower, Sweden, August 2012

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Continuing Professional Development: #CPD23

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...
Photo by Sheila Webber: I'm keeping well out of the way, bah humbug

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Teaching and Learning in Second Life as Part of a Blended Approach: Reflections and Lessons learned #vwbpe

Today Ridvan Ata and I gave our presentation about the Second Life activities that the first year class is engaged with, at the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education Conference: here's a picture of us presenting and here is the presentation:

Teaching and Learning in Second Life as Part of a Blended Approach: Reflections and Lessons learned

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My 2000th blog post! I celebrate with Toonway and Xtranormal

This is the 2000th post on this weblog, which started in September 2005. In fact the total for the Information Literacy Weblog is more than this, as it ran in a similar form under different software from April 2003, until the server it was on got hacked into in 2005.

I have celebrated this milestone by using two cloud-based applications I just came across. The first one allows you to create animated cartoon frames easily (Toonway, a French application that is targetting the English-speaking market, although some fragments of French remain).
I am not sure whether this has been used much for information literacy, but the second one, Xtranormal Movie Maker certainly has. There has been a recent discussion on the North American ili information literacy discussion list about videos for explaining Boolean Operators, and one of them was made using Xtranormal. When I played it, loads of other Xtranormal information literacy videos popped up.
The speech is synthesised, and I think this means that anything serious swiftly starts to sound like a parody of itself, but some people have used this to good advantage. Just as examples, these four all deal with evaluating websites: http://youtu.be/dKVL1ehDQB0; http://youtu.be/5No4TOu5v84; http://youtu.be/TVh6dma6vJ0; http://youtu.be/kO3dOD6-UAY.
When you sign up, you start with 300 points and then pay points for using characters and sets: you are bound to run out of points after doing a couple of videos unless you use the same characters and sets all the time. It is easy to do a video quickly (you type in the dialog, and it synthesises it immediately) - it is also very easy to do rather bad videos. Below is my own celebratory effort, in which Bruce asks what Information Literacy is, and Sheila tells him. It is only 40 seconds long.



By the way, the above isn't my main Youtube account (that's http://www.youtube.com/user/sheilawebber)

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Reflecting on 23 Things: using 23 Things in an Information literacy class

Today I gave a presentation given in the virtual world, Second Life: Reflecting on 23 Things: using 23 Things in an Information literacy class. Firstly, I describe what is meant by a "23 Things" initiative, and identify some characteristics and examples. Secondly, I describe a "23 Things" initiative I have used in a Masters-level class in the Information School, University of Sheffield (Information Resources and Information Literacy). There are references at the end of the presentation. This is it on Slideshare.

Reflecting on 23 Things: using 23 Things in an Information literacy class

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Sheffield University, Information Literacy and IBL

At the moment I am in Edmonton, Canada, preparing presentations for the Augustana Information Literacy workshop at the University of Alberta, Canada. This is why there has been a couple of days gap in my blogging. It is colder here than in the UK: here is a picture from today.
One of the things I will be doing is talking about Sheffield University as an example of information literacy being advanced through a university-wide initiative concerning a pedagogic approach (in this case, Inquiry Based Learning (IBL). I've blogged some of these items before, but here is a list of resources I'm mentioning
- There is an IBL website at http://www.shef.ac.uk/ibl/
- CILASS. (2008) Information Literacy. (CILASS Briefing Paper; 4) http://www.shef.ac.uk/content/1/c6/07/93/44/Information%20Literacy%20Briefing%20paper.pdf
- Case studies of IBL projects with an IL component:
- - English http://www.shef.ac.uk/ibl/resources/casestudies/english/historyof.html;
- - Human Communication Sciences http://www.shef.ac.uk/ibl/resources/casestudies/hcs/introweek.html;
- - Library http://www.shef.ac.uk/ibl/resources/casestudies/library/seil.html;
- - Psychology http:// www.shef.ac.uk/ibl/resources/casestudies/psychology/publicpres.html;
- - Law http://www.shef.ac.uk/ibl/resources/casestudies/law/ul1.html (see also an account by two faculty in the Law School: Semmens and Taylor, 2006)

- Corrall, S. (2009) Information Literacy: The Case for Strategic Engagement. http://www.slideshare.net/cilr/information-literacy-the-case-for-strategic-engagement (Professor Sheila Corrall outlines the case in general, and finishes by giving Sheffield University as an example)
- McKinney, P. (2010) Inquiry-based Learning and Information Literacy: a meta-analytical study. University of Sheffield. http://www.shef.ac.uk/content/1/c6/11/08/47/IL_meta-analysis_PM-FINAL.pdf
- Parker, L. (2009) Can't I just upload it to the VLE? Designing and embedding information literacy into online and blended learning. http//www.slideshare.net/LynParker/cant-i-just-upload-it-to-the-vle-designing-and-embedding-information-literacy-into-online-and-blended-learning (Lyn Parker is Head of Learning and Teaching at Sheffield University Library)

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Information literacy in our future careers: videos

The Information literacy in our future careers exhibition is something I've done several years running with a class that is core to three of our masters programmes, the MA Librarianship, MA Information Literacy and MSc Information Management. In the first week of the exercise teams of students start creating a poster to depict how information literacy will be relevant in their future careers, and in the second week they display the posters and explain them to each other.
This year there are 115 students, the majority international (over half the class is from China). They have a variety of career aspirations, particularly the largest cohort, the Information Managers. Careers that were addressed in the posters included headhunting, farming, and human resource management, as well as different kinds of information and library jobs. 30 posters were produced and you can see them all in this Flickr set: http://www.flickr.com/photos/23396182@N00/sets/72157627880923331/
This is a short video that I made, asking some of the students to explain their posters.

In addition some of the teams give some very interesting accounts on their own team blogs. "Team I" did a video about their favourite poster which is embedded in this blog post (their own poster is one of the ones featured in my video, above): http://i23things.blogspot.com/2011/10/information-literacy-in-our-future.html "Team U" also provide a nice explanation of their poster here: http://ucanbloglikeme.blogspot.com/2011/10/il-poster-by-u-team.html
We ask people to evaluate the posters, and the two most popular posters were those from Team A (pictured at the start of this post) and Team N (pictured right)

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Student exhibits on Facebook, Google, Wikipedia in Second Life

On 27 October I presented at the at the M2N4SL – Midnight to Noon Conference for Second Life Educators and Researchers conference in Second Life. I gave brief details about the class "Information Literacy" that is core to the BSc Information Management programmes at the University of Sheffield Information School & which I coordinate. After giving this introduction to the pedagogic approach and design for the class, I took delegates over to our SL island, Infolit iSchool, where my students have mini-islands with their presentations about "Should Facebook users be concerned about privacy", "Is wikipedia reliable" and "Are the Google generation really bad at searching and evaluating information". If you have a SL avatar you can visit (the mini-islands will be there until February 2012) http://slurl.com/secondlife/Infolit%20iSchool/162/187/21/

Inquiry Based Learning with first year undergraduates

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Information Literacy in Romania

This week, in the class I coordinate Information Resources and Information Literacy, I asked class members to link to an item about information literacy in their own language (using the team blogs they are maintaining in this class). Today they showed each other the material they had found. This Masters-level class is very international: about 115 students, over which over 60 come from China, and there are many other countries represented too. The students identified some interesting items, and I will be highlighting some of them in this blog.
The first up is a report on a Romanian Information Literacy conference, found by Cristian Dragu, from Romania. He says thatInformation Literacy can be translated as "Cultura Informatiei" in Romanian. This is his blog post that links to the item: http://w-teaminf6350.blogspot.com/2011/10/information-literacy-or-cultura.html Of course it is in Romanian, but there is always Google Translate ;-)
This rather blurred picture is of the session today when the class is starting to prepare posters for the "Information Literacy in my future career" exhibition

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Is it really true that only librarians like to search and that everyone else wants to find? (No)

I have been irritated for a while by the statement about "librarians being the ones who like to search", as there seem to me to be several things wrong with that idea. Going back to what seems to be the original source, Tennant (2001) said "isn't it true that only librarians like to search? Everyone else likes to find".

This statement has been used by people such as Wilder (2005) to bash information literacy advocates. As usual, when you do return to the source, it is immediately apparent that the original author was not making such a straightforward statement (as has been noted already by other commentators like the Pragmatic Librarian). However, I still see this phrase quoted and paraphrased nowadays, usually when we are being told that we've got to make things simpler, shouldn't overcomplicate information literacy education etc. etc.

I would say there are three problems with this statement.

Firstly, I don't think it is literally true. For the moment I am just basing this opinion on my own experience, i.e. I have friends who are nothing to do with the information or library profession, and who don't work in education, who have talked about the process of digging out and hunting for information as something enjoyable. Some people seem to like rooting around in stuff to find things out. I'm pretty sure that if I started rooting around, then I could find something in the research literature that gives some evidence for this as well (so I will have to try that).

Secondly, the statement seems to be grounded implicitly on the idea that the best way to find stuff is to search for it. There I do know that there is research literature that shows that people often prefer to browse, and also people may use "bumping into" (or "encountering") information as a major way to acquire information. However the statement seems to be saying that if you don't like to search, then all you want to do is find. It doesn't take account of the fact that you might just prefer browsing to searching. By the way, I am not saying here that people don't like the "finding", obviously they do (unless they are patent searches hoping no-one has had their idea before). I'm just saying that you shouldn't pretend it is either/or; search/find.

Thirdly, the statement doesn't take account of the fact that you can learn through searching for information. As an educator, that is one of the things I aim people to help people discover and understand: that if you open your mind during the process of searching, you can start to learn more about what the search is all about, what the context of your search topic is, all the different ways it is being talked about, and so forth. If you pick up these clues as you go along it can feed back into your search strategy (I know I don't need to make this point for most of the readers of this blog!). Importantly, it can also deepen your understanding of the subject of your search, and (depending on what you are looking for) learn more about people, your neighbourhood, society ...

Sometimes you may just be in search/find mode (e.g. when I wanted to know the show times of the new Harry Potter film, I didn't see this as a learning journey: although it must be said I learnt what the new name of one of the cinema chains was, along the way). However, I think that people who always see information acquisition as a matter of "show me the answer" are missing out. They are going to miss out on a way of learning things; their lives may be the poorer.

I don't think this is a question of wanting to make them "mini librarians", and it is not all about getting them to use the "correct" search strategy. It is about the process of getting information being part of learning and life. Or (as it says in the Prague Declaration) about information literacy being part of the basic human right of lifelong learning.

References
Tennant, R. (2001) "Digital Libraries- Cross-Database Search: One-Stop Shopping." Library journal. 15 October. http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA170458.html

UNESCO (2003) Prague Declaration: Towards an Information Literate society. http://portal.unesco.org/ci/en/ev.php-URL_ID=19636&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html

Wilder, (2005) "Information Literacy Makes All the Wrong Assumptions." Chronicle of higher education, January 7th. http://chronicle.com/article/Information-Literacy-Makes-All/21377
Photo and article by Sheila Webber: Photo of hydrangeas, Sheffield, July 2011

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Rubrics

Recent discussion on the ili-l discussion list concerned "rubrics" i.e. criteria for assessment. Amongst the resources recommended by people who posted were
- RAILS project (Rubric Assessment of Information Literacy Skills) http://www.railsontrack.info.
- Megan Oakleaf's document on writing rubrics: http://meganoakleaf.info/writingrubricsright.pdf
- Collection of resources on using rubrics http://libguides.gccnj.edu/rubrics
- A book, Stevens, D. and Levi, A. (2004) Introduction to Rubrics. Stylus Publishing. ISBN-13: 978-1579221157.
I will also add that supporting students so they develop the criteria by which they are going to be assessed is something that needs adequate class time, but is tremendously valuable in helping them understand, and be motivated about, what they are supposed to achieve. It is something we do every year with one assignment (a poster) for our first year ("freshman") students, and should really do more.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Yellow rose, Hailsham, June 2011

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iSchool launch event in Second Life

This is a short machinima that I made highlighting our University of Sheffield iSchool launch event in Second Life on 13 June 2011.

The machinima was created by me, Sheila Webber (Sheila Yoshikawa in Second Life) and the music "Forest Dance" is released under a Creative Commons License by Butterfly Tea: http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/70768
The speakers at the iSchool launch event were: Dr Lorri Mon (Lorri Momiji in Secoind Life); Dr Joe Sanchez (North Lamar in SL); Lyn Parker (Maggie Kohime in SL); Professor Nigel Ford (Nigl Forder in SL) and Sheila Webber.
"Second Life" is a trademark of Linden Lab. The iSchool website is at http://www.shef.ac.uk/is/

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Information Literacy and the role of the supervisor: a supervisor's perspective

All of the powerpoints from the UK University Science and Technology Librarians' Group (USTLG) meeting (focusing on information literacy) are now online at http://www.leeds.ac.uk/library/ustlg/spring11/index.htm. I have embedded my own presentation below. I was talking about supervising doctoral students: as well as supervising my own students, I have also examined PhDs at other universities.
I aimed to identify some of the different factors which can affect the information literacy and information behaviour of the supervisors and students. In particular, I drew on research by Lee (2008) which identified 5 different approaches to doctoral supervision. I also used some quotations from my own students, and from academics, and I mentioned the Researcher Deevelopment Framework.

Information Literacy and the role of the supervisor: a supervisor's perspective

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Developing concepts of Information Literacy #lilac11

This poster is being presented by me at the LILAC (Information Literacy) conference 18-20 April 2011 in London, UK. I'm also going to be displaying the "favourite" poster created by students and mentioned in the bottom section of my poster.
This is a one page pdf of something designed to be seen as as an A1 sized poster, so you will have to zoom in to be able to read all the text! The abstract is below this embedded link.

Developing concepts of Information Literacy

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"This poster presents ways in which the author aims to develop learners’ concepts of what information literacy means to them, in a core Masters class (“Information Resources and Information Literacy”) taken by 90 students in 2010-11 (60% of whom were international students).
"One intervention makes use both of a Virtual Learning Environment, WebCT, and face to face discussion. The author sets up WebCT discussion threads for 10 conceptions of information literacy discovered through phenomenographic research (Webber et al., 2005). Students select the conception that best matches their own, and post comments on why they chose it. The most “popular” conception, in both years the exercise has run, has been IL as critical thinking and autonomous learning. The “results” are discussed with the class, in terms of implications for organisational and library development of these conceptions.
"The second intervention consists of a seminar and a poster display. Students are divided into small groups and set the task of producing posters that show “What information literacy means to my future career”. The career aspirations of this class are varied (from management and Government posts in China, to library posts in the UK) and the posters are similarly varied in approach and style. This culminates in an hour long exhibition attended by students and staff, which also includes a display of database reference guides produced by students in a further exercise, and selections from their online discussion posts. This provokes discussion around the nature of information literacy and its relationship to employability. The poster outlines key facts about the class, illustrates the aims and steps in the interventions, and include photos of some of the students’ work."
Reference:
Webber, S. Boon, S. and Johnston, B. (2005) “A comparison of UK academics’ conceptions of information literacy in two disciplines: English and Marketing.” Library and Information Research, 30 (93), 4-15."

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Perspectives on the Information Literate University

Last Tuesday I presented Perspectives on the Information Literate University at an internal seminar at the Open University (the photo shows a sculpture outside the library). For those outside the UK, the Open University is the major British distance learning university, which has had over 1.5 million people studying with it in its 40 year history.
It has had an Information Literacy Unit for some time, and the Head of Information Literacy, Jo Parker, had invited me to contribute to the seminar, which was on Innovating IL to engage learners. This was an interesting session, in which there were also presentations about information literacy embedded in a social work programme (there is a book chapter on this, see http://oro.open.ac.uk/27434/), the work of a group that is identifying ways of mapping out different ways to plan and monitor modules, and a discussion about information literacy in the context of different programmes.
Here is my presentation embedded from Slideshare:

There is much useful material on the OU's website. There is a page with links to various resources to do with information literacy at http://library.open.ac.uk/help/stuskill/
The resources include:
- Information literacy toolkit for lecturers developing modules: http://www.open.ac.uk/iltoolkit/index.php
- The open learning unit: Safari - skills accessing, finding and reviewing information http://www.open.ac.uk/safari/index.php
- Open learning Key skill assessment unit: Information Literacy: http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=2962

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Congratulations

Last week two of my PhD students successfully completed their vivas! Shahd Salha has done a phenomenographic investigation into Syrian school librarians' conceptions of information literacy. She undertook two phases of interview and analysis, one before and one some months after a training course that she conducted. Shahd is shown in the first picture after her viva, with the External Examiner Bill Johnston and Internal Examiner Nigel Ford (as supervisor I just have to sit quiet in the viva).
Eva Hornung also used the phenomenographic approach to investigate Irish solo librarians' conceptions of Continuing Professional Development. Solo librarians are people who are the only librarian in their organisation. Her External Examiner was Dorothy Williams (second right) and Eva is far left. Congratulations to them both, and I will be blogging about their work more.

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Information Literacy in our future careers

There is an exhibition with posters from this exercise with my students in Second Life (which I blogged about here), and this video has snippets from the session held on 8th December in which I talked about the activities. If you have a Second Life avatar you can visit it at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Infolit%20iSchool/230/35/28/

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Exploring information literacy on Infolit iSchool

In this 5 minute video (produced a few days ago) I introduce some of the places on Infolit iSchool (in Second Life, a trademark of Linden Lab) where you can learn more about what information literacy means to you and to others.

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What information literacy means to our future careers

Event in the virtual world, Second Life, on Wednesday December 8th 12 noon SLT (8pm UK time, see http://tinyurl.com/35d8lf2 for times elsewhere): What information literacy means to our future careers. This takes on Infolit iSchool in Second Life http://slurl.com/secondlife/Infolit%20iSchool/230/35/28/. You need a SL avatar and the SL browser on your computer to participate. I will talk about an exercise with Masters students which involves them in creating posters about how they feel information literacy will be useful to them in their future careers, including displaying some of the posters. There are about 90 students in the class this year, with a majority of students from outside the UK. I did a short blog post about the exercise here. This session will be in text chat. The picture shows the venue for the presentation/discussion.

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Information Literacy in my future career

Today students in one of my classes exhibited their posters on What Information means in my future career. This is a class of 90 students, mostly taking our MSc Information Management or MA Librarianship. About two thirds of them are from outside the UK (particularly from China) and many of them are not intending to work in libraries: this year Information Management students named careers including IT consultant, working in accountancy, and managing an e-business.
As part of the core Information Resources and Information Literacy class they create posters illustrating what aspects of information literacy will be important in their future careers. They use flip charts and pens mostly, though in some cases 3D items and pictures were added (and one poster had a QR code!). They work in groups of about 6. Last week they started on the posters in a one-hour seminar and this week they finished them (though some had done some work in between) and we had the exhibition from 11-12. People circulated and discussed the posters. The aim is to develop understanding about what IL means personally, and what aspects are important for you to develop further, and it also develops awareness of what information literacy means in different work contexts.
I always find it exciting to see the variety of posters and to hear the discussions about information literacy going on around the posters. I included some information about the activity in this conference poster. Unfortunately most of the photos I took of the event are rather poor, these are a couple of the better ones.

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