Information literacy presentations from WILU conference

There are abstracts and presentations from the major Canadian conference, WILU, which took place in May 2012. Numerous very interesting presentations e.g. (to choose a few at random)
- Massive! Open! Online!: Understanding MOOCs and Their Impact on Library Instruction and Services
- Faculty Members’ Perceptions of Technology-Oriented Support by Liaison Librarians at the University of Alberta
- Reel Life, Reel Students, Reel Experiences: Videos as a Teaching and Learning Tool
- Best practices for Very Large Team Teaching: A Case Study of a Graduate Course in Health Librarianship
- A Sampling of Post-Secondary Integrated Information Literacy Programs in British Columbia
Abstracts and links at http://sites.macewan.ca/wilu2012/program/program-abstracts/
Photo by Sheila Webber: Trees, shadow, autumn, November 2012

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Recent articles

A few assorted articles I hadn't picked up before:
- Kelley, J. (2012) "Off the Shelf and Out of the Box: Saving Time, Meeting Outcomes and Reaching Students with Information Literacy Modules" Library Scholarship. Paper 15. http://dc.cod.edu/librarypub/15
- Limberg, L., Sundin, O. and Talja, S. (2012) "Three Theoretical Perspectives on Information Literacy" HumanIT. 11 (2) http://etjanst.hb.se/bhs/ith/2-11/llosst.pdf [I had already blogged the other papers in this issue, I think this one must have been added later]
- Gunton, L., Bruce, C., & Stoodley, I. (2012) "Experiencing religious information literacy : informed learning in church communities." Australian Library Journal, 61(2), 119-132. http://eprints.qut.edu.au/51026 I already blogged an earlier article on the same research
- Emami, M. and Seify, S. (2012) "Determining the information literacy competence (ILC) of faculty members in University of Applied Sciences and Technology." Interdisciplinary journal of contemporary research in business. 3 (9), 1488-1495.
http://www.journal-archieves14.webs.com/1488-1495.pdf
Photo by Sheila Webber: Autumn starts to touch the beech leaves.

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IFLA #wlic2012 IL in developing countries; Faculty attitudes to librarians

I'm blogging froom the IFLA World Library and Information Conference in Helsinki, Finland. In this post I'm going to highlight a couple more papers from a session this afternoon.
Dan Dorner (Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand) talked about Improving the resources for supporting information literacy education in developing countries. A key theme was the contextual and culturally-situated nature of IL. He cited work by me and Bill Johnston (this is one of our key themes), so I immediately felt more warmly towards him ;-) He also mentioned, for example, Hofstede's framework for cultural analysis [Hofstede, G. (1983) "National Cultures in Four Dimensions: A Research-Based Theory of Cultural Differences among Nations." International Studies of Management & Organization, 13 (1/2), 46-74]. Dorner discussed this in relation to two countries: Vietnam, USA, UK and Sri Lanka and proposes a conceptual model of IL education. Questions after his talk raised the important issue of indigenous knowledge. His full paper is here: http://conference.ifla.org/sites/default/files/files/papers/wlic2012/105-dorner-en.pdf

In the same session, Christina Nilsen (Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, BC, Canada) presented on Faculty perceptions of librarian-led information literacy instruction in postsecondary education. As a practitioner, she understands the challenges of integrating IL and gaining access to students, and she highlighted the research and writings about faculty-librarian relationships. Nilsen carried out a questionnaire survey of faculty in Canada (106 respondents), to investigate their perceptions of academic librarians and the importance they placed on information literacy in their discipline. A large number rated their students' IL as poor or fair, also a majority rated IL as important and about half don't regularly ask librarians to teach their students. There was an interesting variety of reasons for not inviting librarians into their classes. Nilsen's full paper is here: http://conference.ifla.org/sites/default/files/files/papers/wlic2012/105-nilsen-en.pdf

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Information literacy instruction in four Vietnamese university libraries

An article I came across recently: Diep, K.C. and Nahl, D. (2011) "Information literacy instruction in four Vietnamese university libraries." The International Information and Library Review, 43 (4), 198-206.
"This case study explored the perceptions of academic stakeholders about the development and delivery of information literacy (IL) programs in four universities, and identified elements necessary to establishing IL credit courses in Vietnamese higher education. The following research questions framed this study: 1) How do library administrators, instruction librarians, and faculty perceive the current implementation of information literacy instruction (ILI) programs for undergraduates studies in universities libraries in Vietnam? 2) What are the challenges to including IL as a credit course in the curriculum as perceived by library administrators, instruction librarians, and faculty? Respondents were purposefully recruited from four universities, including library administrators, instruction librarians, and faculty. Three online surveys were distributed to 537 individuals through Survey Monkey with 149 replies and a final receipt of 133 completed surveys. Interview and focus group data collection included 23 face-to-face interviews and nine focus groups. Findings showed IL is considered the domain of librarians and has not influenced Vietnamese campus culture. IL activities at four university libraries take the form of lectures, workshops, and basic IL skills modules. Few ILI activities are subject discipline-related. Respondents reported challenges to an ILI credit course revolve around the lasting impact of teacher-centered instruction and rote learning, misperceptions about the effect of IL on student learning outcomes, degree of support of IL by academic stakeholders, degree of faculty-librarian collaboration, and scarcity of resources. Recommendations are given for academic librarians in Vietnam implementing ILI programs and considering developing IL credit courses."
Photo by Sheila Webber: Pattern of new leaves, May 2012

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The Informed Researcher Booklet and Information literacy lens on the Vitae Researcher Development Framework

There are two important new publications from Vitae (the organisation in the UK that focuses on developing researchers' skills and employability): a short and attractive booklet aimed at researchers themselves (that gives advice and explains the relevance of information literay) plus a 2-pager that relates the SCONUL 7 Pillars model of Information Literacy to the framework for developing researchers' skills and knowledge (the RDF framework). They were produced in collaboration with other key bodies including SCONUL and the Research Information Network. They are both professionally produced and can be downloaded for free.
- Bent, M., Gannon-Leary, P., Goldstein, S. and Videler, T. (2012) The Informed Researcher. Vitae. http://www.vitae.ac.uk/CMS/files/upload/Vitae_The_informed_researcher_2012.pdf
- Information literacy lens on the Vitae Researcher Development Framework using the SCONUL Seven Pillars of Information Literacy. http://www.vitae.ac.uk/CMS/files/upload/Vitae_Information_Literacy_Lens_on_the_RDF_Apr_2012.pdf (the picture here is the second page of this publication)

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Teaching Faculty Award for the Support of Information Literacy

The Augustana Campus Library (Camrose, Alberta, Canada) of the University of Alberta has announced the 2011 recipient of the Teaching Faculty Award for the Support of Information Literacy. The award, which started in 2005, is an annual award given to an Augustana Campus teaching faculty member who has contributed consistently and notably to the support and promotion of information literacy at the Augustana Campus of the University of Alberta. Nominations are accepted from Augustana students, staff, faculty and administrators. The award is presented annually at the Information Literacy in Academic Libraries Workshop. (My photo shows Augustana librarian Nancy Goebel announcing the award at this event the week before last.)
The recipient of the 2011 Teaching Faculty Award for the Support of Information Literacy is Dr Neil Haave, Associate Dean of Teaching and Associate Professor of Biology on the Augustana Campus. The nomination indicates that "Neil has taken a leadership role in incorporating the information literacy skill requirement into Augustana's curriculum. He has worked closely with Augustana librarians on developing an information literacy model for biology. Neil promotes the broadening of and incorporation of information literacy skills as part of a liberal arts and sciences education".
I've mentioned this award before: I think it's a great idea, and they also have a similar award for a student. More information at http://www.library.ualberta.ca/augustana/infolit/awards/

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Horizon report: Technology Outlook: UK Tertiary Education 2011-2016

Earlier this month The New Media Consortium and JISC published Technology Outlook: UK Tertiary Education 2011-2016. I have regularly reported on the annual publication of the main Horizon report, but I had missed that they also periodically publish more specific ones. You can find a link to all the reports on the JISC/ Horizon wiki at http://jisc.wiki.nmc.org/home. There have been 3 Australia-New Zealand Horizons, there have been a couple on "K12" (schools), and also ones on Museums and the Iberoamerican perspective.
For the UK higher education one they mainly adopted a delphi approach, working with a small group from the education/technology field. The wiki I linked to above also has additional resources and discussion, and people are encouraged to add material in various ways.
I was just alerted to this today, by a blog post from Peter Miller so I have only skimmed the wiki and report superficially, but that won't stop me from making a few comments. One is that it is definitely worth looking at, to learn and (in the UK anyway) to gauge the kind of assumptions and priorities that underly the report.
Unsurprisingly, there is a good deal of overlap between the main Horizon 2011 report (published at the start of the year) and the UK one. Cloud computing, which is one of the "one year or less" items in the UK report is an underpinning element in the main report. The highlighted technologies are: One year or less - cloud computing, mobiles, open content, tablet computing; 2-3 years - game-based learning, learning analytics, new scholarship, semantic applications; 4-5 years - augmented reality, collective intelligence, smart objects, telepresence.

Again unsurprisingly technology is centre stage, so (in my opinion) the need to (for learning and teaching applications) approach things from the learning need (rather than some technological requirement) gets a bit lost sight of.

I was also rather surprised that (for something aimed at the tertiary sector) the evidence and references were generally not that substantial e.g. quoting a Huffington Post article by James Gee instead of his books or articles that made the same point. Although the report is looking to the future, there is really quite a lot of research (if small scale) into use of innovative technologies in learning and learning management: at any rate there are a lot of peer-reviewed articles and some theses, and it has certainly got beyond the point where you have to rely solely on trade, conference and news sources. I suppose that I might notice this particularly because I'm marking Masters dissertations at the moment, and looking for the quality of evidence that is cited, but in that I'm probably not atypical as an academic. A good number of my students are doing small scale investigations in the area of social media or gaming.

Just to get in a final point, unfortunately this UK report doesn't discuss the relevance of information literacy (though, interestingly, the Australian one does!); however the need for educators and students to have "digital media literacy" is emphasised. As far as I could see "digital media literacy" is not defined, but it does seem to include some elements of information literacy.

If you want to go straight to the UK report it's at http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2011-Technology-Outlook-UK.pdf. Also the wiki is well worth investigating, as already mentioned.
Photo by Sheila webber: autumn blooms, September 2011

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Reinventing research? Information practices in the humanities

The Research Information Network has published (in April) case studies which analyse how humanities’ researchers discover, use, create and manage their information resources. There are case studies of: Old Bailey Online; The Digital Image Archive of Medieval Music (DIAMM); University of Birmingham English Department; UCL Philosophy Department; Corpus linguistics; The Digital Republic of Letters.
The Reinventing research? Information practices in the humanities report confirms disciplinary differences (e.g. compared with findings in the previous RIN publication on life sciences). In terms of the kinds of electronic resource used "A majority of respondents use Google (79%) and/or Google Scholar (66%) as a starting point to locate relevant research. But traditional methods, such as citation chaining (83%) and learning from peers and experts (95%) remain the most significant ways of finding resources. The scholars in our study also subscribe to e-mail lists (66%), with many using RSS feeds (31%), social networks (48%), or other notifications (42%). These numbers reflect a consistently mixed use of traditional and newer information resources and technologies and suggest a thoughtful engagement with the new technologies that best complement their research needs." (p68)
You can download the report at http://www.rin.ac.uk/system/files/attachments/Humanities_Case_Studies_for_screen_2_0.pdf (url updated 26 May 2011)
Photo by Sheila Webber: Bluebell wood, Hellingly, April 2011

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