Friday 29 October 2010

Finding our students at their point of need

Lauren Pressley has done a humdinger of a presentation here! This is the keynote at the Library Instruction at the Point of Need Conference today 29 October 2010, at Thomasville, North Carolina.
She says: Higher Education is changing ; The point of need is changing ; What we do changes too ;
It's not about us..... it's about them.

This is the best presentation I've seen this year - love the images and style, but it's the message that is really important. I was only thinking about some of the same issues earlier this week (for a Conference talk) and pleased (and a trifle relieved) to see common ground! Not going to tell you what ! Do take a look at it!

Thursday 28 October 2010

How to use Delicious : the King of Socialbookmarking

Kristi Hines (on Socialmedia Examiner) has produced a useful guide.
For exisiting users it gives some ideas you may not have thought of - particularly with use of tags. For new users ( and I am a great fan of delicious and could not do without it...) there is good guidance on how to get started.

Wednesday 27 October 2010

Libraries in a Digital Age

Here is a detailed write-up by Lyn Robinson of a recent one day Conference on Libraries in a Digital Age organised by the Association of Independent Libraries at the Royal Astronomical Society, London, 14 October 2010. Of particular interest here is a presentation by Gwynneth Price (Institute of Education) on Social Networking : just a lot of twittering?

Tara Brabazon : the end of shhhhh in the Library

Tara Brabazon makes a spirited defence of the use of podcasts in her article in the Times Higher, 20 October 2010. She argues :

"In a time of shrinking funding, librarians’ savvy use of time- and space-shifting podcasts can aid diverse groups of students and scholars and highlight valuable resources".

Saturday 16 October 2010

John Palfrey: Rethinking Plagiarism in the Digital Age?

Plagiarism is such a hot topic and John Palfrey (co-author of Born Digital : understanding the first generation of Digital Natives.) features in an interview on the Project for Information Literacy (PIL) site here.

He says "we need to find ways to give students a finer-grained understanding of what plagiarism means in the information context in which they are growing up. My view is that we start with first principles."

It's quite a short but interesting read.

Information Fluency Strategies and Practices to Help Enhance Critical Thinking Skills

Thia presentation by Chad Mairn of St Petersburg College, Florida is full of ideas for your information literacy classes.
I particularly iked the idea that
"Information fluency is the intersection of information literacy, computer literacy and critical thinking."

Web 3.0 : enhancing reality with mobile applications

This is a good summary of the possible future : as the summary says :

"A visual exploration of current possibiilities of augmenting physical reality through new mobile/wireless applications and the mobile web. New reality augmentation methods for business, advertising, travel, geolocation, social networking, history and information literacy through mobile devices, QR codes, geolocation, barcode reader and reality augmentation applications for the mobile web, web 3.0."

Prepare yourself for an aural assault....

Friday 15 October 2010

Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 Information Literacy

Here is a great presentation I came across by Mark Mitchell, from the schools sector in Australia.There is some excellent thought provoking stuff here about what 2.0 means and how students now need to have what he calls E Information Literacy ability.

Friday 8 October 2010

Librarians Do Gaga

Been doing too much "inducting" anbd teaching to post lately.Now here is a video to cheer us on a Friday afternoon or anytime!
Thanks to a query on lis-link I have come across this video Librarians Do Gaga. Students and faculty from the University of Washington's Information School get their groove on!!Directed, edited, and produced by Sarah Wachter and lyrics by Sarah Wachter. It's aiming to get students to get to the Ca-ca-ca-catalogue and those databases! Must try it out with a group sometime. Maybe 4 minutes is a bit long??