Wednesday 9 November 2011

Information Literacy 2.0

I agree with so much of an article by Meredith Farkas on Information Literacy 2.0 when she says :
"The birth of the web made it necessary for librarians to shift more towards teaching search strategies and evaluation of sources. The tool-focused “bibliographic instruction” approach was later replaced by the skill-focused “information literacy” approach. Now, with the growth of Web 2.0 technologies, we need to start shifting towards providing instruction that will enable our patrons to be successful information seekers in the Web 2.0 environment, where the process of evaluation is quite a bit more nuanced."
She goes on to emphasise the importance of critical evaluation. This has always been important : it is simply that it is now the most important factor - in my opinion.Search is significant but its what you do with the results - how you interpret them and make them into an argument. That's what my students can't do and need help with. And of course being able to use the wonderful collaborative tools that Judy O'Connell was speaking about here.

Teacher Librarians are important

Brilliant post from Judy O'Connell about the importance of teacher librarians.
"The importance of the teacher librarian is intrinsically linked to effective and responsive information curation and dissemination in distributed environments within and beyond the school. Use of Web 2.0 tools has become embedded in good practice, and information curation has extended beyond the library catalogue to library and school information management systems for bibliographic and media resources, and various organizational tools that reside beyond the school in web environments, such as Libguides, Diigo, Live Binders, wiki, Delicious, Google tools, RSS, media tools, netvibes, iGoogle, and many more."
Read this clarion call!

Textbooks of Tomorrow

Stephen Abram posted about the Textbook of Tomorrow. It shows predictions as an Infographic.
I ask though : would 1 in 4 students really give up sex for a month in order to have all-digital textbooks?!

QR codes and Information Literacy

I have been playing with QR codes for over a year now.Students have been slow to take to this new technology. Lauren Pressley has done a large presentation on QR codes, location based services and augmented realit, including a section on IL. I am sure this is an important and developing area.
At the moment it is still about experimentation. Some great slides. See here.

RefWorks Tutorials on Video

I owe a big thank you to LSU Health Sciences Center for producing such useful videos about Write n Cite and RefGrabit to help with our RefWorks training. I imagine that other libraries who have to do RefWorks training will find them equally helpful. Here they are.

Finding free images online!

Judy O'Connell has provided a terrific guide to finding free images here.
She says "It’s not just about copyright – its about being practical, and showing students the wonderful world of possibilities beyond Google images or taking anything they find that is not actually in the public domain – a vital point as more students and teachers move into online environments of blogs, wikis and more. Including images with postings enriches the experience for the reader and can also help to illustrate or support the writer’s viewpoint." Thank you Judy!

More about Infographics

Kathy Scrock has collected some information about Infographics on her site here : books, samples, online tutorials and advice on how to create them and how to use them in class.

Integrating Information Literacy into the HE curricula

I have long believed that IL should be integrated into the curriculum where it fits into the student learning experience. This is preferable to those standalone study skills units which mean little to the student.
The challenge is to get the stuff embedded. When I was in Brisbane at the RAILS seminar at Queensland University of Technology (QUT)I found out about a thesis by Xiaoli Wang which goes into the characteristics of IL integration, key stakeholders involved,curricula design strategies and the process of integration.Here it is in the QUT depository,