Virtual Libraries month in Second Life

April 15 to May 15 is Virtual Libraries Month in the virtual world, Second Life. There are two key sites in SL
1)Information on Community Virtual Library activities (a Second Life international "ask a librarian" service and more e.g. they mount exhibitions and events)
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Info%20Island/83/55/35

2)A sampling of other libraries in Second Life (this is an Italianate garden with posters with links to a sample of Second Life libraries)
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Info%20Island/64/118/33
To go to these locations you need a Second Life avatar and the SL browser on your computer.

LILAC Conference 2010 : discussion in Second Life

Jo Parker, my co-editor has just passed this through to me :

I went to Sheila Webber's InfoLit School SecondLife session yesterday
where a few of us gathered to talk about the recent LILAC conference,
the main UK conference on IL, held in Ireland last month. Sheila
(Sheila Yoshikawa in SL) introduced our speakers, 'Pancha Enzyme' and
'Ishbel Hartmann', and with a mix of text chat and voice they
presented some of the highlights from the conference, including an
overview of the pecha kucha technique (20 powerpoint slides of 20
seconds duration each ‑ no mean feat; we agreed that it would be
useful for getting a powerful message across though less good for
audience participation); Geoff Walton's work 'demolishing' the Sconul
7 pillars model of IL; and a research project (Stephanie Rosenblatt)
looking at the impact of IL interventions on the quality of student
bibliographies. The work being undertaken in Newcastle's public
libraries was also mentioned (I remember the tweets about this at the
time, people were very excited), along with Edinburgh's support for
students in SL (via the 'IS cream van'), and the use of QR codes on
mobiles phones to support IL.

The session lasted about an hour and I took away lots of new and
useful stuff to follow up. Sheila provided SL 'notecards' with the
links, and also a very fetching LILAC t shirt for our avatars to wear!
When we did a quick check, there were participants from the US,
Australia and the UK ‑ so if you get the timing right, you probably
get as good a spread of people as you would at a f2f conference.
Sheila usually makes a transcript of the events available, so look out
for that.

The next session is in a couple of weeks, when John Kirriemuir, who
wrote the gaming chapter in the book, will be talking about SL in
education.
I am not a regular visitor to SL (I haven't entirely mastered sitting
down, and 'flying' successfully is completely beyond me!) but there is
something strangely compelling about the environment. I'm 'Isla
Darwinian', by the way, in SL, so do introduce yourself if we bump
into each other!

Wikipedia YouTube and Information Literacy

Been meaning to blog about this presentation on Slideshare by Esther Grassian for some time. It's from Sept. 2008 and I even notice that the Powerpoint background and some of the images are some of the same that I have used! So we have a lot in common. The message that Wikipedia YouTube and Google are not enough is of course a common one for us all to be giving out.There are some ideas on how to leverage Wikipedia so that students realise how it is created and the effort involved in doing this. There are examples of other Tubes and titles for use.
I look forward to "speaking" with Esther if all goes according to plan in the Second Life event on Friday that Sheila Webber blooged about earlier this week.

Wikipedia YouTube & Information Literacy

View more presentations from Esther Grassian.

Twitter versus Second Life

After reading Sheila Webber's post about What Librarians think about Second Life, I can't resist mentioning a rather mischievous post I was reading this morning about Twitter and Second Life by Chris Abraham "Twitter Is What Second Life Wasn't: Light, Cheap and Open And That's Why It'll Outlive the Hype Cycle". (I hope she will forgive me!)

He starts with admitting there's a lot of hype about Twitter at the moment and this may be reminiscent how it was with Second Life. But it's different
"Twitter is light, cheap, open and permanent, whereas Second Life is heavy, expensive, closed and ephemeral. Twitter does things right where Second Life failed."
There's some discussion at the end and I guess it's not a fair comparison, but it's a good read.

LILAC discussion transcript

The chatlog (transcript) of the discussion Impressions from the LILAC (information literacy) conference, held in Second Life on Infolit iSchool on 23rd April, is available. Three of us each highlighted a session we'd enjoyed. Vicki Cormie talked about Andrew Walsh's session on using mobiles, Marshall Dozier talked about Peter Godwin's, which also focused on mobiles, and I talked about Sally Patalong's account of two information literacy modules (credit bearing) that she runs. The chatlog is posted at http://sleeds.org/chatlog/?c=397

Information Literacy and Second Life

I just posted on my information literacy blog about a session that I did at the LILAC conference with Vicki Cormie, Denny Colledge, Marshall Dozier and Lyn Parker. The topic was Aspects of information literacy in virtual worlds. As is explained in the longer post, we didn't use ppt in the session (we were using Second Life live - two of the team appeared virtually rather than in person), but we did have a handout with some slides, and this is now on Slideshare at http://www.slideshare.net/sheilawebber/aspects-of-information-literacy-in-virtual-worlds
Additionally we have set up a delicious account with bookmarks to do with libraries/information literacy and virtual worlds at http://delicious.com/LILACSL

Penguins and pixels: virtual world users

I am still hosting discussions regularly on Infolit iSchool in Second Life (SL), the virtual world. The users of the main grid of Second Life have to be over 18, and quite a lot of them are a good deal older than that. That has led to discussions about whether, since SL does not seen to be drawing in lots of young people, librarians in the education sector should be ignoring it.

I think a different perspective on this was provided by Jackie Marsh (Jackie Darkstone in RL) a Professor in the School of Education here at Sheffield University. 10 days ago she gave a talk on Out of school play in online virtual worlds and the implications for literacy learning (6th November 2008). She has done research looking at how young children are using virtual worlds, particularly Club Penguin (which is a world specifically for young children, where they are penguins and have igloos). About half of the children she surveyed were using a virtual world, with Club Penguin and Barbie World most popular. As with social networking sites like Facebook, people were mostly communicating with people they knew already. When the time came to leave they were moving on to teen worlds like Habbo Hotel. In about 6 years these club penguiners will be hitting university ...

Jackie observed that the children did seem able to find the information they wanted for their virtual lives (her focus is literacy, rather than information literacy). She was speaking in chat, and the chatlog is here: http://sleeds.org/chatlog/?c=337 She also has a blog, Digital Beginnings, at http://digitalbeginnings.blogspot.com/

Last week, another speaker, Robin Ashford (a librarian from the USA, Robin Mochi in SL) led a discussion about the Academic librarian in Second Life. She was speaking, and other people were using text chat: there is a transcript of the chat here : http://sleeds.org/chatlog/?c=339. Robin recently did a presentation at a conference in SL and her powerpoint is here: http://www.slideshare.net/RobinAshford/academic-librarian-in-second-life-presentation

Information Literacy in Second Life

As well as continuing the discussion series in Second Life, the virtual world, I have had two sessions (last week and the week before) starting to develop a 3D build of information literacy, using the SCONUL 7 Pillars framework.

People came up with some good ideas, and there is something there already. It is a very busy time at the moment, so there probably won't be much change over the next couple of weeks. There is information on the ideas behind it, and some thoughts so far, at http://infolitischool.pbwiki.com/
SCONUL+7+Pillars+build+on+Infolit+iSchool.

If you visit Second Life, then do drop by Infolit iSchool (our island) http://slurl.com/secondlife/infolit+ischool/21/47/22/ and take a look.
Judy O'Connell dropped in and blogged about it here too.

Information Literate in Second Life

Information Literate in Second Life was the title of a presentation I did at the Creating Knowledge conference in Finland last month: this is the link to the poerpoint on Slideshare (and that's me in SL on the title slide): http://www.slideshare.net/sheilawebber/
information-literate-in-second-life-presentation

Virtual things

Virtualenquiry is "the website for the UK Virtual Enquiry project. We're looking at how instant messaging software is being used in today's University and College Libraries as a support and communication tool" They are funded by SLIC (Scottish Libraries and Information Council) and partnered by Carnegie College and Napier University. The site is newish and at the moment they have a survey about virtual enquiries that they'd like people to complete. http://www.virtualenquiry.net/

Continuing the virtual theme, the Second Life (SL) Educators conference is taking place in Tampa this week. I'm giving a paper Using first and second life to develop inquiry skills in the freshman year at a UK university: a happy blend? - but in the virtual parallel conference being held in Second Life itself. At the main conference there are a couple of papers about librarians experiences/role in SL. The conference wiki is at http://sledcc.wikispaces.com/ and there are likely to be full papers up in due course.

Snapshot of Second Life in UK HE and FE

John Kirriemuir (one of our authors) has continued his investigations into take-up of SL in the UK. His May 2008 Eduserv report is now available.
To the question : Has your institution’s library taken an interest/role in developing in SL? most survey respondents either gave no reply to this question, or a negative one. About half of those who gave a non-negative reply indicated that their institutions library was interested, but not actively developing.

There was a phrase he picked up somewhere : "It was that librarians going on Second Life is like the geography teacher at the school disco!" Librarians trying to be where th students are. The criteria for him must be derived from some construction of what higher education is about; "so, in brief, how does Second Life contribute to the acquisition of metacognitive skills? And, if it does, does it also simultaneously undermine that process, through a combination of reduction of attention span and rational constructive capacity, and a disregard for truth in an environment in which the imagination, pretence, and wishful thinking tend to become the predominant norms?"

Google goes into Second Life

Google have announced their Google Lively vitual world, available through a browser plugin via Firefox and Internet Explorer. Unlike Second Life it is not a single world but splits off different worlds into separate rooms. Using a Google account you can create avatars and interact with others as in Second Life. You can YouTube clips on virtual creens and share photos. Opinions vary as to its quality and where it is leading. See article in ReadWriteWeb, where one of the comments suggests they are aiming at the educational market. As John Major used to say "It's too early to say : we shall have to wait and see".

Guides to Second Life

If you want some quick fire information about Second Life and what it is, you should try the new Educause guide Seven Things You should know about Second Life.

Expanding Information Literacy Using Tools in Second Life

The next discussion in the virtual world Second Life on Infolit iSchool is on Thurs 29th May. You need a Second Life avatar to participate.

12 noon SL time (which is *8pm UK time*), **Thurs 29th May** "Expanding Information Literacy Using In-World Tools" [inworld = in Second Life], venue is: Infolit iSchool (45, 202,22), SLURL (web address to jump straight to the venue, only works if you have the Second Life viewer installed)
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Infolit%20iSchool/45/202/22/

Robin Mochi (a librarian from the USA) leads this discussion. "Free in-world tools, such as Sloog and the Salamander HUD, can be used to take information literacy to the next level. Librarians often supply links to quality websites, with these tools we can share the best in-world resources. We will discuss other possibilities for expanding information literacy in-world, and a tool will be available for all to add to your inventory."