Savvy Web 2.0 Teens Forge Critical Thinking Skills

This article by Lauren Barack on 15 June 2010 in School Library Journal tells of a study by Natalia Ronda, a PhD candidate at York University, Toronto. She is discovering that 14 year olds are using critical thinking skills independently online.For example, "One teenager used YouTube as a social networking tool, viewing videos of potential friends in order to make a judgment whether this person would be interesting as a friend." Another interesting finding was related to privacy. Those in the study had a good idea of what their privacy options were, and all put some time into researching their privacy settings, says Ronda, explaining that teens made decisions on who they connected to and what they shared, after exploring options and reflecting on how these decisions would affect their online experience.

Web 3.0

Web 3.0 on Vimeo by Kate Ray, is a brilliant 14 minute which introduces the semantic web. Includes interviews with
Tim Berners-Lee
Clay Shirky
Chris Dixon
David Weinberger
Nova Spivack
Jason Shellen
Lee Feigenbaum
John Hebeler
Alon Halevy
David Karger
Abraham Bernstein.

Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.

Kate Ray is a recently-graduated NYU journalism/psychology student.

This looked great!

When we started this blog IL and Web 2.0 were not that connected. It is really good now to see examples of how things have moved on. Here is the programme for an event "Everything you wanted to know about teaching Information Literacy but were too afraid to ask " which was a Summer Information Literacy Workshop sponsored by the User Education Committee
of the NJLA College and University Section/ ACRL/NJ and the Shared Information Literacy Committee of VALE‐NJ, the Virtual Academic Library Environment.
And I've just noticed that the Instructional Design course was moderasted by Jacqui DaCosta from the College of New Jersey, who is an old friend from the UK!

Pic is of our LRC here at University of Bedfordshire and it is sunny today just like that.

Twitter Tutorials

Pam Dyer has posted about the best 10 Twitter tutorials on YouTube.
Includes Twitter in Plain English, Getting started with Twitter, Twitter lists in a nutshell, How to do a Twitter profile, Best Twitter tools, Finding Twitter followers, Tweeting from any cell phone, and Twitter for business and branding.

Is it Social Media or Web 2.0?

An interesting post on ReadWrite Web suggests Social Media is set to peak in 2012.This is the view of Justin Kistner, a Social Evangelist at web analytics company Webtrends.THere is a graph of Google Trends showing how Web 2.0 has been replaced by social media.

Google Scholar launches a blog!

Scholar is trying to be more helpful to academic users. In the first post of a new blog they say they have recently added email alerts to Scholar. You can now create alerts for queries of your interest. When new articles that match your alert query are added to Google Scholar, they will send you an email update with links to these articles. This service has meant they have to update entries quicker than in the past with articles now being added twice a week.
Sounds as though this could be useful to some researchers.
Anybody tried it yet?

Web 2.0 integration in information literacy instruction

I blogged about this (Luo, Lili "Web 2.0 integration in Information Literacy instruction: an overview" in Journal of Academic Librarianship 36(1) 32-40 ) earlier in the year without having access to the text. Having read my interlibrary loan copy I can now firmly recommend it as an interesting update to this blog.
It contains a survey and semi-structured interviews examining the adoption of Web 2.0 in IL instruction.An e-mail message was sent to the ILI-L listserv. I found it disappointing that only 50 valid responses were received and then 8 follow-up interviews were then undertaken. However the results are encouraging and very follow up our case studies in the book.
There was mention of use of Web 2.0 tools to illustrate importance of evaluation :
e.g.Facebook as a metaphor for evaluating stuff on the web - a friend request = like evaluating information.
e.g.Change an article on Wikipedia to demonstrate active participatioon of the Web.
e.g. Using flickr to snag digital images and apply attribution and how to put stuff on Wikipedia emphasising copyright and creative commons.

Overall respondents reported positive reaction to Web 2.0 tool usage in IL classes.
The article suggests 3 levels of IL and Web 2.0 :
1. Librarians use for own purposes without engaging students.
2.Librarians (84% of surveyed) use to facilitate delivery of content to students.
3.Librarins (38%)draw on certain features of tools to better illustrate IL concepts.


There is a very useful Table (Table 2) to help us develop Web 2.0 integrated instruction.

She concludes "the landscape of Web 2.0 is constantly evolving and it is crucial that librarians stay current with its development....following professional blogs....."
I guess that is where this little blog comes into the picture (although I cannot see any evidence of awareness of it in the bibliography!!!)

Pic shows me on a boat trip in Scotland - yes it was wet - but it also looks as if I am about to broadcast a declaration, presumably about Information Literacy, down the white tube!

E-Readers and the Device versus the books

This is not particularly about information literacy!
But e-readers are still very topical and if we want to encourage our users to use them to read text books then the Educause 7 Things you should know about E-Readers is a must read.
In the "where is it going" section it says :
"The introduction of the iPad might signal another tangent for e-readers...these trends could result in an all-purpose device capable of containing all of a student's texts and course materials, providing notification of campus emergencies or weather alerts, and allowing access to academic applications such as backchannel tools or remote lectures."

The Device versus the Books on Campus Technology tells of 3 instututions in the USA which have trialled e-book readers.

Reading for learning is not the same activity as reading for pleasure, and so the question must be asked: Do these devices designed for the consumer book market match up against the rigors of academic reading?

Campus Technology recently spoke with three universities that conducted e-reader pilots on their campuses to address that question. Northwest Missouri State University tested the Sony Reader PRS-505 during the 2008-2009 school year, while Princeton University (NJ) and Arizona State University are participating in a pilot of the Kindle DX with five other universities over the course of the 2009-2010 school year.

This is the student comment which sticks with me :

“This is the future, but we’re not quite there yet.”

So, what is the ideal e-reader for students? Northwest Missouri’s Rickman sees the assimilation of e-readers into the academic setting as a merger process, with notebook computers becoming friendlier for reading books and textbooks while e-readers incorporate more of a computer’s capabilities—and he thinks Apple’s iPad will be the device that sets off this process. “The iPad is the beginning of this merger,” Rickman states. “It will be interesting to see what the feedback is. If it doesn’t provide that interface to the rest of the arch—the course syllabus, the course management system, the online library—then I think most students will continue using their notebook computers as e-readers.”


Pic is of the Queen's Drawing Room on the yacht Britannia which is docked at Leith. Rather a surreal choice for this post because I can't imagine the Queen with an e-reader...

Information Literacy 2.0

It has been great to read posts on Miss Sophie Mac blog in which she says
"In general the debate seems to be divided over how we can use web 2.0 to enhance our IL instruction delivery versus how we can do that and also teach how to use web.2.0 to effectively organise, evaluate, create and reuse information. Quite different perspectives. In case you can't tell I'm for the latter. "
I guess that in the book we emphasised how 2.0 tools could be used to enhance our IL delivery. It has always been important to encourage the students themselves to use the tools to help them become more information literate.

Plagiarism video

Here is an amazing Norwegian video about plagiarism. I must think how to use it with my students.

Kids more likely to own a phone than a book

Fast on the heels of the last post : here is another shocker (to some) : that children in the UK are more likely to own a phone than a book!
Findings from National Literacy Trust research published on 2 June 2010 revealed that 86% of young people in the UK owned a mobile phone, while only 73% had books of their own. The study of over 17,000 young people revealed a strong link between both young people’s reading ability and access to books at home.
A thoughtful post by Chris Cameron on ReadWriteWeb suggests this mobile ubiquity need not be connected to any declin ein children's reading abilities. In fact mobiles give new opportunities for giving children access to content.

Is the Internet making us dumber?

Matthew Ingram in Gigacom gave an interesting post "In the Internet making us dumber?" Guess we've all heard this before, and it's pertinent to this blog, because if we are using Web 2.0 tools we may be adding to this reliance on the Internet...
Matthew Ingram begins :
"Is the internet making us smarter or dumber? The Wall Street Journal put together a couple of provocative essays this weekend looking at that question: one from Nick Carr, whose most recent book The Shallows argues that the internet is making us less attentive and in general less intelligent, and the other from Clay Shirky, whose latest book Cognitive Surplus argues that the internet is on balance a good thing for both individuals and society."

From the debate on the post it seems to be a matter of which you think is the more significant :
The decline in the people's ability to reflect.
The collisions and connections in ideas made possible by the interent.