LILAC 2012 part 1

This year our annual UK Information Literacy Conference LILAC was in Glasgow. Having been to Glasgow (the former 2nd city of the Empire) twice for conferences already, I knew that this would be a cracker and so it proved. Over 120 of the 350 delegates were international : a great sign of the success of this Conference.
The keynotes Megan Oakleaf (Syracuse University), Lord Puttnam, and Tara Brabazon (University of Ontario, Institute of Technolgy) were all inspiring and so all totally different in style. I shall not attempt to summarise in deatil, but just offer a few comments and try to give  the flavour.

Megan Oakleaf 
believes that we can show evidence of our library impact on studemt learning., correlate library interactions with other student success measures, and define the library's role in achieving strategic institutional goals.

How do we show our value?

What can we do differently?

Could we impact with students before they start?

Here is link to a free version of an article by Megan Oakleaf: "Are They Learning? Are We? Learning Outcomes and the Academic Library." The Library Quarterly, 81 (1), 61-82. http://www.meganoakleaf.info/aretheylearningoakleaf.pdf

Lord David Puttnam
spoke brilliantly (no powerpoints). I remember particularly :

The Far East are well ahead.streaming of video. This  can be done easily seamlessly in education and distance learning.

Voice recognition is going to big.The iPad 3 has voice recognition instilled.

Keyboards will be  less important in future. T

Oracy needs to be in the teachers ' curriculum.This means kids will need to  be better speakers, orators. Importance of social skills.

Compare a surgeon and teacher of 1912 operating now....The surgeon could not begin to cope  but the teacher would ......

If we are just using digital technologies to deliver the  same curriculum then its a waste of possibilities which are there. 

We need to learn about student ways of operating.

 Librarians are part of this imaginative change.

Teachers and librarians are the infantry for change!

Education can provide the means to survive, and provide social security and health systems required.

But our assessment processes are way way behind.

Librarians have a brand issue. It is like a millstone round our neck. The public doesn't understand our role. We are seen as custodians.....treasure keepers.

Companies have the same problems. 

But Dame Lynne Brindley  has succeeded brilliantly with the British Library.

Tara Brabazon

Using some Powerpoints, sound and her usual flambouyant acting style...

She spoke of the need for a Digital Detox. 

Google is like the McDonalds of information management.

We dont put words into Google that we dont know and we are too easily satisfied.

(As I have said so many times : they dont know what they dont know : or with incoming students they often think they do know how to search)

She suggests digital dieting which in practical terms could mean :

Pushing students away from Google toward Google Scholar (YES!!!!)

Reduce their speed pf search by putting in intellectua; obstacles like asking for annotated bibilograhphies.

Reduce use of textbooks.

Improve and widen their vocabulary.

Help them to know what they dont know by using the curriculum. 

More about LILAC in next post.

Information Literacy BEYOND Library 2.0

This blog has gone rather quiet! The main reason has been that a sequel to the book has been under development : called "Information Literacy beyond Library 2.0".
Jo Parker and I have been hatching this for well over a year so here it is at last!
This blog has been trying to keep you up to date so now we have another book!

Here is the blurb from our publishers :

Information Literacy Beyond Library 2.0
Peter Godwin and Jo Parker

This new book picks up where the best-selling Information Literacy meets Library 2.0 left off. In the last three years the information environment has changed dramatically, becoming increasingly dominated by the social and the mobile. This new book asks where we are now, what is the same and what has changed, and, most crucially, how do we as information professionals respond to the new information literacy and become a central part of the revolution itself?

The book is divided into three distinct sections. Part 1 explores the most recent trends in technology, consumption and literacy, while Part 2 is a resource bank of international case studies that demonstrate the key trends and their effect on information literacy and offer innovative ideas to put into practice. Part 3 assesses the impact of these changes on librarians and what skills and knowledge they must acquire to evolve alongside their users.

More information: http://www.facetpublishing.co.uk/title.php?id=7623

Table of contents: http://www.facetpublishing.co.uk/downloads/file/godwin&p-toc.pdf

Free sample chapter: http://www.facetpublishing.co.uk/downloads/file/godwin&p-ch1.pdf

Photo : Social networking in the library at Luton in former years.

Libraries to go : mobile tech in libraries

Ellyssa Kroski has done it again! A great summary of how libraries are engaging with mobiles.Last year at the Online conference in London I was able to see her present and this latest update is really worth looking at.

Mobile Tech in Libraries

View more presentations from Ellyssa Kroski

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.

M-Libraries 2011 : Keynote: Stephen Abram

I have heard Stephen talk before but his was way the best : entertaining, challenging and in the end hard to keep up with! Here it is :

M libraries final

View more presentations from Stephen Abram

Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century

This occasional paper "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century" is by Henry Jenkins (MIT) and others. It is published by the MacArthur Foundation and springs from their major initiative in 2006 to investigate how young people are being affected by digital technologies to learn, play, socialise and participate in civic life.

It talks a lot about a participatory cultures.

To quote :

"Some have argued that children and youth acquire these key skills and competencies on their
own by interacting with popular culture.Three concerns, however, suggest the need for policy
and pedagogical interventions:
The Participation Gap — the unequal access to the opportunities, experiences, skills, and
knowledge that will prepare youth for full participation in the world of tomorrow.
The Transparency Problem — The challenges young people face in learning to see
clearly the ways that media shape perceptions of the world.
The Ethics Challenge — The breakdown of traditional forms of professional training and
socialization that might prepare young people for their increasingly public roles as media
makers and community participants."

It's a useful document for anyone researching how the present generation learn and for explaining the challenges we face in supporting them.

Academic Library autopsy report, 2050

Brian T.Sullivan wrote here in the Chronicle of Higher Education, 02/01/11

"The academic library has died. Despite early diagnosis, audacious denial in the face of its increasingly severe symptoms led to its deterioration and demise. The academic library died alone, largely neglected and forgotten by a world that once revered it as the heart of the university. On its deathbed, it could be heard mumbling curses against Google and something about a bygone library guru named Ranganathan."

It's a nice little read for the start of the year and has provoked some reactions!

He declares "Information literacy was fully integrated into the curriculum" Not here I here you saying!

Happy Christmas!

Let's have none of this Season's Greetings stuff! This is my 100th post this year - just made it - not so much news this year - and next year will bring some surprises.

We're covered with snow again and not coping too well. My proposed trip yesterday aborted through car with flat battery!

This is just to wish everyone who reads this a very Happy Christmas and let's have a great 2011
(Twenty eleven, not Two thousand and eleven!).

Pics are of the Nativity with a Scottish flavour ; and St Albans Abbey this weekend.

Next is Now!

Another futuristic video which is useful as a discussion trigger.

They say
"Advancements in technology are quickly creating a mobile environment, and one that has students hooked. This isn't new news, but what's telling is that it's not stopping, or slowing down. The video you are about to see paints the real picture of how students are connecting more and more heavily with the digital world. They reap 24/7 access to all the information they could ever want, and enabling them to learn and absorb whatever information they choose. For education, what we fear we should prepare for is already here. In order to bring our students the information they need to take on unknown careers of the future, we have to discover now who they are, and what it is they are dealing with. We have to choose to participate, and openly share and collaborate with them. Yesterday was the day to be present, and this video will bring you more reason to believe that what is next is definitely now."

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!

Finding Our Students At Their Point of Need

View more presentations from Lauren Pressley.

Future of screen technology

This has been a barren month for my posts! So before October starts take a look at this fantastic vision of the future.
It is the result of TAT's (The Astonishing Tribe)Open Innovation experiment - an experience video showing the future of screen technology with stretchable screens, transparent screens and e-ink displays...

I'm not sure I could cope with the displays while I am shaving....

Google chief's fears for Generation Facebook

The Independent carried an article this week based on comments by Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google.

"I don't believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time," he told the Wall Street Journal. "I mean we really have to think about these things as a society."

The weirdest thing he came out was " a stark warning over the amount of personal data people leave on the internet and suggested that many of them will be forced one day to change their names in order to escape their cyber past."
Bet the Passport Office and ID Card development staff are not too keen on this...

InfoWhelm and Information Fluency

Here is a really powerful video from the 21st Century Fluency Project.
They say
"We live in a 24/7 InfoWhelm world. We have access to more information than we will ever need. This video will tell you just how much information there is out there. It requires a different set of skills than the ones we leave school with today."
I say
"What a world we live in and what an exciting opportunity for librarians to act as information guides".

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.

Library of the Future in Plain English

Here is great trigger video to help discussions about the changing library : from University of Technology, Sydney. It's complete with the usual Plain English "boos" when there's some out of date technique mentioned...

Social Media Revolution

If you ever need a quick punchy video to demonstrate the kind of world we live in, then this could be your answer. Particularly good for business and media students.

The Future of Publishing

Came across this really clever little video : its about what the Web Genaeration may or may not think about published stuff. Originally done for internal use by Dorling Kindersley Books. Glad they have shared it because it's a good conversation trigger.

Information Literacy 2.0 : hype or discourse refinement

When I came across the reference to this article (Sonja Spiranec and Mihaela Banek Zorica Information Literacy 2.0 : hype or discourse refinement Journal of Documentation 66(1) 140-153.) I feared the worst : another article splitting hairs about what IL is , and full of long words (pedagogies, praxis etc.). In fact I found myself agreeing with much of the content, despite remaining sceptical about the need for the term, "Information Literacy 2.0). I don't normally do long posts (or read long articles with big words...) but this article is so relevant to this blog that I have made an exception.

The authors start with a description of how the term IL has developed "in response to the issues that were necessitated by the developments within the information society". The Web was crucial in this development. Despite digitilisation and shifts toward virtual libraries the basic concepts of IL have remained the same, Web 2.0 has brought new landscapes which are user-centred and very much about participation. Services can be shaped by this participation. New types of information resources have appeared. "What will happen with information literacy now that both [information landscapes and education] have fundamentally changed with the appearnace of Web 2.0? Can information literact remain unchanged?"

When I scoped our book there was very little mention of "Information Literacy 2.0" on the web. The authors have used some of the same sources which I used. Most of them predate our book. The connection between IL and Web 2.0 was new then, and the case studies we included were largely trendsetters. The authors of this article have used the intervening time to accept the importance of the juxtapostion of IL and Web 2.0 and attempt to redraw the map of what IL can be.
In doing this they have been critical of the skills model of IL and moved toward the socio-technical model of Scandinavian authoes like Tuominen. In other words IL stems from particular groups and communities , evolving within subject disciplines, and is practiced by communites using their own technologies.
The authors refer to posts about IL2.0 saying "one could easily get the impression that IL2.0 is entirely about using Web 2.0 services ...as a medium of information delivery and a method of education". Perhaps the authors had seen this blog or read our book after all!! However we always knew it was more than just offering new methods of IL delivery. This happened to be the most attractive and easily understood part three years ago.
Then we move on to the paradigm shift (there always has to be one of these!)following recent developments in information landscapes and approaches to learning, and how this might affect IL.
Web 2.0 is changing what it means to be information literate : the blurring of authority following the erosion of information context (Yes, yes!)Web 2.0 "brought an end to the stability of information context by creating flat and fluid information spaces". This leads to increased emphasis on critical understanding of how information is generated. They say"Information Literacy 2.0 further presupposes the reduction of the contents related to the typical assumptions of information retrieval such as extensive introductions to Boolean operators". Totally agreed : we spend more time teaching how to evaluate what is found and less on the intricacies of search technique. In other words more on SCONUL 7 pillar no. 5 and less on no. 4. This is exactly what I predicted several years ago.
The authors are critical of the one size fits all approach to IL teaching - a mistake which I used to make years ago when having to teach students from many disciplines! The importance of the discipline and the recognition that information searching is seldom if ever done in a structured sequential way (the way we often teach it - for our convenience) are points very well made.I like we should "encourage students to stop seeing research/assignments as a process of collecting information and instead to see in terms of forming their own perespectives and creating new insights, which is in the core of IL 2.0 as well".
The authors note the widening of library instruction beyond what is contained in the library and subscribed to it and which is now widened to include blogs, Wikipedia etc. etc.
"The only way for educational institutions to control or influence information behaviour of students in these new realms is indirectly through IL programmes". Moving away from Booleamn operators toward tagging, issues of reliability etc. Totally agree. Just been teaching that all week to large classes of new Master level students!! I wish that was sufficient :and we were that important! However I am sure that the institution has duties regarding protection of privacy, plagiarism and academics have the key part to play by utilising the new technologies to enhance the educational experience. However I am bound to say that although Web 2.0 is now mainstream and here to stay, I do not think we are anywhere near the tipping point where the educational experience of the students has fundamentally changed. That tends to drive a stake through the whole argument of the paper.
Will we soon be talking about IL3.0? I don't accept we are talking about IL2.0 : merely that we have seen a merging of many literacies around a common core which is fundamentally about information in one form or another, and that Web 2.0 has enabled these artefacts to be created and shared by everyone. This requires a shift in the balance of the way IL is "taught" with more emphasis on evaluation and the ethical issues of re-use of material.

Thanks for staying with this : I hope you have found it interesting! What a way to spend a Friday afternoon, writing this...

Pic is of a "social learning space" years ago here at the library in Luton. Have things changed?

Happy New Year! and the 2010 Horizon Report

My posting sort of fizzled out after mid December, amid the snow and Christmas preparations. I want to wish all my readers a reallY Happy New Year. Last year was a pretty exciting one for me, and who knows whether this blog will even exist by this time next year? Will I retire properly ?
I hear on the news that there could be 40cm of snow around here tomorrow. We British are hopeless with snow so expect stories of chaos!

There has been a preview 2010 Horizon Report here. I was interested that they see Digital media literacy as a key 21st century skill, with a widening training gap for faculty and teachers.Some faculty are realising they are limiting their students by not helping them to develop and use digital media literacy skills across the curriculum.They feel that this is worsened by the lack of clarity in being able to codify the skills or set standards for their measurement.

and

"More and more, people expect to be able to work, learn, study, and connect with their social
networks wherever and whenever they want to. We are not tied to desks anymore when we wish to use computers. Workers increasingly expect to be able to work from home or from the road, and most everyone expects to be able to get information, addresses, directions, reviews, and answers whenever they want. Mobile access to information is changing the way we plan everything from outings to errands. A corollary of this trend is the expectation that people will be available and online, anywhere and anytime."

This is our challenge!