Information Literacy for Researchers

There is a leaflet available here entitled "Information Literacy framework on the Vitae Researcher Development Framework using the SCONUL Seven Pillars of Information Literacy".
This is a valuable document which uses the new SCONUL Seven Pillars framework and should be a useful aid for demystifying the information maze for researchers.

Web 2.0 to enrich Information Literacy skills

This presentation was given by Lori Cooney back in March 2012 at Mass Schools and Libraries and contains a wealth of suggested tools. If you are a school librarian and have missed this Prezi presentation then do take a look here.

LILAC 2012 part 3 Our Symposium "Information Literacy - just an outdated buzzword".

I have saved the best part til now! Jo Parker, Jane Secker and myself put on a fun Symposium " Information Literacy - just an outdated buzzword?" on the Thursday afternoon immediately after lunch.
I was worried that we were competing against 4 other events including a Teachmeet. Also immediately after lunch would anyone want to argue about the merits of Information Literacy?
We were very pleasantly surprised to see upwards of 50 delegates crowding into the room. But would they discuss the topics using the prompts we had devised? Also the room was in rows of immovable seats and we could not split them into groups.

No problem : the discussions when prompted were almost deafening!

We then each spoke for about 5 minutes :

Jo Parker gave a short summary of how librarians have changed their approach to user education, moving on to information literacy and the web, but was this enough?  Information literacy hadn't been very showy in the past, more like a female peacock rather than the full flowering male peacock. (slide).

I then took over and, disdaining Powerpoint, used 3 props. First the new edited book "Information Literacy beyond Library 2.0" which had been the starting point for the symposium (held up briefly and then thrown down on the floor...)but how to sum up some of the arguments?
Is there an elephant in the room now? Enter prop number 2 (Toy elephant) : there was an elephant in the room but it was not a single one. A better way to look at the problem of IL was to acknowledge that there was something very important around everyone's management of informatiuon : but it kept changing in its nature and no-one saw the whole elephant  : some saw the ears, some the tail, some the head.... There have been many attempts at a comprehensive term (multiliteracy, digital literacy etc etc) but perhaps the most useful way was to take a transliterate approach, which meant acknowledging overlap of literacies and that these would keep changing. Then when we came to talking to others about IL we would need to adapt our language and approach according to the discipline, level, and subject discourse and we would do well to put on a large pair of spectacles (put on a  ridiculously large pair of glasses). The existing IL frameworks had been too rigid but the new SCONUL framework promised more flexibility  and the New Curriculum for Information Literacy research by Jane Secker and Emma Coonan offered the kind of picture that that could fit the future.

Jane Secker then suggested that  information literacy should be viewed holistically as part of the learning process, and drawing on her work with Emma Coonan and the ANCIL ‘pizza’, Information Literacy should be customised and different ‘toppings’ might be more appropriate in different disciplines. However information literacy needed to be delivered embedded in the curriculum and at the point of need. She also saw information literacy as being part of helping students understand ‘the rules of the game’ and used the metaphor of chess, that by having the rules of the game explained it would not make them a grand chess master.

(For more about Jane's research see her other session at LILAC 2012.)

These little presentation created buzz so we set the participants to form informal groups off with the  first discussion point :

"If IL at your workplace was a ‘thing’ (like oup peacock or pizza) what would it be like for them?"

Then after a few minutes we asked :

 "What do you do?Share your knowledge of the frameworks you use with your group (and if you don’t use any –why not?) "

Then after a few more minutes :

"How far do the existingframeworks/statements you’vediscussed go in terms of expressing what is happening at your workplace?Any pitfalls? Gaps?"

Another few minutes and then :

"What’s our action plan?What should we be doing differently (if anything?)"
We  encouraged participants to tweet to #!Lbuzz
This took the place of reporting back from groups. As the groups which were formed varied in size, and there were so many of them, the normal report back just would not have worked. In stead we were able to go through the twitter stream.
 Here is a selection of the tweets :

.....................................................................................................................................

 IL is for life, not just assessment time

Info centric instruction should mean success lives on, and is not just about one off assignment success

Look thro the eyes of the learner to build ur IL framework. What’s in it 4 them?U can take a learner to the 

IL fountain but can you make them drink?

 Information Literacy as a bargain-basement – the TKMaxx of education

@touchthecloud Great use of crowdsourcing IL thoughts on Twitter – thanks for making it such fun!

 Librarian as personal shopper – taking the punters to the good stuff and telling them what would look nice
on them.

    
My action plan for IL. 1)Think. 2) Act. 3)Reflect. 4) Refine. 5) Repeat. 6) Retire

If it’s going to be pizza it should be a calzone – all the good stuff inside

 The elephant has the glasses on – but can it see? 

 Can I be first to posit the idea of the Digital Literacy Spaghetti Bolognese framework? It’s basically just a mess…

I don’t need IL, I just need literacy, I can’t spell Duck Billed platypus! Help me….

  

Different experiences, different institutions. Shared resources, know more about pre-he IL, less silo-ized idea of IL

 Hearing a real need for librarians to have a database of shared resources. Pointing them to your survey @jsecker [think that’s the OER stuff]

It’s a cocktail cabinet containing a Swiss army penknife to open the wine

 Don’t be mechanistic encourage enquiring minds

Do you want a dutch one? @AnnekeDirkx Grappige sessie waarin we de resultaten van onze discussies moeten tweeten

She also said: and we think the frameworks are a little but old fashioned

        We are using acrl or sconul frameworks

        Our IL is a small and spotty ladybug, a dutch cow and a restaurant menu

It is messy. It’s a dinosaur. It should be joined up. It should be holistic, not in isolation, engaging and campus wide. 

 Our action plan: create clearer smorgasbord of tasty options to communicate what I can teach

 It’s like Mr Potato Head

.............................................................................................................................

So what did we conclude?

Information Literacy will continue to evolve. It should not be looked at too prescriptively. It moves about and  is messy.
 The term IL is still the best label we have, we will need to adapt our language and approach according to the discipline, level, and subject discourse.
Librarians can get excited about it even just after lunch and we have a bright future helping our everyone to construct their information universe.

Here are the slides.

LILAC 2012 part 2

For the full list of sessions at LILAC 2012 complete with most of the Powerpoints click here. 

I would like to draw your attention to a few of the sessions I attended which I found particularly interesting so here goes :

Mary Antonesa and Claire McAvinia (National University of Ireland Maynooth)

Information Literacy and the case of the “natives”

The concept of the Digital Native started with Marc Prensky et al and encouraged librarians to do new things in order to connect with them. There has been a lot of cold water poured on this over recent years and the general consensus is that it is much more complex than this!

This presentation based on research being done for a PhD at University of Sheffield is looking at IL and its evolving relationship with literacy, the learning environment and the creation of knowledge by students. This is very much the same ground that I was looking at it

our new book so I was eager to see if her findings based on focus groups of all concerned, student observation and interviews were going to chime with what I have written.

Emerging findings emphasised :

-the importance of the transition from school to HE and the intimidating nature of online material after the transition;

-the challenge of referencing and the lack of understanding of its value ;

-in terms of teaching  : dont tell us show us;  

-they may think they should know and therefore do not  ask.

-Library instruction is more about  knowledge construction.

-Literacy development is progressive not sequential.

-It is socially negotiated.

-It depends on context.

-Need to focus on the person’s interest.

-Cannot be learned once for all time.

Amen to all these!

The second study is on the use of vles by students.

This has begun with a survey of use of undergraduate  language students. The kind of use was disappointing to me (but not surprising!) L they saw it as a place to get lecture notes, the place to keep up to date with room changes etc. Lecturers were enthusiastic  and later beginning to use e-lng tools, aaaand also giving tasters of secondary sources that opened up reading lists.

This was one of the most interesting sessions and  more time was needed to follow up these interim conclusions.

 

Maria Savova (Claremont Colleges Library) Robin Canuel (McGill University)and Chad Crichton (University of Toronto)

Mobile Technology and Information Literacy instruction ; the McGill Library experience.

This was one of the most useful sessions I attended and is the kind of thing that all HE institutions should be tackling if not now, then soon!!

The workshop “McGill Library from the palm of your hand” was given to library staff first.It covered E- content issues ; whether to download or use online ; Issues of direct online ; direct download and can be used offline ; download to pc and transfer. Current catalogue records do not clarify which type it is and therefore users need to be aware of these format issues. Html versus pdf has issues for 6 inch screen. Digital rights management and the problems this raises. Full versus mobile library web sites.

How to manage e content on mobiles and on ipads

What application  will students use to download their stuff onto? This is a big area for development and becoming part of what it will mean to be information literate.

Andrew Walsh (University of Huddersfield)

Playing games and growing trees...not sucking lemons

How Lemon Tree, a social online game based on use of library resources has been developed at Huddersfield. Works rather like Foursquare.

Here is a link to Lemon Tree

Students register with Lemon Tree and are awarded points for use of library and comments. 

Started in Nov 2011 and already 500-600 signed up exceeding expectations!
For further details strongly recommend you look at  this article in the University repository. 

Gwnneth Price (Institute of Education)

Digital literacies as a postgraduate attribute

This very interesting project is part of the JISC "Developing digital literacies" band. see here.

Staring in July 2011 it runs for 2 years. It will describe what pg students  think about use of digital tool.Different groups will have different experiences.

The next stage is to give all students an ipod touch to use for making journal of how they study.

This sounds fascinating as I believe librarians should be assisting students to gather, manipulate, synthesise digitally across platforms and devices. This project will help us to understand what is already happening and how we can tackle this in the future.

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.

Truth, lies and the internet

This Demos report here looks at the ability of young people in Britain to critically evaluate online information. We librarians may have a view on this already (!) This report reviews current literacture and the views of 500 teachers.
The report calls for scepticism online to ba the heart of learning. Censorship of the web is neither needed nor desirable. This will be a useful report to be able to use and cite.
Great stuff!

Research Supervisors and Information Literacy

Just in case you haven't come across the recent RIN report "The role of research supervisors in information literacy" - here is the link. It looks at the role of PhD supervisors in ensuring research students have the appropriate level of IL ability to manage their work and later career. Two online surveys were done (one for supervisors and one for research students)plus 5 case studies. A complex and variable picture emerges (doesnt surprise me..) Supervisors are an influence, even if they dont real;ly recognise the IL concept.A minority do not engage their students in IL. There is emphasis on academic writing and importance of critical thinking which I finbd encouraging. Supervisors are not always aware of the training and help available (surprise surprise). Many admit to being out of date or not fully up to date.
We have an opening here and the recommendations will help this. See here

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!

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,

Transition Literacy

Information literacy from school to higher education is one of the most important areas for development. I was very interested to find this recent presentation at WILU at Regina in Canada. They used the term transition literacy to describe this challenge : a useful label I think.

T8 Grassroots collaborations and beyond : bridging the gap between high school and post-secondary, by Jennifer Sigalet, Okanagan College, Leslie Barton, Pleasant Valley Secondary School and Sherri Savage, San Jose State University (MLIS). See it here.

The abstract said :

"Recent surveys indicate there is a widening gap between the information literacy skills of high school students and the information literacy skills expectations post-secondary professors have of first-year university students. In response to this growing concern, a high school teacher-librarian and a college librarian recently collaborated on a joint production of the video Research Skills: Bridging the Gap Between High School & Post-Secondary. The film features interviews of six university professors discussing their research skills expectations of first-year university students. The interviews confirm the results of ongoing studies and reports on information literacy and the significant gap between high school and first-year university student preparedness.

Since its production (2010), Research Skills: Bridging the Gap Between High School & Post-Secondary has become a powerful tool for creating an awareness of the existing information literacy skills shortfalls of students entering post-secondary education. The film has subsequently been presented to key players in education including high school administrators, teachers, teacher librarians, school boards, and university professors and librarians.

The original goal of the film Research Skills was to create an impactful means of advocating for teacher-librarians while reiterating the importance of teaching information literacy skills in high schools in preparation for post secondary education. As well, the film has subsequently stimulated discussions amongst high school teacher-librarians and post-secondary librarians as they continue to explore collaborative bridging opportunities within school districts.

The session will bring together useful information on the current state of bridging the gap between high school and post-secondary and will explore collaborative ways of bridging this information literacy gap."

There was also a useful handout here.

This is the Silver Bullet!

I didnt put the title of the article as the title of this post in case it put you off!
Participation and pedagogy : connecting the social web to ACRL learning outcomes, by Greg Bobish, Journal of Academic Librarianship, 37 (1) 54-63 is the most comprehensive and important summary of how Web 2.0 can be used to deliver Information Literacy!
True, it is tied to the ACRL standards and this makes for a long and detailed article, but there are so many great ideas here! It is really the epitome of much of what our book and this blog is about! It is the article that I should have written (but was too lazy) months or years ago applied to the SCONUL Seven Pillars Framework.
So thank you Bob for this.

New Teaching Tools for Chat Reference

This brilliant presentation using Prezi was given recently at WILU 2011. It was by Lauren DiMonte and Joanna Szurmak from University of Toronto Mississauga. They demonstrate the value of a chat reference service in a University Library and then show how they developed short videos to meet FAQs. They refer to recent articles about screencasts and include an example of their own work at Toronto. Wish I'd been at the presentation to applaud!

Information Literacy and Higher Education : a toolkit for curricular integration

Jennifer Jarson has written a great paper here in College and Research Libraries News (Nov 2010) which " is to guide readers to important resources for understanding information literacy and to provide tools for readers to advocate for information literacy’s place in higher education curricula."

Reading this and following the links is likely to save colleagues who need sources and justification for their IL interventions hours of time!

SCONUL Seven Pillars Model revised!

At the LILAC Conference in London recently Moira Bent and Ruth Stubbings unveiled the new version of the SCONUL Seven Pillars Information Literacy framework. This is a major development and I should have shouted about it before! I quote :

"In order for the model to be relevant to different user communities and ages, the new model is presented as a generic “core” model for Higher Education, to which a series of “lenses”, representing the different groups of learners, can be applied. The Research Lens is the first of the lenses to be developed."

Here is the generic model for HE
Here is the research lens

It's just not the same : mobile information literacy

This is the presentation Andrew Walsh (University of Huddersfield) and I gave at M-Libraries in Brisbane.

This was the abstract :

"Libraries are increasingly developing services that take into account the massive effect of mobile devices upon our users. But what does this increase in use of mobile devices and related services mean for information literacy?
Some databases and library catalogues are delivered in mobile friendly formats, or cross platform search tools (such as Summon at University of Huddersfield). More of our users have the equipment to take advantage of these services each year, with mobile access to the internet soon expected to overtake fixed access. When a library user is as likely to search for information on a mobile phone, tablet or handheld
gaming device as on a fixed PC or in the physical library, will that change the concept of what it means to be information literate? How does mobile search change the discovery, evaluation and re-use of information?
We should consider how the concept of information literacy may be affected in this pervasive mobile context and whether we need to develop a new lens through which to view the literacies required by our clientele.
This paper will first consider the mobile context for information literacy. Then the presenters will compare and contrast their experiences in meeting and harnessing these devices in the delivery of Information Literacy in their own institutions, the University of Bedfordshire and University of Huddersfield in the UK."

You can see a pdf here

Nicholas Carr : the age of perpetual distraction

Nicholas Carr (author of The Shallows, what the internet is doing to our brains) features in the latest Project Information Literacy (PIL) "Smart Talks" here. It's both interesting and provocative. Makes me want to read the above book. As it mentions the report mentiuoned in the previous post about the latest research by Head and Eisenberg, this is a useful follow-on.

This excerpt is the most interesting for me ;

"I don’t think anyone is “born digital” (at least not yet). We’re all born with human bodies and human minds, and those bodies and minds are influenced in similar ways by the ways we use them and the environment in which we use them. I’ve never subscribed to the fear that people wouldn’t be able to figure out how to navigate online information. People are generally pretty good at learning how to use new media, to separate the wheat from the chaff—and that goes for older people as well as younger ones. I’m 52, and I don’t take anything I find online at face value, either. What concerns me is the mode of thinking that the online world encourages, with its emphasis on speed, multitasking, skimming, and scanning. The web provides little encouragement or opportunity for quieter, more attentive ways of thinking, such as contemplation, reflection, introspection. Those ways of thinking used to be considered the essence of the human intellect. Now they’re seen as dispensable."

So, following from this does this mean that our information literacy interventions should pay more attention to this need to encourage reflection?

BTW this is the 400th post on this blog!!! Somehow I dont think we will make 500...

Latest Head and Eisenberg research

How college students use the Web to conduct everyday life research in First Monday, is the latest piece of research by Alison Head and Michael Eisenberg. (Project Information Literacy PIL).
Here is the abstract
"This paper reports on college students’ everyday life information–seeking behavior and is based on findings from 8,353 survey respondents on 25 U.S. college campuses. A large majority of respondents had looked for news and, to a slightly lesser extent, decision–making information about purchases and health and wellness within the previous six mont

Publish Post

hs. Almost all the respondents used search engines, though students planning to purchase something were more likely to use search engines, and those looking for spiritual information were least likely to use search engines. Despite the widespread use of search engines, the process of filtering relevant from non–relevant search results was reportedly the most difficult part of everyday life research. As a whole, these students used a hybrid information–seeking strategy for meeting their everyday life information needs, turning to search engines almost as much as they did to friends and family. A preliminary theory is introduced that describes the relationship between students’ evaluation practices and their risk–associated searches."

What is Information Literacy?

Mike Eisenberg answers some key questions in this excellent vodcast.He still sees IL at the centre of the literacies in the 21st century, with technology and digital literacies fitting in as part of the IL process. He refers extensively to his Big6 framework. It's a really useful vodcast for those wanting answers to the basic questions of what IL might be and how to start putting it into the curriculum.