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

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Back from Oz!

This has been the longest gap between posts-ever!
Most blogs which I follow are drying up a bit so I guess I am not unusual. However the main reason is that much of May I have been in Australia visiting and attending the RAILS seminar and M-Libraries Conference in Brisbane. I shall be posting about these as fast as I can.
The first presentation at M-Libraries I want to showcase was one I didnt even go to! It is by Sally Cummings, Julie Cartwright and others from Charles Darwin University, at Darwin. It is an excellent description of how they have used a treasure hunt to engage new users both on and off campus. The slides show uses of QR codes and how the treasure hunt helped to encourage the use of these. There are details of how effective they felt the hunt had been and pointers for the future.I particularly liked the plans for future use of QR codes there "Aim for high impact low cost.Linking physical spaces or items directly to associated electronic resources."A lot of the presentation resonated with our experience at University of Bedfordshire but there are some great tips which we can use too. Wish I had gone to this session and isnt Slideshare wonderful that we can all "attend" it now!

Exploring student engagement with mobile technologies at a regional university

View more presentations from Sally Cummings

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

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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.

Barack Obama and information

"Is education mainly about information?" asks a little video made by the University of New Brunswick Library. In the clip Barack Obama makes a guest speech at a University (in an amazing blue robe).This might be useful trigger video for a discussion about education or what the library can offer.
Information + Time for Research, Reading, and Thinking = Success for Your Research Paper.

Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter

No doubt about it : I don't blog as much as I did ; there aren't so many posts on the blogs that I follow.
In an article 'Blogs wane as the young drift to sites like twitter" in the New York Times Feb 20, 2011 by Verne. G. Kopytoff, we discover the trends. The Internet and American Life Project at the Pew Research Center found that from 2006 to 2009, blogging among children ages 12 to 17 fell by half. Among 18-to-33-year-olds, the project said in a report last year, blogging dropped two percentage points in 2010 from two years earlier.
Among older internet users blogging is still preferred. Some will see Twitter and Facebook as complementary to blogs - a place to promote their blogs.