Moira's Info Lit Blog

Delighted to see my friend Dulcie has had an article published in the New Review of Children's Literature and Librarianship Volume 15, Issue 1 April 2009 , pages 1 - 20. It's based in her recent research for her PhD.
Congratulations Dulcie!

Water fountain in Siena, Summer 2009

After a request from Phil Race on the NTFs list for examples of questions about teaching which folk wanted answers to, I decided to use this as a basis of a library staff workshop. 10 library staff participated, all involved in different kinds of teaching activity - some doing well integrated information literacy work, others running practical workshops, some doing outreach with local school children, others working with archive material. We submitted questions beforehand and structured small group discussions around this, reporting back to the whole group and then comparing our thoughts with the answers from the draft chapter of Phil's book, which he knidly shared with us. We all felt that we got a lot from the workshop and it went on for almost 2 hours as no one wanted to stop! We're planning to have a follow up in the summer, where we will look at the suggestions again and see if anyone went away and tried any new approaches and if so, how it went. We'll also probably carry on with another set of questions and build up our own little set of suggestions.

You can see the questions we discussed and the suggestions we came up with here:

Vitruvian Man sculpture at Vinci, Italy, 2009.

On Monday I was invited to a meeting of a working group convened in order to send a coherent info lit based response to the Vitae consultation document on the Researcher Development Framework. I've already blogged about this, but it's worth repeating.

The proposed framework has been created as "a tool for planning, promoting and supporting the personal, professional and career development of researchers in higher education. It describes the knowledge, skills, behaviours and personal qualities of researchers and encourages researchers to aspire to excellence through achieving higher levels of development". It incorporates and extends the old Joint Skills Statement (JSS) into a framework which has different phases of development as well as different attributes. Interestingly for me, the consultation document describes five types of researcher, similar to the 7 Ages model I wrote about last year.

Our working group has representation from JISC, SCONUL WGIL, CILIP CSG, RIN, HEA, JISC, DCC, Vitae, BAILER, RLUK and UKCGE, so a fairly wide range of interests. I was just there as myself!

In our discussions, we did highlight some areas of the framework which we feel need rewording and/or reorganising to bring out the IL elements more clearly and I think there also too much emphasis still on the skills and competencies involved in becoming information literate. It is possible however, to draw an IL thread through the framework and it does have an underlying premise of developing behaviours and personal qualities which chimes well with my personal definition of IL as being an attitude or habit of learning, rather than just a set of skills. I think that if we can blend this approach into our response it will be a big step forward for IL development.

Consultation responses can come from individuals and groups until 11th Dec - a great opportunity to get IL firmly embedded into the development of researchers in HE.

Ostia Antica, Italy 09

I wasn't really looking forward to the weekend which has just passed - two full days of watching people I have never heard of cycling in circles in Manchester! My friend Liz advised me to focus on the bulging lycra-clad thighs - good advice, but I still took along some background IL reading just in case (that's the only reference to IL in this post!).
I have to admit I was very pleasantly surprised, because I really did enjoy the weekend! Why? Well, first of all, I could see everything - the Velodrome is not huge and wherever you are you have a good view of the action, even if you're a shortie like me. Next, this is the first sporting venue I've been to where the PA system worked effectively, so I could hear too. Hearing was important - music seems to be an integral part of cycling and the choice of tracks added an extra dimension to the experience [Mission Impossible theme for the guy trying to beat Chris Hoy, Ninja's for the Japanese Kierin race, Sweet Caroline when the girl was disqualified for leaning on an opponent - sing it to yourself!]
The cycling itself was also much more exciting than I had expected, especially as GB kept winning gold medals and the women's team even managed to create a new world record. I have learned a new vocabulary of madisons, kierins, derneys, team pursuits, sling shots, repechage and more and I have to say that the bulging lycra was also worth it. However, I'm sharing bulging muscle with you instead - this is Sir Chris Hoy preparing for one of his events.

Much more fun than reading about information literacy all weekend! You might see a few more cycling photos adorning the blog over the next few weeks.

There's an interesting article by Richard Bosier entitled "Why is the scholarship of teaching and learning such a hard sell?" in Higher Education Research and Development, v28 (1) March 2009, p1-15

Osprey landing on nest, Thanks to Darryl in WA