On Friday I participated in a Netskills event – a user testing day to help develop a self evaluation tool for their JISC funded i-skills project. The JISC i-skills project is about information skills in employment, focusing on administrators and managers. Helen Conroy at Netskills has done some great work in developing a paper based self evaluation tool, which is going to be turned into a freely available(I think) online tool. The testing day brought together staff developers, admin staff, library staff and IT staff, discussing how we thought the tool should be structured and how it might be used. It was fascinating to hear different views on IL and to discuss how aspects of IL might be integrated into general staff development programmes. For example, where does IL fit in a session on team building or time management? Should it be explicit or implicit?
I hope I’ll have a pic of me at the event here shortly, but meanwhile here is a waterfall at Milford Sound, NZ.

At the ICS event last week, Ruth Stubbings ran a fascinating workshop entitled “How does critical thinking fit into information literacy?” It was easy to see parallels between the way people develop as critical thinkers and their level of information literacy and I’m keen to think of ways of building these ideas into my own IL workshops

Seal on rock, north of Christchurch, NZ

Last week I talked about my project at the above event and, as I did on my study tour, I asked people to fill in a Wandering Minds sheet to tell me what they thought about during my talk (it’s always a scary thing to do!). There was a lot of interest in school liaison and building up connections with schools, but people also picked up on podcasting at Curtin, the concepts of the sheet itself and possibilities of replicating my survey in their own institutions. I’ll be following this up as it would be great to be able to do some comparisons.

This is where they filmed Aragorn falling off the rock in LOTR. (near Queenstown, NZ)

I’m very pleased that I can now announce all the details of an info lit event to be held here at Newcastle on 2nd April. Christine Bruce will be running a workshop based around her 6 Frames model and Sally Brown will be looking at assessment and where IL fits in. We’ll also have a couple of short presentations from Newcastle staff of practical examples of IL in action. I’m hoping it will attract a mix of academic, library and support staff, both from within the university and further afield.

Photo of Sally Brown

http://www.ncl.ac.uk/quil…it/infolit.html

I’ve just been looking at the November Learning website
Even though it’s a commercial site, it has an info lit section which includes an IL quiz and answers – some nice ideas on validating web information for use in schools which are freely available.

Pelican, WA

http://novemberlearning.com/Default.aspx?tabid=160