The road to Molyvos
Sirje Virkus from Tallin University in Estonia has been researching into IRCs in open and distance learning institutions and has a lot of detailed data. I wasn’t able to make notes as her presentation was very fast and detailed, but I look forward to reading her paper when the conference proceedings are published.
Access to new technologies and services is a priority in India and Maitrayee Ghosh gave us a fascinating overview of the kinds of innovative projects which are taking place. I particularly liked the concept of the InfoThela or Infocart- a bicycle front end, with a battery powered information console behind, which works with a wireless connection to the internet and can be taken to small villages to provide general info, health care, agricultural info and much more. I’ll add a photo when I can get one. Maitrayee mentioned many other projects relating to agricultural information, telemedicine and the simputer, a cheap little computer for personal use. The digital divide in India is enormous, exacerbated by the number of different languages spoken in the rural areas.
A street in Molyvos
I use mind mapping quite frequently with students when I’m teaching them to think about search strategies so I was keen to hear what Virpi and Jouni had to say about their course involving mapping tools and information retrieval. Based at TKK, the leading technology university in Finland, the course is for teaching staff, to enable them to use these methods in their own teaching and Virpi explained that all the staff have found it helpful. I also hadn’t realised the differences between mind, concept and dialogue maps, but was pleased to find that they use the same mind mapping software as I do (Freemind). Jouni explained that concept maps (software CMap Tools) are good for defining terms and creating relationships, while dialogue maps (software Compendium) are about questions, answers and reasons. It makes sense when you see their examples.
Jouni Nevalainen and Virpi Palmgren (hotel pool and Molyvos in background)
I was interested to see Cath Hunt and Maggie Smart’s demonstration of their online classroom, using software callled Wimba (I think). They are using it to deliver online training sessions in database use to PhD students studying for a virtual doctorate at Salford University. All students need a PC, mike and headphones and the live sessions bring the benefits of immedicate feedback and a fun environment. The sessions can be archived, which is helpful for students who need to revisit any of the information. The class size did look quite small and I wondered how scalable an initiative like this would be.
Cath and Maggie (still a beautiful view of the sea too!)
Bob Glass
Bob says he doesn’t have time for a blog, so I thought I’d add him to mine!
Amongst many other things, Bob is responsible for the Information Literacy area of the LearnHigher CETL, at Manchester Metropolitan University. I’ve mentioned it on my blog before so won’t go into details here – the link is above. Bob told us about his interest in assessing IL – he has been working with John Madison University in the US to use their online IL assessment tool to discover what an Information Audit can tell us about first years and to see if an MCQ test can be an effective tool for IL assessment. I’d like to use this tool alongside my own assessment exercise which I’m hoping to run with chemists and environmental science students this year, but Bob tells me there’s a charge for using it, so I may have to think again.
Conferences are great places to meet new people and make friends. This is Pauline Ngimwa from the African Virtual University in Kenya.
Pauline’s talk explained how this World Bank funded Pan African project is working with 57 universities in 27 countries to tackle the issues of connectivity with a consortium to bring down the cost of bandwidth provision and the use of mirror servers.
We had a good info lit afternoon this afternoon! I enjoyed Nancy Graham’s explanation of the BRUM project at Birmingham University. Nancy and her colleagues have created 15 RLOs (reusable learning objects) relating to information literacy skills. The RLOs can be used and repurposed as required and are freely available for anyone to use. I plan to add links to them from our Info Lit Toolkit at Newcastle.
As you’ll see, I caught all the speakers this afternoon at the same spot!
I was fascinated by Kara Jones and Kate Robinson’s presentation today. They have been working with a group of international students- first asking them to recommend a physical library from their home country which they enjoyed using, and following this by asking them to choose 5 books which they feel they can recommend about their country. The Library at Bath University have bought copies of the books in their original language as well as English and have a wiki linked to their catalogue in which the students can comment on the books and recommend them to others. This is a great example of involving students, which I intend to copy at the first opportunity!
Kate and Kara (Molyvos castle in background). Sorry about the shadows
Jane Secker (LSE)and Gwyneth Price (Inst of Education)[both part of the University of London] are involved in a project called LASSIE – Libraries and Social Software in Education – which is exploring how social software can enhance the experience of distance learners. They have completed a comprehensive literature review and also have a blog. I was interested in their ideas for encouraging groups of students to use del.icio.us to share useful websites as part of coursework – I’d like to try this out with some of my students.
LWW isn’t just about information literacy, but has a broad remit covering technological and social issues relating to information, so I thought people might be interested in some of the papers. The programme began with a keynote presentation from Christine Borgman, Professor in Information Studies at UCLA. Chris emphasised that the role of data will have a significant influence on how libraries develop in future and talked about the value chain linking together publications with their research data. Her paper linked well with a following talk from Graham Pryor, who described how Project StORe has been developing middleware to provide links from output publications to source data. Graham summarised some of the advantages and disadvantages as perceived by researchers – for example, advantages include validation of experiments, ability to track research output and explore research in more detail, as well as identify collaborators. Worries were identified as fears of scavengers and misinterpretation of data.
Sunset over the Aegean