Last week I helped organise the UC&R Northern Group meeting focused on support for international students. Karen, Marie and I presented our work on the SCONUL Guidelines again and I’ll link to our slides below.

However, the interesting part of the day for me was hearing the views of international students and scholars themselves. We invited two scholars to talk to us – Jarka Glassey is a senior lecturer at Newcastle now and she talked about her experiences learning in Slovakia and the issues she encountered coming to the UK. She made me aware that as well as planning support for new students, we must remember that we have many international scholars at all levels in our universities and must ensure that we cater for their experiences too.

Ramesh is a postgraduate student from Iran and she gave us her perceptions of the differences in learning and libraries in the countries she has studied in, the UK, Sweden and Iran, with some useful summaries on her slides.

Pat Gannon-Leary and Rosie Crane from Northumbria summarised their research findings on international learning cultures, highlighting issues in learning experiences which we need to be aware of when planning to teach international students.

We ran out of time for a proper discussion at the end of the day, but I am hoping we shall continue an online forum, as there were lots of interesting points to follow up.

Links to all the presentations are below:

At the LILAC conference, I managed to meet up with several people who are keen to develop university library links with schools to promote information literacy development. We snatched a few brief chats over coffee and all agreed this is an area we want to do more work in. We would like to run a one day event designed to bring together university and school librarians, school teachers and university lecturers to discuss ways in which we can develop a community of practice for mutual support. I’d like the event to be an opportunity to hear about existing good practice, as well as facilitate discussion and generate new ideas. We haven’t agreed a venue (though it will probably be Newcastle) or a date yet, but I’m keen to hear from folks who are interested in participating in this venture in any way, so do please email me: moira.bent@ncl.ac.uk

Spring lambs

There were several presentations at LILAC around the theme of how to develop information literacy in secondary schools. As this was the subject of my own NTF research, I tried to attend as many of the sessions as I could. Several were from the public library perspective. Anu Miettinen talked about how Vantaa Public Library in Finlamd has gone on to provide IL education for students’ of Vaskivuori Upper Secondary School. Lisa Thomas and Karen John explained the Porfolios and partnerships programme: a pilot information literacy project for secondary schools. Caerphilly Public Library Service developed a proposal to extend the information skills sessions to 14-16-year-olds in local secondary schools. Both presentations made me reflect on ways in which academic, public and schools libraries could be working more closely together in this area.

Daffodils

As usual, the LILAC conference this year was excellent and I have come back to work brimming over with new ideas, as well as a large amount of envy for what other people are achieving! I’ll be posting a few comments about sessions I attended over the next few days, but thought I’d start with my own. Liz Stockdale, who is a lecturer in Environmental Science here at Newcastle, and I gave a talk about the work Liz has been doing to weave a golden thread of IL through the 3 years of her programme. We have designed a variety of IL interventions and strategies, as well as some techniques for assessing the impact of the interventions on the quality of the students’ work. We ran out of handouts as more people attended than I had expected, so I promised to add a link to our slides from the blog – here they are:

We’ve also written the work up as an article and submitted it to the Journal of Information Literacy – a pre refereed version is available on our institutional repository.