I went to a very interesting presentation at the Vitae conference on the Researcher Development Framework – badged as “a tool for planning, promoting and supporting the personal, preofessional and career development of researchers” I was pleased to hear that the framework goes beyond just describing competencies or skills and addresses knowledge, behaviours and personal qualities as well. This sits much better with my own understanding of information literacy as being about attitudes, habits and behaviours relating to information, rather than just skills in managing it and I could see how IL could sit comfortably within the new framework.
The proposed framework builds on the Joint Skills Statement, with a matrix of “domains” and “descriptors” based around 5 levels of development. From the small section I saw, there are definitely elements of IL already present. It will be released for consultation soon and I look forward to seeing the whole framework and hopefully contributing to it’s final form.

Hadrian’s Wall, Lanercost.

My attendance at the Vitae conference was sponsored by SCONUL and supported by RLUK and the RIN, so that Wendy White and I could give a presentation highlighting some of the issues in the RIN Mind the Skills Gap report. As usual I promised to put our slides onto my blog, so that anyone attending could download copies, so here they are:

Some of the feedback from our presentation was gathered on post-its, answering the question “tell us one thing which has occurred to you during this talk” (yes, I’m hooked on the one thing feedback idea!)and again, I promised delegates I’d include their comments on the blog, so here they are, in no particular order and in unedited form:

– need to review university training in respect of information literacy for wide researcher base, particularly research leaders
– information about information should be made available online so that all researchers can access the material – perhaps RCUK should fund such an exercise
– as a senior researcher/trainer/postgraduate developer how do I address my huge information skills gap in order to then more effectively encourage other researchers to fill their gaps!? It’s so important and a little overwhelming.
– incentives for improving data curation skills
– I think everyone today is in danger of information overload so in order to be an efficient researcher you really need to have the skills to recognise what is useful information and what is not
– impact, impact factor, new web based developments
– how can I promote my research publications to improve my H index?
– work with library staff to devise appropriate training for research staff
– how do we get buy in from these different stages of researchers? Is the message well received?
– choosing to plagiarise or not to plagiarise – links information skills and personal effectiveness (self confidence, finding your own voice etc)
– a lot of this conference seems to be about information literacy if we take this definition, why don’t I know more about it?
– the quote says it all [ quote was “The more you know, the more you realise that you don’t know, whereas if you don’t know you don’t know, you can be quite confident that you know”]
– need to think about the idea of attitudes and behaviours in relation to information, I haven’t thought of it as more than competencies before

http://www.vitae.ac.uk/re…-.html#pageInfo

On Tuesday I attended the Vitae Researcher Development Conference at the University of Warwick. It was attended by around 400 delegates, all people involved in supporting researchers, but only a handful of librarians were present. The conference was a great opportunity to hear about new developments in researcher support and you’ll find lots of information about it on their web pages.
I liked their use of Twitter in the opening plenary. Delegates sat around circular tables to listen to the speakers, each table equipped with a laptop, so we could twitter during the presentations and afterwards during our discussion. All the tweets were displayed on the large screens around the room and this gave very quick feedback on any common threads arising from the discussions. I wonder if we could use this technique within a teaching session with students?

Lea Gardens yet again

http://www.vitae.ac.uk/vitaeconference2009