Author Archives: Moira

Cold Cotes Farm

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” I can only see from where I’m standing the cause and effect on the people around me”. This quote from “Just my thoughts”, by Ed Loft reminded me of my Wandering Minds exercise in which I’m trying to capture some of the impact my NTF is having on the people I meet. It’s providing me with some fascinating insights into what people take away from our encounters, often totally unrelated to the main subject of the meeting. I’d be delighted to hear from you if you’ve read anything on this blog which you’ve found interesting, as this will add to my pool of information.
Anyway, back to Ed, who as well as being the author of the above mentioned little poetry book, is also the owner of the Cold Cotes B&B (and events centre) near Harrogate in Yorkshire. Having just spent a very comfortable night there, I can thoroughly recommend it! We were greeted with a tray of tea and home made cakes and things just improved from there!


Cold Cotes Garden

http://www.coldcotes.com/

Umbrella

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Last week I was at Umbrella briefly, in order to run a workshop with my colleague Sophie Brettell from our Quality in Learning and Teaching section. Our workshop was entitled “Collaboration in transition – working together to facilitiate information literacy” We used the SRS interactive system to gather group opinions and also to allow participants to complete my perceptions ranking exercise and quickly see each other’s views. I’ll add another posting soon with a link to our presentation as I’m hoping some of the participants will look at this blog and pick it up.

Mulla mulla WA (Courtesy of Darryl again)

Umbrella and research book

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Just a note to say that if you’re one of those sad few people who is thinking they’d like to get a copy of our book on research support, it will be available on the Facet stand at Umbrella with 30% off – a bargain! I’ll be doing a workshop at Umbrella on saturday about my own project and the Newcastle IL project too, in conjunction with Sophie Brettell.

i3 conference, Aberdeen

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I’ve spent the last few days at the Information: interactions and impact conference in Aberdeen. Sheila Webber is mentioning a lot of the presentations on her blog and there is also a conference blog. This was a very international conference, bringing together practitioners and academics from a wide range of countries. I felt privileged to have been asked to talk about my own small project and was pleased that it generated a some interest and possible future contacts in my audience. I particularly enjoyed the keynote from Martin Westwell from the Institute for the Future of the Mind, talking about how technology changes the way we think, or more precisely, how what we do with technology changes how we think.
Another thought – an information literate person is aware of all the aspects of IL and chooses to “do it their own way”, so they way often exhibit what appear to be non IL behaviour – we have to be careful not to make assumptions.

Banksia, WA (thanks Darryl)

http://www.i3conference.org.uk/

Providing Effective Library Services for Research

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I have just received my advance copy of the book written by myself, Jo Webb and Pat Gannon-Leary. It’s very exciting to see my name on a real book and a first for me! Now we just have to hope that people find it useful and that you all buy lots of copies! The book cover says “This book will inform and advise all those who work with researchers in libraries, combining practical advice with an exploration of fundamental issues relating to the relationship between research and libraries”. As you can imagine, it’s a riveting read!

http://www.facetshop.co.u…&Category_Code=

Petition for professional school librarians

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There are only a few days left to sign up to the petition on professional librarians in school libraries. The petition says:

“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to make the provision of professionally staffed libraries within all schools, both secondary and primary, statutory.” and can be found here
It closes on June 14th – the end of this week.


Flowering red ginger (thanks to Darryl in WA)

Sir Learnalot

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Sir Learnalot is the title of a small project I’m involved in, together with Ruth Stubbings (Loughborough), Debbi Boden (Imperial), Chris Powis (Northampton) and Marcus Woolley (Luton). We have some funding to repurpose the original Edulib materials into a digital resource. Edulib was an excellent initiative which ran several years ago, aiming to improve teaching skills for library staff. The outcome of Sir Learnalot will be a digital resource which can be used either independently or alongside face to face workshops. Like Lollipop (which is about IL skills for library staff) it will be freely available and customisable for individual library learning situations.

Clematis

Emerging technologies for learning (Becta)

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A friend (thanks Heather) sent me the details of this site. Becta is an organisation which aims to improve learning through technology and they produce some excellent publications, which often give a broad overview of an area. This one, entitled “Emerging technologies for learning[volume 2 2007] includes the following chapters:

Emerging trends in social software for education
Learning networks in practice
The challenge of new digital literacies and the ‘hidden curriculum’
How to teach with technology: keeping both teachers and students comfortable in an era of exponential change
Games in education
Ubiquitous computing


Part of my herbaceous border (for Caitlin!)

http://partners.becta.org…ap_03&rid=11380

Durham Johnston School joins my project

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This is the last UK school which will be participating in my research at present, though I am also expecting that students from one or more schools in New Zealand will be joining in in the next few weeks. Time and distance constraints mean that these students will fill an online version of the ranking exercise, rather than the paper version which I have used up to now. Chemistry students at Newcastle and Canterbury (NZ) Universities are also currently filling in the online version. If this works sucessfully, then there is potential to widen it out to include more schools and universities, both in the UK and overseas. I’ll never have time to go back to my real job!


Aquilegia in the garden