Hello to all the researchers I met at the NE Universities researcher summer school at Beamish Hall yesterday.
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| Pippin helping with paperwork |
We talked about profile raising, esteem and impact. One resource I forgot to mention is MyRI, a useful open access online resource which helps you to learn more about bibliometrics – ways to track and measure your research output.
Now you know the name of my cat and you have boosted my blog stats too!
I’m finding it difficult to keep up with all the different social media applications which are around these days. This week, thanks to Jenny, I’ve discovered flavorsme, a neat way to keep basic info and links about yourself all in one place.
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| Heron near Falkirk Wheel (thanks Kathy) |
Last week I was interviewed by Jane Secker and Emme Coonan as part of their research for their Arcadia Fellowship. It was nice to be called an “expert witness” – not sure I agree with that description, I’m more just an enthusiastic amateur! The project is fascinating. Jane and Emma are aiming to understand the information needs of future undergraduate students on entering UK higher education and so develop a revolutionary curriculum for information literacy that can be used with them. The curriculum aims to be flexible so that it can be can be used and adapted in a variety of settings and will support face to face, blended and online learning provision. I really enjoyed our chat. Having the opportunity to reflect back on my own NTF research was useful too.One of the useful outcomes from my NTF work was encouraging me to think about how the way in which teachers perceive IL affects how they integrate it into their teaching – if they think of it as skills, or even just using the library, then they may not address the underlying attitudes, understandings and behaviours which need to be taught alongside the skills
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| Falkirk wheel again (courtesy of Kathy) |
I was disappointed to miss the e-books and e-content event last month due to illness, so I’m pleased to see all the presentations are now available. Over the last couple of years I have been using some of my NTF fund to buy a range of different e-book readers. In my little collection I have: a bebook, a cybook, a sony touch, sony pocket and sony prs505, an iriver story, a kindle, an archos and an ipad. So far not one of them is an outright winner for me in terms of academic library use (well, maybe the ipad…). I feel the Sonys should be, as at least it’s possible to add non DRM controlled EPUB documents onto them, so a few subscribed titles maybe. Certainly they seem to be the best bet for using with public library ebooks. I do like the Newcastle City Library pages, and the Overdrive summary page of different devices. Sony’s are not so easy to read PDFs on though. We loan a few sony readers out to our users and they are very popular, but it’s frustrating that they don’t work with all our ebook content. I must say I like the option via Amazon to email a PDF to your kindle and have it reformatted – that’s much better for EJ articles, but really only works for a personal reader, not loanable equipment. I know other folks are experimenting a lot with readers now – I’ll be interested to know your experience if you’d like to leave me a comment.
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| The Falkirk Wheel (courtesy of Kathy) – lots more Scottish photos to come! |
Helen Partridge from QUT is giving a talk today in Manchester about her research on the issues, challenges and opportunities social media brings to the information world. It promises to be a thought provoking discussion. She gave the same talk last month and there were some very interesting blog posts about it – see Neil’s Random Letters and Emma Wood’s Librarian Identity. There’sa twitter tag for today’s talk too: #infolit
I thought maybe readers of this blog would like to respond to a survey on use of online resources in teaching from a fellow NTF:
DO YOU USE ONLINE RESOURCES IN TEACHING AND LEARNING?
ORIOLE (Open Resources: Influence on Learners and Educators) would like to hear from educators that do. They have launched an online survey (access from website) and would appreciate your responses. The average time to complete the survey is 20 minutes and there is a charitable twist. Respondants are asked to select charities from a list with the most popular three each receiving
I’m looking forward the next UK Universities Science and Technology Librarians Group (USTLG) meeting tomorrow. We usually meet twice a year to discuss topics of interest to group members and contributions are generally from within the group, so very practical and useful sharing of experience sessions. I’ve chaired the group for a long time and really enjoy the informal networking aspects of the day. Tomorrow, the meeting is focused around information literacy and, as it’s at Sheffield, we’re delighted to have Sheila Webber with us. She’s be talking about IL and supervisors. I’m going to do a repeat of the LILAC presentation (sorry if you already came to that) and then we have 4 different talks from group members about work they are undertaking at present in different aspects of IL. I’ll put my slides here now and then next week will try to blog about the other sessions too.