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.

http://www.learnhigher.mmu.ac.uk/

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.

http://clt.lse.ac.uk/Projects/LASSIE.php

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

This is the first day of the LWW conference – and this has to be one of the best conference locations I’ve ever been to. This is the view from my hotel room of Molyvos and the Aegean!

The conference programme looks good too. I’m looking forward to hearing the talk by Kara Jones and Kate Robinson – Kara tells me it is about a project which involves international students contributing their views on books from their home country into a wiki which then links into the library catalogue. Sounds like a great idea. More when I’ve actually heard the presentation!

Just another pic of the sea:

Next week I’m going to the LWW7 conference in Greece, with Marie Scopes from Leeds Met and Karen Senior from Bolton, to present our paper on library support for international students. As part of our project, we’ve run a questionnaire, survey websites and talked to students to discover just what the situation and issues are, before proposing some solutions and examples of good practice. The paper will be published in the LWW7 conference proceedings and the full SCONUL report next January.

San Francisco Airport Library

I’ve just been updating the WGIL website (still a bit of a struggle for me, but I’m getting there!), so I thought I’d just give it a quick plug in case there are folks reading this who don’t know about it. On it, as well as the original 7 Pillars article, you’ll find up to date details of all members of the working group and our action plan for the coming year.

https://www.sconul.ac.uk/…ation_literacy/