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)

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.

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/

I picked up the details of this redesigned website from Sheila Webber’s blog
and was surprised to find my blog listed in their list of weblogs!

My garden

http://www.infolitglobal.info/

I’ve just been invited to present a short paper at the i3 conference at Robert Gordon University at the end of June. I hope by then that I’ll have analysed some of the data from my schools visits and this will be my first opportunity to tell people how I’m getting on. The conference has a wide range of interesting speakers, so I’m very pleased to have been asked to join them.

Bramley (on the right) went missing for 4 days over the weekend. Pippin is glad to have him home!

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

Meg Upjohn has just alerted me to this resource from Oregon Library. It includes a range of handouts, tutorials and teaching tips.

Wanaka, NZ (another of Meg’s pics)

http://instructionwiki.org/Main_Page

Although it’s not directly relevant to info lit, I thought I’d add a plea to readers of this blog to help me to get in touch with researchers around the world. Over this last year, I have been involved in writing a book about research support and libraries (make sure you order a copy!)and as a result we have had a paper accepted at a conference in South Africa in August. I shall be on holiday then so sadly can’t go. Pat Gannon-Leary is presenting the paper but we are currently working on the data together.
We want to extend the research we did for the book by including more views from researchers outside the UK – if you have any contacts, or are a researcher yourself and can assist us by filling in the survey or passing it on, I’d be delighted to hear from you. More UK views will also be welcome of course.
If you can help, please email me moira.bent@ncl.ac.uk and I will reply with a copy of the survey.

karen Senior, the Librarian at Bolton University and I will be presenting a paper at the LWW7 conference this year. It is based on the work we’re doing on library support for international students and is entitled Discrete Library Services for International Students – how can exclusivity lead to inclusivity?

This photo of Routeburn, New Zealand, was sent to me by Meg Upjohn, Chemistry Librarian at the University of Canterbury, Chrsitchurch, NZ

http://www.cerlim.ac.uk/conf/lww7/

A colleague (thanks Elizabeth) has just alerted me to this wiki: Library 2.0 in 15 minutes a day It has been created by Sam Wallin, a librarian in Vancouver and looks as if it could be a useful tool for helping library staff get up to speed with new technologies

http://instructionwiki.or…5_minutes_a_day