Yesterday I was invited to attend an IL day at Sheffield University, the special guest for the day being Christine Bruce from QUT. Christine came to the UK to do a keynote speech at the LILAC conference and is coming up to the NE today so that she can run a workshop in Newcastle on monday. I’m planning to get some advice on my own project this weekend, in between doing some quick sightseeing around the region.
The meeting in Sheffield was excellent – in the morning we had an informal seminar in which Christine addressed some presubmitted questions around topics such as IL in the workplace, IL and Web 2.0, IL and threshold concepts. Lots of things to think about! In the afternoon she explained what the research group at QUT are working on and we also heard from Sheila Webber and Bill Johnston on their research into academic conceptions of IL in chemistry and english academics.

Durham riverbanks

Last monday to wednesday I went to the LILAC conference in Manchester. There were so many interesting talks – I’m going to pick a different one each day to write about. Today I’ll choose the first one I attended, which was a talk by Sheila Webber about writing for publication. Sheila made us think about why we wanted to write and what we thought the barriers might be (eg encouragement by management!) I found it very helpful Sheila has started a wiki for anyone who wants to follow this up

Guilderton Library WA – is this the smallest library in the world?

I have just discovered Peter Godwin’s blog.
This is what he says it’s about: How does Web 2.0 affect our delivery of Information Literacy? How do librarians cope with the Google generation and what does this mean for Information Literacy? This site will be a sounding board for us to exchange our views and good practice!
Peter highlights some interesting info from other blogs and some useful tips too.

Durham, near Elvet Bridge (AJB)

At the ICS event I mentioned a few posts ago, Chris Powis reminded us about his InfoTeach wiki. Chris set up the wiki for his NTF project and wants it to develop into a collaborative resource for everyone involved in teaching information literacy. However, he’s disappointed by how few people are contributing. I’m feeling guilty as I haven’t added much myself. If you read this, click on the link and help Chris by adding some content. Don’t worry about not being an expert – we can all learn from each other!

Rooftops in Durham. (AJ Bent)

On Friday I participated in a Netskills event – a user testing day to help develop a self evaluation tool for their JISC funded i-skills project. The JISC i-skills project is about information skills in employment, focusing on administrators and managers. Helen Conroy at Netskills has done some great work in developing a paper based self evaluation tool, which is going to be turned into a freely available(I think) online tool. The testing day brought together staff developers, admin staff, library staff and IT staff, discussing how we thought the tool should be structured and how it might be used. It was fascinating to hear different views on IL and to discuss how aspects of IL might be integrated into general staff development programmes. For example, where does IL fit in a session on team building or time management? Should it be explicit or implicit?
I hope I’ll have a pic of me at the event here shortly, but meanwhile here is a waterfall at Milford Sound, NZ.

At the ICS event last week, Ruth Stubbings ran a fascinating workshop entitled “How does critical thinking fit into information literacy?” It was easy to see parallels between the way people develop as critical thinkers and their level of information literacy and I’m keen to think of ways of building these ideas into my own IL workshops

Seal on rock, north of Christchurch, NZ

Last week I talked about my project at the above event and, as I did on my study tour, I asked people to fill in a Wandering Minds sheet to tell me what they thought about during my talk (it’s always a scary thing to do!). There was a lot of interest in school liaison and building up connections with schools, but people also picked up on podcasting at Curtin, the concepts of the sheet itself and possibilities of replicating my survey in their own institutions. I’ll be following this up as it would be great to be able to do some comparisons.

This is where they filmed Aragorn falling off the rock in LOTR. (near Queenstown, NZ)

I’m very pleased that I can now announce all the details of an info lit event to be held here at Newcastle on 2nd April. Christine Bruce will be running a workshop based around her 6 Frames model and Sally Brown will be looking at assessment and where IL fits in. We’ll also have a couple of short presentations from Newcastle staff of practical examples of IL in action. I’m hoping it will attract a mix of academic, library and support staff, both from within the university and further afield.

Photo of Sally Brown

http://www.ncl.ac.uk/quil…it/infolit.html

I’ve just been looking at the November Learning website
Even though it’s a commercial site, it has an info lit section which includes an IL quiz and answers – some nice ideas on validating web information for use in schools which are freely available.

Pelican, WA

http://novemberlearning.com/Default.aspx?tabid=160

On Tuesday I visited Wolsingham School in Weardale to run my survey with some of the staff. Again, it was a very positive experience, with a lot of interest in and understanding of information literacy issues. There seem to be a lot of opportunities to build stronger links between schools and university libraries and I hope I’ll be working with staff at Wolsingham on this over the next year as they develop their new 6th form library.

Wolsingham School Library

http://www.wolsinghamcollege.durham.sch.uk/