Me amongst the orchids in Durham

I liked the idea underlying this tool presented by Sue David and Judith Scammell of St George’s University, London. They were looking for a way to improve IL skills of second year medical students and decided to use an online self assessment tool. followed up with optional tutorials. The tool creates a medical scenario; students have to navigate a critical path through it by answering questions relating to various types of information needed. Because it relates to a real world situation, it’s very relevant and gives students formative feedback to help them learn. This works very well for a subject like medicine, in which students can perceive a need for finding this kind of information after they graduate too. If they identify a specific need, they can sign up for more in depth workshops relating to information skills. The takeup has been disappointingly small so far, as with any task which doesn’t carry marks and as the participants have been anonymous, it’s not been possible to track the impact of the exercise, which might have helped with selling it. However, there are plans to change this in future. You can view the tutorial here

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The other day I attended a digital copyright workshop run by Naomi Korn. She made us aware of the web2rights website, which contains some useful diagnostic tools and flowcharts to help people work their way through the legal issues relating to IPR. Their website addresses questions such as:

• “Do rights exist in a virtual world and, if so, who owns them?
• Who owns the rights in works that are a result of collective collaboration?
• What happens if you can
  

Nikki Heath also introduced us to Storybird, a creative writing site which allows children to use images to inspire their writing. This reminded me of some work which Sara Bird, our Education Officer at Newcastle University, has produced. Sara has used some of the wonderful images in our Special Collections to creat a resource called Archives Alive, which contains some fab resources which can be used by schools. Part of this is Authors Alive, a creative writing tool which helps children frame a story around characters and situations in our collections. This is taken from Authors Alive:

Choose a character, anything from a smelly fisherman to a drunken rat.
Put your character in a desperate situation, a public hanging or a daring rescue.
Choose a place for some action, an oyster bar or the toilet.
Finally pick your object, a murderer’s socks or some killer false teeth.

Nikki Heath, who was UK school librarian of the year last year, gave an inspirational talk for her keynote speech at LILAC All the way through, folks were tweeting “I wish she worked at my kids school” and “I wish I’d gone to a school like that”, because Nikki gets the whole school involved in her initiatives to encourage children to read. She’s trying to combat attitudes like “I’d rather wrestle a croc/ babysit my sister/ eat sprouts” than read a book, so the basis of her approach is that we should start with reading for pleasure.

I loved her DEAR initiative (Drop Everything And Read) beacuase, like all good IL initiatives, it is rooted in the curriculum. Nikki has prepared information packs for teachers in all subjects, so when DEAR time comes around, no matter what class they are in, children will drop everything and participate in a reading activity. Simple and effective, as the kids get the message that all staff value reading and it’s not just a library thing.

I knew I’d be entertained by my colleaugue Lucy Keating’s talk about her work on researchers and social media. Lucy explained her concerns that researchers don’t use social media because there is lacl of clarity on the benefits, there’s no critical mass, there are concerns over plagiarism, they feel it’s trivial and for social use and there are few career incentives. However she feels that she can tempt them with her netvibes site, which neatly brings together resources on different aspects of web 2.0 to get them started. It includes examples of how researchers are using the different resources successfully and you can find it here

I was already aware of the existence of MyRI, but it was interesting to hear Ros Pan and Eleen Breen talk about how they developed it. MyRI is an open access bibliometrics toolkit of RLOs, comprising slides, videos and pdfs which can be edited and customised. It’s very timely, high quality and is going to save us all lots of time!

orchids again

I really enjoyed Susan Boyle’s workshop at LILAC on using games creatively. Susan made the point that pedagogy should be focused on arousing students’ imagination and engagement. Games are a great motivator and give participants a sense of accomplishment and confidence and I was surprised at how some very simple games can be used to bring a group together. It’s all about “EDUtainment”, surprising folks and making workshops memorable. Susan used this “do the big rocks first” video to illustrate her point – a very simple demonstration of time management which certainly sticks in your mind!
Even IL lends itself to games – we discussed games which help students with off campus access, evaluation, citation, database choice, search techniques and more. I’m certainly inspired to try using some.
Susan’s tips: games should be fun, quick, simple, easy to play, designed around a specific objective, followed up with correct play.

There were so many excellent presentations at LILAC. I’m going to add a few blog posts about some of the talks I attended, starting with my own! Ruth Stubbings and I officially “launched” the new SCONUL Seven Pillars model to quite a large audience. We’ve had  a lot of feedback and some requests for our slides, so here they are

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The Seven Pillars

?? The RIN and Vitae have commissioned a new booklet in Vitae’s researcher series, called the Informed Researcher. As with the other booklets, the emphasis will be on practical tips, illustrated by quotes and comments. The consultant, Pat Gannon-Leary, would like to conduct a short survey amongst researchers, using the “one thing” technique I’ve mentioned before. She’s looking for contacts amongst researchers – if you are a researcher, or know of someone who might like to help, please can you let me know. We’re hoping the booklet will be published in September.