My colleague, Jenny just alerted me to this new example of plagiarism hitting the news – it’s always useful to have real examples to demonstrate to students what might happen!
Hadrian’s Villa, near Rome, July 2009
Thanks to Jackie for alerting me to Educause’s report on Students and IT There’s a table (Table 4-5) in the report that depicts students’ perceptions of their information literacy skills – interesting!
Drinking fountain, Siena, Italy, July 2009
In talks I’ve given recently about Writing for Publication, I have mentioned all the good work Helen Fallon is doing in support of WfP, especially the workshops she runs for library staff. Helen has a blog “for library staff who wish to write for academic publication. It aims to facilate discussion about writing and publishing, particularly in librarianship and related areas. It should also provide a forum for posting messages such as calls for papers and conference presentations”
Pat and I have also been talking about having a CoW, a Community of Writers, and perhaps Helen’s blog is one way of facilitating this kind of community for library staff who are keen to start writing.
Durham Canyon July 2009
Our new NTF here at Newcastle, Colin Bryson, has written a very interesting SEDA paper on student engagement. I was particularly interested in the section on transition and engagement which makes the point that for students to be engaged by good T&L they need to have the self confidence and skills to engage. They recognise that libraries have role to play and describe a model of transition which is helpful in identifying the contribution of libraries and IL.
Floods in Durham 18th July 2009
see more photos of the floods here
I mentioned a few months ago that I had given a talk at LILAC with a colleague, Liz Stockdale and I put a link to a draft copy of our paper in our eprints repository. The paper was substantially revised after detailed advice from Susie Andretta and has now been published in the Journal of Information Literacy
Lea Gardens again
I am interested in thinking about how we can use the concept of threshold concepts in information literacy. This article in Active Learning in Higher Education 2009, 10 103-119, describes a small research project which looked at identifying threshold concepts in different disciplines.
Me in Lea Gardens, Matlock (photo by Kathy)
I have just heard from our Institutional Repository manager that my NTF report which I deposited last month had 86 downloads in December, which made it the top downloaded paper from our repository. I can now claim to have had a Christmas Number one! I’m pleased so many people are interested in it, even though it isn’t a high level piece of work.
Sadly we lost Bramley last month, so this is the last picture of him
Wow, a whole month since I posted a comment on my blog. I don’t expect there’s anyone still reading it now! I blame the fact that I’ve been too busy doing the job to spend time blogging about it, but I promise to try harder.
Anyway, I thought people might be interested in Phil Race’s blog on assessment, learning and teaching in HE. Phil has moved his blog and Google keeps pointing folks to his old site, but this link will take you to the new one and an interesting document on Making Learning Outcomes Work. Phil talks about eight factors which should be clearly evident to students – who, what, how, why, when, where, so what and wow (You’ll have to read his article to find out what they mean!)
It’s just a useful reminder for those of us just about to enter the busiest period of info lit teaching of the year.
The Tour of Britain in Durham
This ACRL webpage caught my attention at the same time as an article by Mark Hepworth and Marian Smith entitled “Workplace information literacy for administrative staff in HE” published in the Australian Library Journal 2008 57(3) 212-236. I haven’t had time to read Mark and Marion’s article yet, but I note that it is making comparisons with the JISC i-skills model. IL for admin, technical and secretarial staff in HE is an area which I am currently thinking about, as I am in the process of setting up some workshops for the admin staff in the Faculty with which I liaise, probably starting with something very practical, like an EndNote workshop, but hopefully also covering some broader IL skills and concepts. I’d be interested to know if any other libraries are developing anything similar or have experienced an increased demand for this type of help.
Coypu in the Carmargue, France
