I’ve just come across Jane Secker’s article in Serials 21(2) July 2008 p112-115. To quote from her abstract: This paper provides an overview of the University of London’s Libraries and Social Software in Education (LASSIE) Project, led by LSE and the Institute of Education. The project explored whether social software, or Web 2.0 technologies, could enhance distance learners’ experience of libraries. LASSIE also undertook five case-studies to explore in more detail: social software and reading lists; social bookmarking and libraries; podcasting and information literacy; blogging; and Facebook and libraries. It concluded that social software might be best utilized to enhance information literacy support for distance learners.

Water jousting, Meze, France

http://www.metapress.com/content/77qxr36271369p47/

New Directions for Teaching and Learning v114, 2008 is a themed issue around Information Literacy. It’s great to see a mainstream T&L journal according the issue this degree of importance, the editorial includes comments such as ” information literacy can be viewed as a call to another approach to content and teaching practice”, “there needs to be a shift towards learning how to be information literate – learning how to question, understanding how to evaluate…..in other words, turning information into knowledge”
Articles include:
Reforming the undergraduate experience
Librarians as agents of change: Working with curriculum committees using change agency theory
Global educational goals, technology, and information literacy in higher education
Information literacy and its relationship to cognitive development and reflective judgment
Information literacy and first-year students
Effective librarian and discipline faculty collaboration models for integrating information literacy into the fabric of an academic institution
Dynamic purposeful learning in information literacy
College student engagement surveys: Implications for information literacy.

Kingston University Library new extension (photo from Pippa Jones from Leeds)

http://www3.interscience….l/86011233/home

There’s a short piece in this week’s Times Higher Education about the SCONUL report on international students – I seem to have got my name in press a couple of times….
I wish they had focused more on the actual report itself though and actually explained how it is trying to help libraries develop their services. I have been quite pleased at the positive response we have had to the report so far, people seem to like the practical suggestions in the appendices as well as the examples of good practice. Karen Senior and I will be giving a presentation and a workshop based around the report at the SCONUL Access conference on 24th June at Kingston University.

Heraklion from the harbour

http://www.timeshigheredu…code=402149&c=1

I am delighted to see another positive review of our book on “Providing effective library services for research”. This one, on the HEA ICS website is from Laurie Prange, a librarian at Yukon College in Canada. I will be using some of the data from the book to contribute to a workshop which Phil Sykes is organising at the SCONUL conference in Edinburgh next month.

Street in Archanes, Crete

http://www.ics.heacademy….view.php?id=482

A colleague (thanks Pat) just sent me details of this online book. I haven’t read it but chapter headings look interesting: [Faculty Expectations of Student Research, Asking Students about Their Research, Dream Catcher: Capturing Student-Inspired Ideas for the Libraries’ Web Site, Mapping Diaries, or Where Do They Go All Day? What an Experience: Library Staff Participation in Ethnographic Research and more]

Mark Knopfler’s guitar on stage at Newcastle City Hall 21.5.08
He just gets better and better!

http://docushare.lib.roch…Collection-4436

This paper by Andrew Shenton (Library Review 57, 4 2008, 276-288) is a report of a small scale project exploring problems encountered by school students when looking for information.

Flowers in Archanes, Crete

http://www.emeraldinsight…ntentId=1723245

I just picked up a post on this article by Philip Kent on Peter Godwin’s blog Agreeing with the CIBER Report, Kent emphasises that many authors overemphasise the impact of ICTs on young people and underestimate the effect on older generations. However, he also makes the point that we need to do more in schools to develop information literacy as by the time students reach university they are entrenched in Google and it’s “almost too late”
Anyway, I’m carrying on with adding some of the refs I find to my Refshare database and have now added a link to the database at the left of the main blog posts.

Manolis Kabourakis (TEI Crete), Gillian Bell & Dr Gordon Port (Newcastle) in Archanes, Crete

http://www.iatul.org/conf…proceedings.asp

The article on which our conference presentations at the SCONUL/CONUL seminar in January and LILAC in March were based has now been published in the New Review of Information Networking 2007, 13:2 81-99.(Bent, Gannon-Leary & Webb)

The seven ages model categorises a researcher’s learning life into a series of discrete stages and explores the learning needs relevant to each “age”. We used some of the data from our book on research support to look at how researchers view themselves, the research process and their relationships with information and the library.

Primulas in my garden April 2008

http://www.informaworld.c…pe=author,email

I must earn my free copy of this book by carrying on my posts about each chapter:
Ch 8 Information literacy and RSS feeds at LSE
Christopher Fryer and Jane Secker

This chapter describes how RSS has been used at LSE to enhance access to training courses for staff and students by bringing together information from different training providers in the institution into one training portal. The data is automatically displayed in chronological order and users can filter the list tailored to their interests. The aggregating programme generates new RSS feeds which can be displayed in the VLE and on plasma screens around the university. Very neat! I wish we had this at Newcastle.

Bramley in the garden