A colleague (thanks Sara) alerted me to this Diploma on Functional Skills from the QCA. It covers “practical skills in English, Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and Mathematics, that allow individuals to work confidently, effectively and independently in life.” Looking through the standards, they use a lot of info lit type terminology – things like “finding, selecting, developing, communicating information” and “use discrimination in selecting information that matches requirements from a variety of sources and evaluate fitness for purpose” It will be interesting to follow this up a little more.

Oystercatchers from Darryl in WA

http://www.qca.org.uk/qca_6062.aspx

I was interested to hear the news item on Radio 4 this morning about the growing problem of plagiarism in schools. It echoed the findings of my own survey, in which teachers also expressed concern about students copying and pasting from the Internet. However, many of them also said that they rely on the Internet as an information source for students, so it’s a difficult situation. Nearly all the school students I spoke to identified wikipedia as their main information source and very few had any understanding of the issues surrounding quality. I’m hoping that one of the outcomes of my project will be some practical ways in which my library can work more closely with local schools to help with this issue.

Me at Yosemite

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7194772.stm

There are only a few days left to sign up to the petition on professional librarians in school libraries. The petition says:

“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to make the provision of professionally staffed libraries within all schools, both secondary and primary, statutory.” and can be found here
It closes on June 14th – the end of this week.

Flowering red ginger (thanks to Darryl in WA)

This is the last UK school which will be participating in my research at present, though I am also expecting that students from one or more schools in New Zealand will be joining in in the next few weeks. Time and distance constraints mean that these students will fill an online version of the ranking exercise, rather than the paper version which I have used up to now. Chemistry students at Newcastle and Canterbury (NZ) Universities are also currently filling in the online version. If this works sucessfully, then there is potential to widen it out to include more schools and universities, both in the UK and overseas. I’ll never have time to go back to my real job!

Aquilegia in the garden

I had an interesting meeting this morning with Laura Jeffrey from Durham University Library. She is interested in finding out how they can make their induction more effective and feels that a better understanding of what students are learning about libraries and IL in schools will help them plan a more focused programme. As I have already been talking to some Durham schools about a very similar topic, we felt that this will be a good opportunity to collaborate and share information. Hopefully Laura and her colleagues will gather data which will feed into my project and I’ll be able to pass on to them relevant data which I’ve already collected. This will give us a much broader picture of how we can help with the transition into university.

Alex (my son) at Trent Lock

Today I visited Egglescliffe School near Stockton, in order to interview staff and students for my project. I was made very welcome and in the foodie spirit of this blog, have to report on the excellent quality of the school dinner today! Egglescliffe is an 11-18 secondary school, noted as outstanding by Ofsted, so I wasn’t surprised to find both staff and students had plenty to say about their views of information literacy. This school is also one of the few in this area which still has a teacher librarian in post – this makes an interesting comparison with Queensland, where I found many such posts and even a specific course for teachers wishing to add an extra librarianship qualification to their cv.

Wendy and Fariha in Egglescliffe School Library (with permission)