Helen Howard gave this interesting presentation on what Leeds University have been doing to develop IL with their postgraduate students. They run a half day workshop for about 20 students, reinforced by open workshops on topics such as Endnote, current awareness and copyright. The half day approach allows the team to use mixed teaching methods. I was interested in the pre workshop assessment. It seemed to incorporate similar things to my approach at Newcastle – an IL self assessment, information about the PhD topic etc, but has given Helen useful data to report too.
Helen also raised some questions:
* how can we support PhD students later on in their research? This is something we have recently been discussing at Newcastle too, maybe as optional workshops on specific topics.
* can we provide an online alternative? We have ResIN at Newcastle but it’s just a set of web pages, no interaction or guided “training”. We also put materials into Blackboard for the PG programmes and some of my colleagues run a blog for them. What else could we do?
* how can we deal with numbers involved?This is a big issue – it’s very timeconsuming to develop and deliver a quality programme, especially to relatively small groups – lots of repetition.

Chester town centre, Easter. (well, it’s near Liverpool!)

ASK won the CILIP UC&R Innovation Award in 2007. It is an online tool which aims to help undergraduate students with thier first assignment by providing them with a 10 step model to work through. I loved the way it allows students to enter the type of assignment and submission date and then works out a work schedule for them (though I would also have liked to see it give the students the skills to do this planning themselves). I also liked the way students can personalise the portal and that it includes some IT and study skills (writing, reflecting, reviewing etc)Alison Pope, Geoff Walton and Julie Adams from Staffordshire University have plans to develop ASK with Web 2.0 technologies, videos and podcasts as well as extending it to cover other tasks such as creating posters and giving presntations. ASK is available under a Creative Commons licence.

That bird again!

http://www.staffs.ac.uk/ask/

Anja is a Senior Research Fellow in Education at Southampton and her keynote address focused on the Student Diversity and Academic Writing project with which she has been involved at Lancaster University and LSE.
I found Anja’s talk particularly timely, as the SCONUL task group I have been involved with has just submitted the draft guidelines on library support for international students. Anja made the following points based on her research, which focused on Indian, Greek and Chinese taught postgrads in buiness and marketing:
* Indian students are often taught using specific course books and notes so they have no need to reference. They rarely do coursework
* Indian students often miss out on presessional courses because their English is good, so they miss out on a lot of information they really need
* Indian teachers are not often involved in research so their students have no concept of it, or of scholarly journals.
* Greek students are used to having private tuition to help them pass exams, which they can retake as often as they need to.
* Greek students are used to relying heavily on peer support rather than support from acadmic staff.
* Greek students are provided with key texts free, so don’t use libraries.
Greek students are used to memorising and reproducing, which has implications for plagiarism
* Chinese students – we need to differentiaite between undergraduate chinese students (who may have come to the UK because they failed the national entrance exams for chinese universities) and postgrads who are already succesful academically.
* Chinese libraries vary greatly in size and quality. UK libraries need to make clear to students what the library is for and what they can do there.

Mandurah bird again

It was great to meet Patricia Senn Breivik in Sheffield too; she led a discussion about IL and emphasised that we need to be more political about it. It was interesting to hear that some accrediting bodies in the US are now looking at student IL outcomes rather than counting how many books the library has! Pat also advised us to look at what industry wants for jobs which are hard to fill, citing her own experience with the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce.
Talking about the “information have-nots”, Pat reminded us about the UNESCO statement that IL is a basic right for life long learning and invited us to think about how IL works in an orally based society.
We also discussed library staff skills and time for IL advocacy – what are our expectations of library staff when they sit on committees, do we all have advocacy skills or is it better to play to individual strengths?

Inside the information commons, Sheffield (photo from Flickr)

I always enjoy listening to Sheila Webber and Bill Johnston talk about their work on information literate universities – it’s a term I have started using whenever I talk to senior managers in my own institution and I find it very helpful. Their talk highlighted an issue I am struggling with at present – the conflict between embedding IL into the curriculum so that it is part of the subject being taught, whilst at the same time articulating it as a graduate attribute. I used to think that if I could sneak some IL into a course, without students realising, then that was fine, but I’ve realised that because becoming information literate is so important, students need to be able to add it to their CVs and talk about it to prospective employers. Being aware that you are information literate is part of the bigger picture.

Sheffield Information Commons (photo from Flickr)

On 14th March I attended a seminar at the Sheffield Centre for Information Literacy Research.
The first talk, given by Sheila Corrall, described her research into strategic engagement with IL. Sheila surveyed 114 universities in the UK and found evidence of strategic commitment in 75 cases, limiting her survey to documents in the public domain accessible from institutional websites. She found IL was mentioned in institutional strategies for information, student skills, and learning and teaching, but was less common in graduate attributes and research strategy documents. Sheila is developing an evaluation framework to model her findings.

Pippin again

http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/is/cilr/index.html

I just picked up on this article in the Guardian from a debate on the plagiarism mailing list

http://education.guardian…2255793,00.html