View from the Library

The NUIS courses in Singapore are hosted at two different Polytechnics. I’m currently visiting Ngee Ann Poly, which has 15,000 students, mainly aged 16-18. Students here do a 2 year A-level course, followed by a year diploma course. They may then enter into Stage 2 of a NUIS course – in marine or chemical engineering at Ngee Ann, or mechanical engineering or food science at Nan Yang Poly.

View of Singapore from “the boat in the sky”

As I’m currently in Singapore on university business, these posts are primarily for my colleagues back at home, but for anyone else interested, this is what I’m up to.

NUIS: Newcastle University in Singapore, runs 4 programmes in conjunction with Singapore Institute of Technology (SIT). The programmes are hosted by 2 polytechnics, with Marine Engineering and Chemical Engineering at Ngee Ann and Mechanical Engineering and Food Science at Nan Yang. There are currently 23 full time staff and ~300 students based here, as well as several “adjunct” staff, local experts who contribute as guest lecturers. The poly libraries provide local support and access to print materials and Newcastle provides distance support and access to e-resources. You can see our library guide for NUIS students here

My brief is to learn more about how things work here so that we can ensure we are providing the best possible support for both staff and students. I’ve already spent a day meeting the Dean, chief administrator, SIT rep and Operations Director, which has helped clarify some of the systems and processes involved in a 3 way agreement such as this. I’m already realising the truth of Ehsan ( the Dean)’s comment that “once you have been here you won’t be the same Moira”. Is it the climate, the culture, different attitudes, different kinds of conversations? I’m not sure, but one certainly quickly slips into a different mind set.

Tomorrow, I’ll be visiting one of the libraries, as well as giving talks to some of the student groups

As part of our work on the IL Blackboard modules, we’ve been working with our e-learning staff and they have introduced to a few freely available “toys” which we’re planning to try, either within the modules or just in general teaching. Many folks will already know about them, but they were new to us.  For example:

Durham Lumiere

Wallwisher allows you to pose a question or a comment on a web page and have respondents add post it notes. maybe a way to get students engaged in posting questions before a workshop. You can allow free comments or moderate them.
Poll Daddy is a neat way of quickly getting a group opinion and embeds nicely into Blackboard.
Poll Everywhere enables people to text a question or answer which immediately displays on a screen

A colleague and I are currently devising a couple of modules in Blackboard, part of an Innovation Fund award from the University. One of the modules is aimed at academic staff, to encourage them to think about how to integrate IL development into the curriculum. It’s based on workshops I currently run for our Intensive CASAP (Certificate in Academic Practice) which the university has been delivering for Nigerian academics. I’m hoping to test it with staff at our campus in Singapore next month. This is something close to my heart, I firmly believe that librarians shouldn’t be teaching all the IL development, it should be an integral part of the student learning experience and owned by all teaching staff. Of course library staff can facilitate it and support the staff in delivery and I do enjoy delivering sessions myself, but I think the most effective sessions are those which students perceive as part of the discipline. That means we have to let go a little and “they” have to own it more.

Durham Lumiere

Our twin module contains IL resources for students and it could be run as a “stand -alone” skills module, but what I’m really hoping is that academic staff will take chunks, tailor them and embed them into their own modules. Is this just a dream? We shall see. It’s certainly easier to just point them to a module, but is this effective? Maybe it’s ok for info skills, but then the context relating to attitudes and behaviours, so key to the new 7Ps model, is lost.

Vikki Campus Library

Ruth and I also promised to send everyone at the Helsinki seminar, or who we met subsequently, information about some of the resources we discussed. Again, it’s taken a while, but here it is: Useful links

Paivi and me

After our two talks (on the relevance of IL models and the 7Ps in particular) at the IL seminar in Helsinki last November, Ruth and I asked all the participants to ask questions and make comments. We used the “one thing” approach again – ask us one thing, tell us one thing you like/disliked. This generated a host of questions and comments which Ruth carefully collated. We promised to answer them all and sent the answers to the group. However, I also promised to post the responses on the blog and it has taken me a while to get round to it. However, you’ll find the document here : Q&A

Durham lumiere: Lord Londonderry snowdome c. A Bent

Since we launched the new SCONUL Seven Pillars model last April, we’ve had a lot of feedback, mainly positive, about the new approach. The main difference from the original approach was the addition of attributes relating to understanding and approach as well as abilities. This is underpinned by a core model which can be viewed through a series of “lenses”, depending on the audience or environment. We launched the research lens alongside the core model, to demonstrate how this might work and I’m really excited that over the last few months colleagues have been developing other lenses. The latest addition, created by Helen Howard and Alison Mackenzie, is a Digital Literacy lens. It’s already available on the SCONUL WGIL website in draft form and is very timely, given the current JISC activities around developing digital literacies. I hope folks will have time to look at the new lens – if you’d like to post comments about it here I can take them back to the Group.

One of the first things we noticed about the National Library of Finland was how many people were using the microform readers – 7 folks busily working away. The Library building is beautiful, though very traditional, and I hope to add some of Ruth’s photos to the blog soon.

I liked the way they display their journals (see left) and also that patrons should have “clean, dry hands”

After our second conference talk I enjoyed chatting to a couple of smaller groups of Finnish librarians. In the large conference they had been unwilling to ask many questions, but that wasn’t the case in the smaller groups! We talked about how to engage researchers in developing their IL and I mentioned the self assessment tool I use at Newcastle. This just encourages folks to reflect on their own abilities and to identify areas they want to develop. A cut down version of it is going to be published soon as a Vitae booklet called the Informed Researcher.

Cafe in Finland provides blankets for customers brave enough to sit outside in November!

Our second talk in Helsinki was a very practical one about the process we went through to create the new 7Ps model and research lens. This was the first time Ruth and I have tried to describe the whole process and I think we both enjoyed the experience. We talked about the original model and how well it has been adopted around the world, using our own institutions as examples.
After more discussion about the strengths and weaknesses of the model, we went on to describe the (often painful!) process of creating the new version. There was a lot of interest in the Information Literacy Landscape (see link above) as well as positive reaction to the concept of moving away from skills to encompass attitudes and behaviours.
We used the “one thing” technique I’ve used before to gather feedback from the group and I’ll summarise that on the blog once we’ve had time to analyse it.