Sylvia in her Melbourne Cup hat!
Last night I met Sylvia Edwards, Mandy Lupton and Hilary Hughes, some IL researchers and experts from Brisbane. Mandy and Sylvia have written a fascinating article – Six frames for IL education (see link above), which is well worth reading as it explains a model for understanding different perspectives of IL. It was great to meet people whose work I have admired from afar and to get their advice on my project and what value they think it will have. Sylvia also plans to introduce me to some people doing research on the First Year experience, which will be very helpful and Hilary has given me some useful info on international student issues.

http://www.ics.heacademy….final%20_1_.pdf

I am staying in a house where wallabies hop past the windows and rainbow lorikeets and royal kingfishers perch on the trees in the garden! If I’m lucky a koala may visit us too!
Everyone is very pleased as I seem to have brought the rain with me from New Zealand – it hasn’t rained here for months but was torrential last night after I arrived! It’s not fair!!

Today, I met with Meg Upjohn, who is the chemistry librarian at the University of Canterbury here in Christchurch. Meg is very interested in the work I have been doing with Christine Bleasdale in our chenistry school, looking at embedding info lit into the chemistry curriculum and specifically this term at using the SRS system to do some diagnostic testing with the chemistry first years. I’ve agreed to send Meg some more info about this work to see if she can replicate it.
She is also going to collaborate with me in my research about perceptions of IL and will run my survey with her own staff and students in chemistry and hopefully also in a local high school, to give us some comparative international data to work on. This promises to be a very useful collaboration and I’m delighted to be working with Meg on this.
The photo is the Botanic Gardens in Christchurch.

new Zealand is also the only place you can see the yellow eyed penguin in the wild -we were lucky to see this one outside his burrow, having a stretch before going back to incubate his egg. My photos of the giant royal albatross were less successful!

As the librarian for science and agriculture I thought we should have a blog entry about this topic. Did you know that there are 49,466,000 sheep in New Zealand and I think I have probably seen most of them! More exciting are the kiwis – nocturnal so I couldn’t get a photo – and keas, which are very inquisitive and large members of the parrot family who delight in picking the rubber trim out from around car windshields. Here are some keas I met on the road to Milford Sound

I am very pleased that Professor Sally Brown, PVC at Leeds Met, has also agreed to participate on our Info Lit event in Newcastle on 2nd April 2007, along with Christine Bruce from QUT. Christine is an internationally renowned expert in IL, while Sally is an expert in assessment. It promises to be an interesting day.

Just thought I’d add a photo of Mount Cook to entertain you

One of the things I am interested in is what impact my NTF has on people other than me, so at each library I am visiting I am asking staff to fill ina Wandering Minds sheet during my talk, to tell me of anything they think about (apart from their shopping lists!) while I am talking. I have had some fascinating responses so far and I’ll try to follow a few up next year to see how they have developed. I thought this might also work with my blog, so if you read a post and it makes you think, or do anything, please let me know (my email is on the left)so that I can document it as part of the ripples in my NTF pond

This is a picture of the outside of the main library here at UC

I hear it was pink day in Newcastle Library on Friday, so I have a pic of me wearing pink outside Otago University Medical Library, which I’ll add to the blog when I can get to a PC at which I can download my photos again. (one for the wall in the staffroom too?) Otago University in Dunedin boasts the only medical school in New Zealand, so not a very big group of medical librarians! There are only 8 universities in New Zealand in total.

Ok – 2 photos – wearing pink outside a different library!

It seems I can’t escape from EndNote, even at the other side of the world! I went to a very good demo of Endnote yesterday and hope to bring some useful info home with me. This pic is the campus at Christchurch – rhododenrons everywhere and a wonderful smell from the eucalyptus trees!

This is for Louise! I went to the Christchurch Polytechnic Library yesterday afternoon. As always, I was made very welcome and given an interesting tour. They will be starting a podcasting project which sounds fascinating, as it will include signing videos, so I hope we’ll keep in touch over that. However, Louise would have loved their recycling – there are bins everywhere, never more than 20 feet away. Staff have also all been issued with a tiny wheelie bin to encourage them to cut down on waste. The pics show Alan with a set of bins and Fiona with a baby wheelie bin!