LILAC 2014 presentations - Thursday 24th April

In addition to presenting at LILAC I attended other parallel sessions on the Thursday. I also tweeted at the sessions and or retweeted others. The Twitter feed was #lilac2014 -it is worth a look. 

As usual I picked sessions that were not mainstream for LILAC - these were:

From local to global: sharing good practice in information literacy - the session discussed recent initiatives to facilitate the sharing of information literacy teaching materials as open educational resources both in the UK between librarians from all sectors and internationally. Not surprisingly there is a 'small group of people sharing' and a larger number viewing. This reflects email discussion lists and our own community of practice and the handful of people who blog. What's happening with the professional voicer online? 

I was interested to hear that the CILIP IL subgroup that aims to support and encourage the development and sharing of information literacy teaching materials as open educational resources is looking at creating a website for their Community of Practice. The group discussion about why people are or are not sharing was similar to a discussion I had held at an EU workshop earlier in the year. Similar reasons given. 

Dialogism, Mikhail Bakhtin and information literacy

Drew (Andrew) Whitworth's presentation was a theoretical look at IL where he looked at 'new theories of IL and discussed implications for practice'. Whilst some of the articles he spoke about were new to me - many of his implications for practice were not as I and John Crawford have been saying this for years based on our research and experience e.g.

• IL is for all it can be taught anywhere workplace
• Don't just look for IL as the library defines it.

He has a new book coming out 'Radical Information Literacy' it is a Chandos Publication.

Embedded information literacy in the 21st century curriculum

Good to see a school librarian Darren Flynn, Dixons Allerton Academy presenting at LILAC. I was interested to hear that the library has the 'largest teaching space in the school'. Other aspects were familiar issues such as 'pupils need to be more independent learners', linking IL to the curriculum, 'project based learning where pupils have to come up with their own driving question'.