Digital Scotland Participation Advisory Group June 2015

On Thursday 4^th June 2015,  Bill Johnston, Honorary Research Fellow, Strathclyde University,  Sheila MacNeill, a senior lecturer in Blended Learning at Glasgow Caledonian University, Jenny Foreman, the Community of Practice chair and head of the Scottish Government Library and I attended a meeting of the Digital Scotland Participation Advisory Group at the Scottish Parliament. The Group advises the Cabinet Secretary for Culture, Fiona Hyslop. Some of its members come from a digital/IT background while others, like the John Wheatley Housing Trust have a wider agenda. We had been invited to speak about digital and information literacy partly as a result of contacts the Community of Practice has been cultivating with the minister’s civil servants and partly as an outcome of the successful February conference on information literacy.

We were the last item on the agenda which included some interesting topics.  There was a report from the John Wheatley Housing Trust about the Kirkton Avenue Project which provides Internet access to 138 families in Glasgow. The study investigated the use made of the Internet and found, inter alia, that all of the families used the Internet for information searching. Sally Dyson from SCVO spoke about the Projects SCVO is supporting to benefit the digitally disadvantaged and explained that the number of applications they had received greatly exceeded the funds available to support them.  These activities are important because these are the kind of people we need to work with to support the IL agenda.

When our turn came Bill gave a general introduction to the subject of information literacy, relating it to some of the things previous speakers had said including young and older people’s engagement with information literacy. This was followed by Sheila MacNeill who spoke about the role of information in promoting digital literacy in higher education and her concept of the digital university. Digital participation and the role of universities is more than the digital university per se.

 Professor Michael Fourman had some good points to make about the Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) and the lack of specific reference to IL in it. This certainly resonated with me, as when Christine Irving and I were operating the Scottish Information Literacy Project, we had meetings with the (CfE) Literacy Team and pressed the case for the inclusion of IL. I commented on the civic engagement agenda and used the Referendum as an example of the use of information by the wider population to facilitate informed political decision making. This seemed to go down well with the minister and she seemed to acknowledge the importance of information literacy in a variety of contexts and it will now fall to us to now carry the agenda forward with civil servants and some of the people we met at the Group and we need to expand the scope of the Community of Practice to involve digital participation people in the work of the Community of Practice. We did try to make the point that it is necessary to move the agenda on from digital skills development to promoting the information literacy skills which will be needed when digital skills have been acquired. The meeting was, I think, a success as meeting a Government minister and making the case for IL is a first for the C of P, and, as far as I am aware, not something achieved elsewhere in the UK. The meeting was an opportunity to bring information literacy to the digital agenda in the presence of the minister and she showed a very positive engagement with all the items at the meeting including IL.  It was also an opportunity to engage with other players in the digital participation agenda

Possible action points arising from the meeting envisaged include:

• The Scottish Government should support a further conference in 2016 and the minister should be asked to be the main speaker
• An opportunity to build links and take discussions forward
• A joint C  of P and SCVO working party should be set up to take forward the IL agenda
• A C of P working party should be set up to evaluate available IL learning materials
• Inviting a representative from SCVO to join the  C of P meetings
• Inviting a representative from the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust to join the C of P meetings

John Crawford, founder chair of the Community of Practice with the assistance of Bill Johnston, Sheila MacNeill and Jenny Foreman.  

Comments

[Claire Roberts]

Very interesting and positive report, John - thanks for this.