Information literacy at the Scottish Parliament (2)

As you will have gathered from Ian’s post we both attended the Holyrood Cross Party Group on Digital Participation on the evening of Wednesday 4^th September to give presentations.

My presentation was Information skills for a 21st century Scotland: an online information literacy community of practice.

I was a bit unsure as to how we would be received as the Group has historically been mainly concerned with access and infrastructure issues and less concerned with usage and training issues. However we were well received and the questions were, for the most part, helpful and supportive especially from Fiona McLeod MSP and SLIC chair. I also was pleased by the chair’s (Willie Coffey MSP) interest and enthusiasm.  I spoke mainly about the work of the Community of Practice and also explained a few basic information literacy issues with the help of the CILIP definition.  Many thanks to Veronica and Abi for supplying slides to give examples of our work which also brightened up the PPT considerably.   During the discussion Fiona had a number of suggestions:

• Approach the Public Libraries Quality Improvement Fund to look at such issues as school/public library links
• Raise information literacy at a public librarians’ heads of service meeting
• We also discussed the issue of IL skills training for public librarians

I had a chat with Fiona afterwards and brought here up to date with our work in slightly more detail. I feel we made quite a step forward in raising awareness of information literacy by promoting the issue outside the information world and among politicians.

Information Literacy at the Scottish Parliament

I was recently asked to give a presentation on Information Literacy to the Cross-party Group on Digital Participation. I contacted John Crawford and he was also able to take part. Last night, we gave our presentations. Mine was "skills and assumptions", highlighting some of the challenges pupils/students etc face-situations familiar to us all but seemingly news to the Group. A couple of the examples I used need some amplification for those viewing the slides who weren't present to hear my oral explanation: the pictures shown of American buildings were supposed to be identified by pupils-but how do you identify a picture without already knowing where and what it is? The glossy booklet this was part of had numerous such examples-there was also no skills progression or continuity.

The Edward Jenner example is from a school's website in England-pupils had been tasked to research a scientist but their copying and pasting has had a rather bizarre result-and clearly nobody checked it for accuracy.

John will post information about his own session, but after we had both finished, our presentations were given high praise by the Chair of the Group, Willie Coffey MSP and by Fiona MacLeod MSP (Chair of the Scottish Library and Information Council.

There are a number of promising developments-I suggested to Fiona that she might find it useful to attend the next Right Information Group meeting, which she reacted to positively. Willie has asked me to provide him with more information and examples which he wants to take further.

You can help by sending me any examples of humorous, absurd or unlikely results to searches/enquiries you have spotted to enquiries-I will keep this anonymous! Just to give you an example of the kind of thing I am thinking about, a pupil had been asked what weapons were used in the Spanish Civil War and he had copied and pasted "muskets, swords and the good old bayonet"

Please contact me at IMcCracken@govanhigh.glasgow.sch.uk  or 0141-582-0090 as soon as possible with any examples you may have-however anecdotal