Trip to Sheffield
Tuesday, March 17, 2009 at 11:21AM Discussions and presentations with staff and students at Sheffield University, Department of Information Studies
On Wednesday 11th March we were off to Sheffield at the request of Sheila Corrall and Sheila Webber of the Department of Information studies at Sheffield University to do some work with students. On the morning of Thursday 12th March we did a two hour seminar with the post graduate students who turned out to be a lively bunch. Our theme was our information literacy journey and how we have moved from a fairly educational/scholastic view of information literacy to much more lifelong learning based view in which information literacy should be seen as a key skill for career choice, progression, CPD, workplace decision making and, of course, lifelong learning because you can’t ‘do’ lifelong learning unless you are information literate. Our change of view has been influenced by the many people we have met who have reinterpreted the excellent CILIP definition in the light of their own qualifications, experience, work and learning needs. For example when we first talked to the Careers Division of Skills Development Scotland we had not given much thought to the role of information literacy as a career choice skill but after our discussions with them we have very much changed our view. We have also abandoned the ‘ibrarianly’ view of what constitutes an information source and now accept people as just a valid source of information as a book or a website and people can be evaluated as sources in exactly the same way as a traditional source. We were very pleased that this approach went down well with the students who are clearly well ahead of traditional thinking.
In the afternoon we gave a PPT presentation to PhD research students and some of the staff which generated a useful discussion at the end. Overall a useful experience and an opportunity to present our ideas to the next generation who seemed to appreciate our ideas.
See also Sheila Webber’s weblog posting about the visit – http://information-literacy.blogspot.com/2009/03/visit-from-scottish-information.html
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