Skills for Scotland: information literacy, libraries and learning

This was the title of a Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (Scotland) (CILIPS) conference, held at Glasgow Metropolitan College, on Thursday 19^th March and was chaired by Christine and me.  It was inspired by the Skills for Scotland policy document, published in October 2007 and reviewed the role of information literacy in skills development and economic growth.

After an introduction by CILIPS President, Margaret Forrest, Rhona Arthur, Assistant Director of CILIPS/SLIC spoke about a range of initiatives currently ongoing in Scotland (libraries as learning centres, readership development, workforce development and next generation qualifications) plus how information professionals support skills development and the tools we have.  The Scottish Information Literacy project and framework was mentioned by Rhona. She also referred to the credit crunch and that there was an increase in Public Libraries for IT and skills courses and that 45% use libraries for learning, supporting their studies or homework.

She was followed by Peter Godwin, Academic Liaison Librarian, University of Bedfordshire, who overviewed the main issues in IL teaching and talked about various web 2.0 tools and how they can be used to support IL teaching. Joanna Ptolomey, chair of the Scottish Health Information Network, introduced a health literacies theme by speaking about health inequalities, a particularly important theme in Scotland. Good quality patient information, to be effective must avoid ‘healthspeak’ and use clear, simple language.

The last morning speakers were Jenny Foreman and Lesley Thompson, from the Scottish Government Information Service who are among our most active partners. They spoke about the joint work they did with us on the use of information by Scottish Government civil servants and the actions they have taken which include introducing advanced internet searching training and the development of an information literacy strategy for the Scottish Government.

After lunch, Margaret McKay, a JISC e-advisor talked about assistive technologies which can benefit those with disabilities. This presentation has a strong practical focus with ideas which can be implemented across all library sectors.  Andy Jackson, Teaching and Learning Librarian at Dundee University, returned to teaching themes by demonstrating the Cephallonian method of information literacy instruction with the help of the audience and showed the advantages of moving away from the traditional resource based methods of teaching.

After the afternoon break the focus was on public libraries and prison libraries. This included a joint presentation by Liz McPartlin, Community Access Librarian, Stirling Council and Richard Smith, Reader in Residence about a reader in residence scheme at Cornton Vale women’s prison to develop reading amongst the women and their families, promote use of the library and creative reading and create links between the women and community libraries. The reading groups are also used to help prisoners to explore their problems.

Paul McCloskey, Library development Officer SW Neighbourhood with City of Edinburgh Council reported on various outreach activities in Edinburgh including learning programmes, a book bus and the Libraries4U scheme. Kate King (Edinburgh Prison Library Officer and Sighthill Library Bookstart Worker) finished off the joint presentation with an impassioned and enlightening presentation on the impressive new prison library at Saughton in Edinburgh and the amazing work she does there to develop the 1^st ever Family Event inside the prison and support prisoners for release. She certainly demonstrated that she was “reaching out to the hardest to reach and are helping them discover something that everyone in this room already knows Libraries Can Change Lives – and reading and books can help!”

It was a most useful day with a cross sectoral audience drawn from most library sectors.  The two presentations on IL training were of particular benefit to those outside the HE sector and the training theme was further explored by Jenny and Lesley while there were two useful presentations on health literacy/assistive technology issues. Other speakers covered the role of the public library in education and training, and its continuing role as an agent of community education and development.  Issues like prison provision, deprivation and exclusion were also covered.

Congratulations to Catherine Kearney, Assistant Director of CILIPS/SLIC and her colleagues for efficiently planning and managing the day.

Alliance of Sector Skills Councils Employer Conference

On Monday 16^th March I attended the Alliance of Sector Skills Councils Employer Conference held at Murrayfield Stadium, Edinburgh. All sector skills were represented and I joined the Lifelong Learning table. This sector covers community learning, FE/HE, Libraries, archives and information services and work based learning. The morning was taken up with the views of politicians and government agencies. Fiona Hyslop, the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning gave a short presentation in which she spoke about the 16+ Learning Choice proposals and then reviewed government actions since the launch of the Skills for Scotland document in October 2007.

This was followed by short presentations by senior staff from the Scottish Qualifications Authority, the Scottish Funding Council, Skills Development Scotland and Jobcentre Plus. Points emerging included the need to invest in skills development in times of recession while Mark Batho, of the Scottish Funding Council, raised a lot of interest by calling for the revival of sandwich courses which as well as being beneficial to students create good university links with employers. It might also be an opportunity for students to practise IL skills learned from IL training programmes.

This was followed by a cross party panel of members of the Scottish Parliament although unfortunately there was no one to represent the Scottish National Party.  Most of the time went to answering questions from the floor. There was much discussion about whether skills training should be sector specific or generic although no general view emerged. There was also a feeling that there is an overemphasis on youth training at the expense of older people. I attempted to raise IL within the context of employability skills training but the politicians did not seem very interested.

Rather more productive was the afternoon session at which each skill group had a general discussion. Identifying learning demand and the difficulty employers themselves have in identifying training needs was a key theme echoing the findings of David Gibbons- Wood at Robert Gordon University. Robust, accurate data is needed to plan training.  Currently too much market information is anecdotal. As there seemed to be an interest in information issues I reported on our work with Inverclyde Libraries in incorporating IL training into their employability training programmes.  Overall a useful day and it was helpful to learn something about the problems of particular skill sectors. Having established contact with the Lifelong learning sector I think we are now firmly in their loop. Although the politicians did not seem very interested in IL the Lifelong learning sector clearly is.  Our advocacy policy in general is to target the people who speak to the people who make the decisions and starting off at a technical rather than a political level seems the best way forward.

New year activities

This is the first blog of 2009 and I have delayed writing until I had something to report.   We got our first statistics report earlier this month which showed that the blog had been visited 1,086 times between December 13^th, 2008 and January 12^th 2009. There was a peak of activity about mid December with an understandable tailing off between 22^nd December and 5^th January   with a revival in visits thereafter. This seems like a healthy start and hopefully visits will increase as the blog becomes better known. We should get a clearer picture by the end of February.  Last week I was speaking to Alistair McCleery at the Scottish Centre for the Book at Napier University who is a reader so we are casting our net wide.

Our first meeting of the year, on 8^th January, was at Glasgow Chamber of Commerce with Elaine Rodger, their Training and Workforce Development Manager, who has agreed to distribute a questionnaire on the information needs of small businesses, designed by us, to Chamber members. We are currently focusing on identifying possible content of information literacy training programmes for the workplace and the wider employability agenda. This will help us to plan content effectively and identify the needs of specific stakeholder groups.

Coincidentally I came across newspaper reports at the beginning of the year indicating that the Business School at Robert Gordon University has secured large funding to develop training programmes for small businesses in the Aberdeen area.  I have been in contact with David Gibbons-Wood who is leading on this and we are currently exchanging information. On Friday 9^th January we met further with Skills Development Scotland to plan the symposium on the role of information literacy in career choice, progression and work situations. We have had to revise the date to Friday 27^th March.

On Thursday 15^th January we had a visit from two of our most enthusiastic Project partners, Jenny Foreman and Lesley Thomson of the Scottish Government Library Services. They were active participants in our interview based study of the use of Information in the workplace. The refereed article reporting on the research as a whole should appear in the next issue of Journal of librarianship and information science and we hope it will be widely read as not a great deal has been published in this area. Meanwhile a shorter piece focusing on the use of information in the Scottish Government and how the problems identified in the study, specific to the Scottish Government, are being addressed has recently appeared.  (Crawford, John et al, (2008) Use of information in the Scottish Government, Library & information update, December, pp. 48-49.)  We discussed with them the first draft of their Scottish Government Information Literacy Strategy which was partly inspired by our joint working and made a few suggestions towards the next draft. No doubt we will hear much more about it in due course.

On Monday 26^th January I had a visit from Tanya Wiseman of the International Development Association of Scotland who is working on a three year Project to get teacher educators to think about global citizenship. This involves changing practices of teacher educators including a focus on information literacy.  We share an interest in influencing teacher educators and trainee teachers so we hope we will be able to work together on this.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we are trying to raise our internal profile but more of this later.

Scottish Funding Council ICT conference

On  Tuesday 9^th December Christine and I attended a Scottish Funding Council (SFC) ICT conference in Edinburgh at the invitation of the SFC Senior Policy Officer for Strategic Development, this being an outcome of the meeting we had attended at SFC on 27^th November. The aim of the meeting was to bring together people in FE and HE with employers to discuss how FE and HE can support eskills training. We had never met such a group before but it was soon apparent that the employer representatives were well known to SFC staff and had a good record in supporting eskills development and were therefore not necessarily typical of employers as a whole and indeed one of them remarked. “We are untypical because we are here” and a lack of employer vision proved to be one of the themes of the day.

There were two introductory keynote presentations which included such points as the growing number of businesses using IT, and the need for IT staff to focus on the needs of their employers. The need to focus on the generation which did not grow up with the Internet was emphasised and our old and highly relevant friends, soft skills development, including problem solving were mentioned.

Much of the rest of the day was taken up with discussion and feedback sessions. Our study of information usage in the workplace and our round of meetings, following on from it, suggested that the public sector is a promising area and that getting the message over to Small to Medium Sized Enterprises (SME’s) is the biggest problem.  This and similar issues surfaced - how do you target the right people in organisations? ; SMEs don’t look ahead and plan for the future. Timing, mode of delivery and length of training were all discussed. The need to find out what companies want is crucial as universities often don’t do this. Also mentioned is the need to involve the Scottish Trades Union Congress and particularly its learning representatives who, as we learned from our meeting with the STUC’s Everyday Skills Committee on Tuesday 25^th November, have an excellent grasp of workplace training needs. Significantly nobody from the STUC had been invited to attend. Suggested solutions included an annual event where people from SMEs could meet university staff, which sounds like a good opportunity for IL advocates.

After the first discussion session feedback included developing employability skills and improving course content. Increasing funding training weighted in favour of SMEs was also mentioned.

In the discussions there was quite a lot of criticism of the teaching of IT in schools which was felt to be out of date, boring and lacking in relevance to pupils. This, in turn, raises a major policy issue: the absence of any University input to Curriculum for Excellence planning. While this is a big issue it suggests that our Framework which links secondary and tertiary education is quite pioneering. 

After lunch there were short presentations by several participants who included Christine Sinclair, the executive director of the Institute of Business at Adam Smith College. They work actively with schools in developing the Curriculum for Excellence and also have an advisory board of employers who have, inter alia, urged the need for more soft skills training.

Finally we were invited to suggest a training area into which the SFC might put money and asked to break up into groups to discuss it. Our group spent a lot of time discussing the developing of targeted training for SMEs which would have be funded by SFC since SMEs obviously won’t do it themselves. We all agreed that market research was needed to find out what SMEs want and appropriate mode of delivery is essential whether online, face to face or mentor mediated. An administrative structure would need to be put in place to make it work effectively.

Overall it was a useful day with the main message being that the promotion of eskills and IL training face similar problems

Think life as a school librarian is peaceful and sedentary? Think again! Ian McCracken of Govan High School shares his hectic week

Ian McCracken of Govan High School is one of our project partners and a member of our advisory group who in a recent article in Learning and Teaching Scotland's publication Connected shares with the readers Think life as a school librarian is peaceful and sedentary? Think again! Ian McCracken of Govan High School shares his hectic week.

It's a great article which lets everyone see the diversity of life as a school librarian/Learning Resource Centre Manager/ Information Consultant.

What the article doesn't convey is the amount and depth of work Ian does in the area of information literacy and the skills / employability agenda. We are currently in discussion with Skills Development Scotland and they have been very impressed with the work Ian and the school are doing in these areas.

Well done Ian, keep up the good work.