Information: interactions and impact - i3 Conference sessions (information literacy and health)

There were several sessions I attended that looked at the issues surrounding information literacy and health / health issues.

Audrey Marshall - Weighing in to the literacy debate: findings from a research study on the role of ICTs for weight management

The Net.Weight project is a University of Brighton project funded by the Department of Health (England) investigating the potential of information technology to support self-care in weight management. This is an interesting project which John and I have had some involvement with in an advisory capacity. The project has been running for two years and is nearly finished. For me some of the interesting findings are in relation to peer support rather than medical support, the provision of information and the workshops they ran to develop critical engagement with health information as the following quote from the paper highlights.

it is clear that information itself is not the main issue, since people who are involved in weight management already have a good level of understanding about the causes of weight gain and the ways in which weight can be reduced and managed. People can, however, be encouraged to engage critically with existing information and ICT resources and make suggestions for improved design and services. On a more conceptual level, the Net.Weight research suggests that a collective, as opposed to an individual, approach to the issue of health literacy may be a useful alternative way to both understanding and improving it.

Dr Kristina Eriksson-Backa - Elderly people, health information, and libraries: a small-scale study on seniors in a language minority

This was about a small scale study of the health information literacy of a group of elderly people, Swedish-speaking minority in Finland who took part in a questionnaire about where they got their health information from.

Most respondents showed good abilities of knowing when they needed health information, and also to which sources to turn to ... These were mainly health professionals and other medical sources, whereas libraries played a fairly small role as a source.

They also used media sources, family and friends and the Internet. The results are said to be similar to other studies and that "further research is needed to find out how libraries could reach out to the growing group of elderly people". The study made me think about the collaborative work that is going on between some libraries and health trusts / medical practices in Scotland and England (not sure about the rest of the UK) in relation to the provision of health information. I asked the presenter about this but she was unaware of this work. The other thought I had was whether the age of the participants in the study and their specific health problem played a major factor in their choice of trusted source.

Dr Roma Harris - Communities of practice? A relational perspective on HIV/AIDS information exchange networks in rural Canada

This is a really interesting study which involved "interviews with more than 100 people living with HIV/AIDS (PHAs), their friends and family members, and health care and social service providers, as well as a population survey of nearly 2,000 residents in three regions of Canada". It deals with information seeking behaviour and:

• stigmatism which forces people not to openly discuss their illness within their rural communities plus travel miles for medical help as local doctors in addition to being part of their community are not specialists in this area


• information flow and learning in networks and communities of practice communities

Whilst communities of practice are usually thought of in relation to the workplace, the term "health working" was used by the presenter to describe their activity of seeking and sharing health information within their social networking. I think it is an appropriate term and use of Wenger's community of practice described in the accompanying paper as: 

groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis (Wenger, Mcdermott and Syneder, 2004, p.4). 

Wenger, E., McDermott, R., and Synder, W.M. 2002. Cultivating Communities of Practice. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.  

and would apply to most health support groups where their is little or no information available and there is a stigma attached to the health problem.

My final posting about this conference will cover information literacy and schools plus a session on information literacy and the unemployed. In the meantime I need to turn my attention to other work that requires attention.

Information: interactions and impact - i3 Conference sessions (online communities)

I blogged earlier about the keynotes at this conference now I'll share with you my notes / thoughts from some of the sessions I attended.

Hazel Hall - shared relationships, spaces and online information behaviours: a social exchange and capital perspective (link to PowerPoint presentation) 

The paper was about an academic study looking at "To what extent are online information interactions socially motivated?". The participants where level 3 model students at Edinburgh Napier University who were unable to work in placements due to their visa status which did not allow them to work while in the country. The online information interaction was to represent the work environment and working in groups. Students where marked for their blog postings and the comments they left on other students in other groups blog postings. One of the findings included that the students were not very reflective but to my mind this is not surprising as we don't teach people to be reflective we just expect them to be reflective. There was evidence of peer support and a correlation between proximity, friendship and social motivational exchange. Comments were deemed to be influenced by net etiquette / social environment and not wishing to be rude about one and another.

In other words similar issues to face to face group working.

Online student group working was also covered by another presentation Reusing Knowledge in Online Forums presented by Jim Herring on behalf of colleagues. At Charles Sturt University discussion forums are used extensively as their students are all distance learners (similar to to the Open University in the UK). The pilot study focused on reusing the knowledge captured which is seen as having 'high scholary value as well as practical merits' which could be 'shared effectively among colleagues who teach the same subject the following semester'. The findings included the identification of benefits for lecturers particularly new lecturers or lecturers taking the model for the first time as it could give them a feel for the subject, the flow and the amount of advice to give is seen as time saving. The question however was raised as whether it is information or knowledge that is captured given that what is present in the transcript of the online forums is data which needs to be used to become information added to existing knowledge to make new knowledge.

The other sessions I attended fit into either information literacy in schools or information literacy and health so I will finish of this posting with a quick mention about Malcolm Clark's session on How do People Interact with Structured E-mails in Terms of Genre and Perception. This research is still at the early stages but I was interested to hear that they had used eye tracking to see how people interact / identify different genres / types of emails. How humans recognise formatting features / layout: conference announcements; newsletters; organisational announcements; online retail orders (items bought from online suppliers) and that "it is possible to detect some clues as to the importance of purpose and form". This seems to link in with keynotes talking about selecting / bracketing raw data to help make sense and enacting that through interpretation on what worked before which they had previously retained for future use.

The other finding was that participants can / do 'skim' the shape of e-mail texts ".  They were able to recognise formats that did not have any readable text in them, they had just a lot of xxxx's.  if you are interested Sheila Webber's blog posting has much more on this session.

That's me for the day will do more tomorrow.

Information: interactions and impact - i3 Conference

This is the second year for the i3 conference the first was held in 2007 (it is held every two years). I found the first conference very stimulating and was pleased to attend once more as it certainly does what it says

i³ brings together researchers and practitioners interested in exploring such interconnections between information behaviour, information literacy and impact of information.  The conference will provide a forum for exchange of research findings and an opportunity to identify key questions and issues for future research.  It should be relevant to those involved in researching, developing or delivering information and knowledge services in any sector as well as those concerned with the development of skills for a knowledge society.

It was a packed programme over four days with four keynote speakers and about 30 plus sessions (long and short papers). Unfortunately several people had to pull out including Annemaree Llyod who is doing some amazing work in the workplace (IL and fire fighters and ambulance workers) and our workplace partners Jenny and Lesley from the Scottish Government. However I did manage to catch up with several acquaintances: Audrey Marshall (University of Brighton);  Hazel Hall (Edinburgh Napier College); James Herring (Charles Sturt University, Australia); Eeor Sormunsen (University of Tampere, Finland); Sheila Webber (University of Sheffield); Debbie Bowden (University of Worcester); Ruth Stubbings (Loughborough University); Lynsey Paterson (Young Scot); Catherine Kearney (SLIC/CILIPS) and made lots of new ones which is always nice.

As all students and conference delegates know an hour is a long time to keep still and listen to one person however most of the keynote speakers did keep delegates engaged (most of the time) despite over running by as much as 30 minutes (Dave Snowden) which was taking a liberty and not fair on those people like Audrey Marshall and others who were presenting in the next sessions and waiting for delegates to turn up to their session this in turn had a knock on effect and reduced people's time to talk after / eat lunch. Here's a quick synopsis from my notes of each of the key note speeches:

Dr Chun Wei Choo - Knowing and learning in organizations: Information and the enactment of meaning, knowledge and decisions.

Organisations use information in:

• sense making - enactment (bracket / select raw data in small pieces to help people make sense of the data), selection (enactment with interpretation that worked before), retention (enacted interpretation retained for future use). Beliefs play a major role in this activity.


• knowledge creation - tacit knowledge (personal - gained through apprentiships / on job training, capacity to work on hard problems); explicit knowledge (object or rule based); cultural (shared assumptions and beliefs that shape an organisations identity. Need to articulate tacit knowledge otherwise it remains personal.  


• decision making - most organisations work through some or most of the following models: rational model (e.g. hiring), process model (e.g. new product development), political model(e.g. public, policy decisions), anarchy model.

and how an organisation works depends on the interplay between these processes.  He then went on to talk about a real situation - the Challenger Space Flight which launched losing all on board despite lengthy discussions and engineers concerns based on tacit knowledge which they didn't have time in which to back up with evidence. A key issue was that NASA works in an environment of risk and thought that the decision they took did not fall outside the organisations's cultural knowledge.

I could relate to a lot of that as I've been in simialr situations in the past thought not life threatening.

Dave Snowden- Complexitity, coherence, constraint, cognition and context (podcast and presentation link)

There was a lot covered in this keynote and Shelia Webber's blog posting gives a good flavout of what it covered much more than I could. Ironically one of the themes was about sense making and whilst I did make sense of some of what he said I didn't take many notes as there was a lot to make sense of and some of it was complex. The main things I noted was about:

•  three types of systems: Ordered - system constrains agenda; Chaotic - agents unconstrained and independent; Complex - system lightly constrains agents, agents modify systems, they co-evolve. The examples he used included teenage children's party, they are going to do certain things even although you say no however their needs to be some ground rules and some flexibility. He also showed a picture of a roundabout which had five smaller roundabouts on the edge of the main roundabout. First impression was what a nightmare but he said it worked and the more I thought about it I could see the logic behind it.  I also think the three system could be related to leadership / management styles.


• The Cynefin Framework which he developed - " a model used to describe problems, situations and systems." When I have some time I'd like to have a closer look at this.


• Caucasians scan 5% then compare with paterns in their memory - we are pattern recognition agents. this is based on genetics, experience and narrative. This probably explains why I only took a few notes.


• Tolerance failure improves learning - reference was made to not using good practice to improve learning as you learn more from failure. Whilst this may be true I still think it is useful to have examples of good practice so that you can see what can be achieved. I've often seen things that I thought were a good idea which has inspired me to do some thing.

 Dr Louise Limberg - Information Literacies beyond the rhetoric: developing research and practice between the intersection of information seeking and learning

 Sheila Webber has reported extensively about this keynote in her blog plosting so I'll just highlight a couple of things I jotted down: learning in different arenas; digital competency - 1 of 8 EU essential skills; in school the information = answers; critical assessment of information is the core aspect of information literacy; physical and intellectual tools mediate views.

Dr Kendra Albright - Multidisciplinarity in Information behaviour: Expanding Boundaries or Fragmentation of the Field?

It's not easy being the last keynote of a four day conference, listening to everyone else then updating your presentation to incorporate things you had heard in other keynotes and sessions. However the presenter posed some "Big Questions" which she has started to think about and would be keen to work with others on:

• Does LIS research help to answer the big or important information question of our time? What are they?


• By what criteria might we measure the value of our work? Does it advance theory?


• Does our work lead to a better, deeper understanding of human behaviour? (This crosses many science fields.)  

Points I noted from her presentation include:

• multidisciplinarity in LIS - I think this is a good thing in any profession as it brings different perspectives and skills from other professional disciplines but then I would say that as this includes me in that category.


• little focus on information use


• haven't looked at social content


• less work on areas of Social Context and Power Relations

In relation to some of the above she talked about Information Use in Domestic Abuse situations and how one women who had experienced domestic abuse talked about needing information (legal and physical protection) to survive and that it was a coping strategy, by seeking information she was doing something and this kept her going.  It is in situations like this that you can see how important information is - potentially a life and death situation.

Other points in relation to information use where:

• we seek the information we believe to be right


• most decisions are made on emotions but reason helps to balance emotion (this occurs at the same time).


• emotional information is often better remembered than neutral information.

The key notes left me with much to think about / get my head round and many resonated with the sessions (which I will blog about later) and vice-a-versa. 

For some of the conference photos taken by Kornelia Sliwinska one of the student conference helpers see http://www.facebook.com/photo_search.php?oid=43169634350&view=all