Happy New Year

Happy New Year to everyone.

First day back in the office and I'm busy working my way through my emails. It feels strange to be in the office without John but as he said in his last posting although he has retired from the university he is still going to be active.

Just before Christmas I received some good news, confirmation that my contract had been extended to the end of March 2010 to enable me to finish the work still to be done re Information Literacy, Primary 1, 2, and 3 teachers and the Curriculum for Excellence in Scotland so that is what I will be concentrating on for the next 3 months. It also means that I will be able to attend / speak at LILAC in Limerick 29th - 31st March 2010.

In the meantime I'll continue to blog and add to the IL framework but  will need to look for a new home for the National Information Literacy Framework (Scotland) as it is important that this continues and that a number of people will be able to contribute to it's evolution. Will let you know of any developments in that area.

Signing off

The 100th blog which is in itself quite a milestone as we have made 100 posts in a little over a year, and my last as Director of the Scottish Information Literacy Project. Following the latest reorganisation here, I will be taking early retirement under the University’s Voluntary Early Release scheme and will be leaving the University tomorrow 18th December. However Christine has a contract until the end of March as there is work for Learning and Teaching Scotland still to complete.

I have every intention of continuing to be active in information literacy. I have been asked to guest edit a special issue of Library Trends, and I will be contributing to a couple of planned books. I am also thinking about writing a book about information literacy in non formal educational situations with Christine. I have recently been elected to CILIP Council and will be keen to promote the ‘gospel of information’.

I would like to take this opportunity of thanking all the project partners, collaborators and supporters for the valuable contributions which they have made without which the Project could not have been so successful.

 I am very pleased to say that Lesley Thomson and Jenny Foreman are taking the Community of Practice forward as an online vehicle to keep everyone connected.

As a CILIP councillor I will be fairly visible but I am sure Christine can act as a contact point where necessary.

It has been a real pleasure working with Christine over the past five years during which she has built up an impressive reservoir of expertise especially in the education sector which I hope she will be able to continue to deploy after the Project ends.

 Best wishes to all our readers for a Happy and Restful Christmas and a prosperous and information literate New Year. 

John

Information Literacy in Primary 1

A couple of weeks ago I spent the day in a Junior (Primary) 1 class as part of the work I'm doing for Learning and Teaching Scotland CfE Literacy Team - Real and Relevant – Information and Critical Literacy Skills for the 21st Century Learner’ (Early and First Level). The day was amazing with lots of information literacy activities based around some of the CfE learning outcomes and experiences. For example:

Finding and using information: Early Level

I listen or watch for useful or interesting information and I use this to make choices to learn new things. LIT 0.04a 

The children aged 5 years old listened to a chapter (chapter 4 I think) from a book about an owl finding out about night and darkness.

The book - The owl who was affraid of the dark

They had to listened for a specific piece of information which they then had to remember. Questions were asked to ensure that they had heard and remembered it. Later on in the day they were each given a worksheet and had to draw a picture to represent what the chapter was all about. The teacher then went round each of them and asked them to complete a sentence with information they had heard. Some repeated the information exactly others put it into their own words. Whatever the child said the teacher transcribed it onto their worksheet.

Other examples of activities included:

• selecting books in groups to find information about a particular night animal that the group had chosen i.e. a fox, badger, bat.

With the help of the teacher reading the text the children decided on the 4 most important facts about the animal. Later each group told the rest of the class what they had found.

• 
  
  art of the week where they had to look at a picture of a piece of art Rodin's Thinker and say what they thought it was about. It was amazing to see then looking at it, thinking about it and then giving their thoughts.

I could go on but will end there. My thanks to Mrs Lisa Bonar and her class at St Margaret's School in Edinburgh for allowing me into their world. Discussions regrading the sort of things that would be useful to teachers regarding their own information literacy was also covered. It has certainly helped my thinking for the work ahead of me and I look forward to using this knowledge along with other experiences of Primary 2 and 3 to come in the new year.

This is my last blog of the year so Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to everyone.

 

Journal of Information Literacy - Winter 2009 issue

The Winter issue 2009 of the Journal of Information Literacy  has been published.

Of particular interest is the Editorial by Susie Andretta   The multifaceted nature of information literacy: solving the Rubik cube puzzle. (1-5) 

The collection of papers presented in this issue positions information literacy in diverse contexts, implying that this phenomenon has finally permeated our social, educational and professional consciousness. This is in line with Catts and Lau’s claim that information literacy "needs to be considered not only in relation to education, but also in the broader context of work, civil society, and health and well being" (Catts and Lau 2008, p. 9). The diverse interpretations of information literacy presented in this issue are illustrated by a visual metaphor which has inspired the title of this editorial 'The multifaceted nature of information literacy: solving the Rubik cube puzzle’. Each facet of information literacy corresponds to one of the colours of the Rubik cube1.

This multifaceted aspect of IL is something that John and I have spoken about over the years as a result of our experiences and knowledge plus project / research work.

Of the articles within the issue three are written by known associates including:

project partners Jenny & Lesley

• Jenny Foreman, Lesley Thomson Government Information Literacy in the "century of information"  (64-72)

Audrey Marshall (John and I were external advisers on the net.weight project at Brighton)

• Audrey Marshall, Flis Henwood, Leslie Carlin, Elizabeth S. Guy, Tanja Sinozic, Helen Smith   Information to fight the flab: findings from the Net.Weight Study (39-52)

Christopher Walker. John and I heard Christopher speak about his PhD research into IL and parents of young children in the early stages at the LILAC Conference in Liverpool 2008. We have had several discussions with him offering suggestions and information from our research and experience.

• Christopher Guy Walker  Seeking Information: A study of the use and understanding of information by parents of young children (53-63)

All 3 articles support our experience that information literacy is not just within formal education but throughout life. They are published from presentations at LILAC 2009 (see also our blog postings on the conference - Some thoughts on LILAC 09, LILAC 2009 (The Librarians Information Literacy Annual Conference) Cardiff).

Of interest to IL and the workplace is K. Stuart Ferguson Information literacy and its relationship to knowledge management: A theoretical study(6-24). It explores IL and KM, and learning organisations as I did in my 2007 MSc Lifelong Learning and Development research 'The role of information literacy in addressing a specific strand of lifelong learning: the work agenda'  . It also lead the project to further research in the work place and discussion with Annemaree Lloyd.

Other articles which I haven't read yet but may be of interest are:

Andrew Whitworth  - Teaching information literacy within a relational frame: the Media and Information Literacy course at Manchester (25-38)

Nora Hegarty,  Alan Carbery,  Tina Hurley - Learning by Doing: Reactivating the Learning Support Programme at WIT Libraries (73-90)

Conference corner:

Peter Godwin, Information Literacy gets mobile in Vancouver  (91-95)

Book reviews:

Nick Frost  Book review of Andrew Whitworth. 2009. Information Obesity. Oxford: Chandos Publishing. (96-97)

iKnow (Information and Knowledge at Work

Heard from Jo Parker at the Open University recently about a project they have been working on called iKnow (Information and Knowledge at Work)  for the last couple of years, which has involved building information literacy/management materials for employers to use.

The front page of the training materials state that:

An estimated 6.4 hours per employee are spent looking for information in the workplace each week in the UK. 37% of the searches prove unsuccessful*.

In financial terms, an estimated £3.7 billion is spent on time wasted looking for information that cannot be found.

It’s a staggering amount, so what can be done about it?

The following activities are examples of training materials which will help you save time in finding, using, and organising information at work.

*DeSaulles, M (2007) “Information literacy amongst UK SME: an information policy gap”; Aslib Proceedings, vol 59, no1 pp68-79

The current and final phase of the project is about engaging with employers to get them to test the materials in the workplace, to see how useful they are. They have got a few employers locally interested, but wondered whether there might be any interest amongst the project partners? 

Jo also told me that IKnow finishes in May when the materials will be added to ‘her’ portfolio of stuff and they are already open to anyone to use and look at. Also they are "having a launch event on February 3^rd and if any Scottish employers loved them and wanted to tell everybody how fantastic they are…well, you never know!"

This is great news as John and I have been keen to identify and or work on some materials for the workplace so if employers or anyone involved in workplace learning are interested please have a look at the material and contact Jo at J.E.Parker@open.ac.uk