Mar 25 2009
For anyone interested in the work Kate King is doing at Edinburgh Prison Libraries Edinburgh City Libraries has a blog called Tales of One City where progress regarding the prison library service is recorded.
Thanks to Cathy Kearney for this bit of information.
Mar 24 2009
This was the title of a Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (Scotland) (CILIPS) conference, held at Glasgow Metropolitan College, on Thursday 19th 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 1st 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.
Mar 23 2009
Forgot this from our report on the trip to Sheffield. Seminar with post graduate students. Thanks to Sheila Webber for the photo – see also Sheila’s blog about our visit.
Pontificating
Mar 17 2009
On Monday 16th 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.
Mar 17 2009
Thanks to Ian McCracken and Philip Graham from Govan High School for alerting me to a Radio 4 interview about the Internet, the Google generation and the rewiring of brains – available until Thurday 19th March 2008 via BBC iPlayer Transcript also available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/analysis/7935725.stm
The interview is described on the BBC iPlayer as follows:
“Kenan explores the reality behind the stereotype of the ‘Google generation’, the young people who have become so hooked on the web and computer games that they are unable to think, study and concentrate.
This characterisation is motivated by genuine concerns that heavy use of the internet and computer games are actually rewiring the brains of young people. They are learning and thinking differently to their forebears in a massive technological and social experiment. Kenan investigates these concerns and asks Stephen Fry, among others, whether the rise of the digital generation should be a cause for celebration or concern.
In addition to Stephen Fry, there are other familiar names like Tara Brazabon interviewed.
As Philip Graham says:”This i-player programme is fascinating. I would recommend that you make some time to listen to it. It poses a very serious questions about the internet and its resources creating either a very smart generation, a very dumb generation or a generation with a whole new way of using their brains to which we cannot relate.
For my part, I found it quite challenging as I found value in all the arguments. “
Mar 17 2009
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
Mar 17 2009
We have both had our heads down for a while with backroom matters hence the lack of postings but we were out and about last week.
On Tuesday 10th March we attended the National Literacy Conference, held at the Hilton Hotel in Glasgow. We had been invited by the Literacy Team of the Curriculum for Excellence and the event was organised by Learning and Teaching Scotland. Most of the attendees were teachers but there were a few librarians. The day was mostly taken up with parallel workshops but there were two presentations which kick started the day. The first by HMIE: Mary Ritchie and Janie McManus on some wonderful examples of good practice that they as inspectors had come across that engaged with learners and highlighted that it was all about developing and planning opportunities for learners to use their literacy skills at an appropriate level to meet their needs and that learning must go out beyond the classroom. There were so many good practices that they didn’t have much time to talk about Journey to Excellence (http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/journeytoexcellence/index.asp) and the Professional Development Pack (http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/journeytoexcellence/learningtrails/index.asp ) they are working on which they are keen to engage and talk about. Something we need to investigate further. Next was an introductory keynote by Professor David Booth of the University of Toronto who has spent a lifetime researching and promoting reading and had some good ideas on how to encourage it.
The morning workshops included an impressive presentation by Pamela McLean, the Access Co-ordinator at the Mitchell Library who works mainly with primary schools to promote educational visits to Glasgow libraries to encourage the use of the Libraries’ resources. This includes some basic information literacy training. Perhaps her service could work with school libraries to develop a more co-ordinated approach to information literacy training in schools. A second morning seminar was about Glow which is naturally of interest to librarians. The presentation revolved around a case study of work by an English teacher. While this was very informative the discussion flagged up a worrying ignorance of copyright issues by teachers and clearly they lack guidance and advice. With the coming of Glow this is a bigger issue than before. In higher education most universities have copyright advisers who are usually librarians. Perhaps schools should have copyright advisers too and who better to do it than the school librarian. At lunch time we had a chat with the GLOW team about this issue and discovered there is a section on GLOW about copyright but unfortunately it appears that those teachers who are using GLOW have still to discover this resource.
The first afternoon session included a presentation by Louise Ballantyne, a primary teacher currently on secondment to Learning and Teaching Scotland’s Literacy Team. John attended this presentation and Louise spoke about her ‘Real and Relevant’ information literacy training material which is aimed at Primary 6-7 and early secondary. Among the sources she has used is our Framework. The session was extremely well attended and she was kind enough to refer to our work and hand out some of our leaflets. Her materials should be available on the Learning and Teaching Scotland website in the autumn. Meanwhile Christine attended another excellent presentation by Anne Louise Nicholson, St James’s Primary, Paisley on using Glow to Promote Literacy (Primary) in which it was amazing to see how Primary 1/2 pupils were engaging with Glow, having fun and learning. Children who didn’t participate much in class seemed to find their voice using Glow. This wasn’t just using technology for the sake of it but showed that with innovative learning and teaching very young children can work at their own level using all the technological advances available to them. Anne’s conclusions was that it had lead to – fun and meaningful learning, more ambitious learning, richer language experience overall, able to tap into real life events and involve children, easier collaboration, use of experts to educate (a local painter (artist), wider audience for work to be showcased, easier to evidence using Glow.
The final afternoon session Christine attended was Literacy across the Curriculum – two English teachers who have been working in partnership with a Science (Physics) teacher and a History teacher in different schools in East Dunbartonshire to improve pupils understanding in different subjects through the development of literacy skills. Common areas of concern where; written accuracy (basic spelling, punctuation) and poor quality of extended written responses; in both cases the extended written responses were addressed through note taking and skimming and scanning techniques which lead me to ask the question of whether the school librarians had been involved in this work. Silence! The answer was no and I asked why not since these skills and competencies were the school librarians professional skills and competences. Fortunately there were other presentations which did involve school librarians. As a profession (library and information) we need to do more advocacy work with the teaching profession.
During the coffee and lunch breaks we were entertained by a wonderful school band from Turnbull High in Bishopbriggs. The performance on the drums was particularly spirited. Every conference should have a school band.
Mar 03 2009
John and I recently attended an RSA in Scotland (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce) seminar in Edinburgh to identify ways in which RSA Scotland and Fellows can make a contribution in the field of Education and Skills in Scotland. A topic close to our hearts and we were not disappointed by the contributions and discussion which took place nor the excellent chairing of the event by Louise Macdonald.
Objectives of the seminar included:
It was interesting to learn of the Opening Minds Project in England with its five key competences: learning, citizenship, relating to people, managing situations and managing information which are developed in the classroom through a mixture of instruction and practical experience. It reminded me of the Curriculum for Excellence 4 capacities: successful learners, confident individuals, effective contributors and responsible citizens. Managing information was what we understand as information literacy:
Students should have:
It was also interesting to hear about the Curriculum for Excellence Health and Wellbeing draft Experiences and Outcomes. Hillary Hall a Development Officer involved in writing the draft outcomes and experiences highlighted the ‘Planning for Choices and Changes’ element which involves skills and using available information.
Throughout my learning I am supported in preparing for significant changes in my life by:
The above reflects the work Ian McCracken at Govan High School has beeing doing with a school wide initiative to identify skills that pupils will need not just at school but for life and a common definiton and understanding of what these are. This also reflects the work we are doing with Skills Development Scotland (Career Scotland section) on Information literacy skills and career self-management.
The RSA has drawn up an Education Charter which sets out the principles they believe should inform future development of education for young people, in which they include all kinds of learning, whether formal or informal, and whether offered by schools, college, universities, training organisations or elsewhere. Again much of their work is aligned and resonates with the work we are doing.