Scottish Information Literacy Project

I have been reading the Digital Britain report www.culture.gov.uk/images/publications/digital_britain_interimreportjan09.pdf

which is certainly to be welcomed. It takes a ‘whole population’ approach rather than specific sectors and has things to say about media literacy and also copyright which is not surprising as Andrew Gowers, the author of the Gowers report on copyright,  is a member of the Steering Board which produced it. Although an interim report it offers definite actions.

There are a number of welcome quotations:

p.5 ‘ The necessary education, skills and media literacy programmes to allow everyone in society to benefit will be from the digital revolution will be a central part of the Digital Britain work and will be a key to our success’

p.5 ‘Five objectives for a Digital Britain’ include:

• Fairness and access for all: universal availability coupled with the skills and digital literacy to enable near universal participation in the digital economy and digital society 
• Developing the infrastructure, skills and take-up to enable the widespread online delivery of public services and business interface with Government.

An encouraging emphasis on skills development there.

p.11 Actions 11-12 proposes a Rights Agency to bring industry together to agree how to provide incentives for legal use of copyright material. The need for copyright education for consumers is also advocated. I wonder how it can be done. Is there a role for public libraries here?

p.13 Action 22. ‘We will ask Ofcom to make an assessment of its current responsibilities in media literacy’. The need for a national Media Literacy plan is also mentioned.

p.16 calls for an ‘information rich interaction between the citizen and the provider – health and education are good examples’.

p.63 tackles the  education and skills agenda by identifying three categories of skill:

• Digital Life Skills – needed by all
• Digital work skills – needed by most
• Digital Economy Skills – needed by some

While on page 64 the need to start education and training for digital life skills at a young age is emphasised, together with appropriate teacher training which fits in rather well with the early years work which we will be doing with Learning and Teaching Scotland. The needs of socially disadvantaged young people need special attention. There is also a section on media literacy which draws heavily on the Byron report.

On Friday 24^th April we attended a Future Skills Symposium at Govan High School.  The school is one of our most active Project partners through the work of Ian McCracken the Learning Resources Manager there. The Framework (Future Skills) of 71 core transferable skills is the work of Philip Graham, the Depute Head and Ian with the full support of the ‘Heidie’, Ian White, and has been in operation since the 2007-8 school year began.

It arose out of the fact that pupils were unable to identify their own skills and confidently use them in a wide range of situations. This led to an unsuccessful search for a comprehensive pre-existing framework of skills with the result that Philip and Ian set out to compile their own with the full involvement of staff and pupils.  An initial list of ‘hundreds of skills’ was pared down to a definitive list of 71 future skills which are prominently displayed around the school and are used in every subject.  This has not meant an abandonment of the curriculum or the teaching skills as a separate subject because an examination of the Curriculum for Excellence showed that the skills were already there. They had not been noticed before.  A matching exercise on skills demanded by a range of employers was successfully carried out. The skills are divided into seven groups – the communicator, the contributor, the doer, the sorter, the originator, the connector and the decider. The communicator, for example, has skills which include creative writing, e-literacy, presentation skills and objective reporting while the contributor has team skills, participation skills and is environmentally friendly. Skills booklets were devised so pupils could self assess the skills they learned in lessons and extra-curricular activities. There are also skill cards for teachers who can nominate pupils who make progress in a particular skill. The details of the skills booklets are fed into a growing computer database which offers interesting analytical possibilities to support further development and to inform key areas.  Information literacy is, of course, one of the skills and occurs regularly in all the booklets. Ian is now analysing the database to identify the frequency of the appearance of IL skills and how they relate to others. The results should be interesting.

The event was attended not only by teachers but also people from other education sectors and those concerned with learning and skills development. The Future Skills Framework is likely to be influential well beyond the school sector.  Some further detail can be found in a Times Educational Supplement Scotland article. See URL http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=2638693. You can also watch two PPTs which describe the developmental processes and outcomes in detail. govan-1-journey-so-far1 govan-2-nuts-and-bolts

As part of its strategy of working with supportive organisations outside the library and information world the Scottish Information Literacy Project has been working with the careers arm of Skills Development Scotland (SDS) to raise awareness of information literacy as a career management strategy.

Following meetings with SDS Staff last year we agreed to hold an ‘open space event’ under the auspices of SDS to which representatives of skills organisations, employers, the Scottish Trades Union Congress, organisations concerned with education and training and SDS  staff would be invited to attend.

Open Space technology (See URLs http://www.co-intelligence.org/P-Openspace.html; http://www.openspaceworld.org/cgi/wiki.cgi?AboutOpenSpace) dates to the 1980s. ‘It is one way to enable all kinds of people, in any kind of organization, to create inspired meetings and events. Over the last 20 years or so, it has also become clear that opening space, as an intentional leadership practice, can create inspired organizations, where ordinary people work together to create extraordinary results with regularity. In Open Space meetings, events and organizations, participants create and manage their own agenda of parallel working sessions around a central theme of strategic importance’.

The Open Space event was held on 27^th March and was organised and facilitated by Skills Development Scotland staff. About 35 people attended including representatives from secondary and FE/HE education, adult learning, local government, the STUC, Learning and Teaching Scotland, BBC Scotland, a number of commercial agencies and Skills Development Scotland staff. There were also a number of librarians (our partners), a representative from CILIP Scotland and Skills Development Scotland staff.

Following the Open Space principle attendees were the invited to nominate topics for discussion. Nine did so and therefore became convenors of a discussion. Each discussion had three tasks:

1.      What do the group understand the issue to mean?

2.      Describe possible solutions

3.      Three actions

The discussions were:

·         Developing skills – whose role?

·         How critical to all professions?

·         How do you assess if someone is information literate?

·         How to prevent ‘instant gratification’ approach?

·         Mediation 

·         Transferability of skills

·         What are the positive stories we can tell associated with information literacy?

·         What information do we need to self career plan?

·         Why is something as important as information literacy skills so invisible?

·          

A number of themes emerged from the nine groups:

·         The need for a common vocabulary

·         The National Information Literacy Framework Scotland is a pivotal point where all sectors can meet

·         Information literacy should be appearing in Government skills documents

·         Trainee teachers should be trained in information literacy

·         There should be early years intervention

·         The focus of responsibility should shift to the individual learner

·         Information literacy should be embedded in all curricula in all educational sectors

·         Information literacy is a major CPD issue

The spontaneous emergence of these common themes was very heartening for Christine and me as these were themes which we had previously independently identified.

All the action points of all the groups were then pinned to a wall and attendees were invited to vote on them. Votes were cast as follows:

• Consistency and info. Literacy skills to be embedded in all curriculum subjects. (10)
• An element in teacher training (young people) inputs (8)　
• Shift focus to individual learners and their successes in developing their own information lit. skills and publicise their rewards in doing so. (7)
• Promote concept within field (6)　
• Identifying, sharing and developing Good Practice – across learning sectors (5)
• Use language of ‘exploring’/’searching’ not ‘finding’. (5)
• Promoting information literacy – employers need to recognise value and development need around information literacy (4)
• Raising awareness of issues (3)
• Recognise information literacy as a core cross cutting skill –CPD for our own [SDS?] staff (3)
• Raise awareness of how widely ILS Skills needed e.g. Motor Vehicle Technician (3)
• Raised awareness (3)
• Early intervention to develop self-mediation skills i.e. critical and analytical skills. (3)
• More work experience and employer engagement – earlier to help young people profile themselves. (3)
• Employers – have awareness sessions with employers re information literacy (2)
• Highlighting ILS aspects e.g. Through Glow (2)
• Role model the joy of the search to encourage confidence in searching. (2
• Inter-agency cohesion (1)
• Explore BBC LAB/Activate collaboration. (1)
• Offering a range of CPD opportunities for all staff, particularly teachers.(1)
• Learning review to be more prominent – perhaps more customised learning plans. (1)

From the common themes and prioritised actions a number of common issues emerge, some of which can perhaps be taken forward.

Thanks to funding from Learning and Teaching Scotland the Project will be doing work on early years – primary 1-3 in producing appropriate learning materials for pupils and CPD materials for teachers. We have been trying to pursue the issue of information literacy training for trainee teachers but, so far, have been unable to find a department of education willing to support it. Issues round raising employer awareness and workplace and employability training have been on our minds since the conclusion of the workplace study last year and this recurs in the priorities. We are working with Inverclyde Libraries to incorporate information literacy skills training into the employability training programmes they run and there is further developmental potential here We would like to develop pilot information literacy training programmes with employers and we have partners and collaborators who could support the work. We have not so far been able to find a funding source and this is a cause of serious concern but it might be an issue we could unite around.

I would like to progress the agenda we have begun and would be happy to host a meeting at GCU for any who want to take the agenda forward and have concrete proposals to make.

May I suggest late May – early June so we pursue any concrete proposals over the summer.

Possible dates are: Wednesday- Thursday 27-28 May; Monday 1^st June, Tuesday 2^nd June pm only; Wednesday 3^rd June; Monday 8^th June am only; Thursday 11^th June, Friday 12^th after 11.00am; Monday 15^th June; Thursday- Friday 18^th -19^th June.

Many thanks to Doug Govan, Vivienne Brown, Andrew Paine and Sarah Hall and colleagues at SDS for making it such a successful event.

Voting on the Group actions