Scottish Information Literacy Project

I received this update from Ofcom and thought I would share it with you. Although it mentions Public Libraries it only does so in relation to finding out where to find computer / Internet courses however this could lead Public Libraries promoting their courses to parents. In relation to schools it talks about finding out what they teach children about staying safe online.

Ofcom has launched a campaign to help keep children safe online during the summer holidays.

The Internet offers a range of opportunities for fun, learning and development at the click of a mouse, but it’s important that parents, carers and children have the right skills and information to help keep them safe online.

• Two-thirds of 5-7 year olds now use the internet at home, rising to over three-quarters of 8-11 year olds and over four-fifths of 12-15s.
• Of these, one fifth of 5-7 year olds use the internet without an adult present, as do almost half of 8-11 year olds and two-thirds of 12-15s.
• 12-15 year olds say they spend an average of nearly 14 hours a week online.
• Over a third of 12-15 year olds say they mostly access the internet in their bedroom.  During this time they could encounter inappropriate or even potentially harmful content.

Find out what you can do to help children enjoy the internet safely this summer by watching or reading Ofcom’s guide to show parents and carers how to use parental controls and filters to manage their children’s access to digital TV and internet content. The guide also encourages parents and carers to talk to their children about what they do on the internet and how to use it safely.

The video and guide can be found at 

http://www.ofcom.org.uk/advice/guides/media/

The summer 2009 issue is now out – it is a special issue with a collection of articles from the LILAC Conference.  Although most of the articles are from HE (a reflection of those presenting and attending LILAC) there are items of interest / relevance to other organisations:

• collaboration with teaching staff
• integration of information literacy activities relevant to the student at the receiving end of information literacy provision
• pedagogical approaches
• given limited time in which to deliver information literacy sessions
• use of web 2.00

Whether you attended LILAC or note the articles are worth having a look at. Particularly Moira Bents article on Integrating information literacy as a habit of learning - see appendices for Assessment Activity and Criteria.

See also the article by Eilean Craig, Rob Westwood Evolving the NHS Scotland information literacy process model.

As part of the work commissioned by Learning and Teaching Scotland Curriculum for Excellence Literacy Team the project is carrying out an online survey of Scottish school librarians and their knowledge and use of Curriculum for Excellence with regard to information literacy.

We are aware of some IL activities in this area:

• piloting and creating new activities
• mapping IL activities across the CfE Learning Experiences and Outcomes
• mapping IL activities to the four capacities

but would like to get a clearer more detailed picture of all activities to enable activities, concerns and ideas including ways to optimise school librarians efforts to support information literacy and the CfE to be shared with other school librarians, local authorities and LTS CfE Literacy Team in order that we can promote the valuable work / contributions school librarians are playing in CfE. 

We would therefore be grateful if school librarians and local authority departments responsible for education resources for schools within their area would take time to complete the online survey at SurveyMonkey which consists of 10 questions.   

The survey will run for six weeks until the 4th September 2009.

I will be sending this message out to email distribution lists and would be grateful if it can be circulated as widely as possible.

Thank you for your support in advance.

Christine

The Post Open Space meeting was held at Glasgow Caledonian University on 15^th June 2009 as a direct result of the Open Space meeting of 27^th March 2009 organised and facilitated by Skills Development Scotland staff (http://caledonianblogs.net/information-literacy/2009/05/01/open-space-technology-meets-information-literacy/) bringing together key stakeholders from education sectors and employability, skills and information agendas to identify key factors in information literacy promotion. Attendees from the event were invited to the Post Open Space to identify key issues which might be progressed and formulate action points.

Those present included representatives from COSLA, the Scottish Government Information Service, school libraries, the Centre for Lifelong Learning (University of the West of Scotland), STUC and independent researchers. Unfortunately none of the staff who organised the Open Space meeting was able to attend but Lynn Haughton who works for Skills Development Scotland (currently on secondment to LTS) did attend.

There was a lengthy discussion reviewing some of the issues arising from the Open Space event. The main issues identified were:

• The need to agree a common vocabulary across the education, skills, employability and workplace sectors
• Information literacy as part of the employability and skills agenda
• Training trainee teachers in information literacy

Agreed actions:

• Lesley Thomson and Jenny Foreman from the Scottish Government agreed to set up an online community of practice to facilitate further discussion and action
• Information Literacy as part of the wider skills agenda will be promoted by the Centre for Lifelong Learning (University of the West of Scotland) including to the West of Scotland Wider Access Forum staff based there. It was subsequently agreed that the Centre for Lifelong Learning would try to raise interest in training trainee teachers in information literacy among staff in the education department there.
• Contacts would be maintained and developed via the online forum

Reading through the June 2009 IFLA Information Literacy Section Newsletter  I came across quite a few bits of information that I thought many of you might be interested in. Items include:

• Using RSS feeds for Current Awareness
• Faculty and Instructional Technology Conversations – what your faculty and IT staff say about Information Literacy when you’re not in the room. Information Literacy and IT Fluency
• Scotland Health Services Information Literacy Portal
• Are they Really Ready to Work? Employers Perspectives on the Basic Knowledge and Applied Skills of New Entrants to the 21st Century U.S. Workforce  (I haven’t read this 64 page pdf yet but the title sounded of interest). 
• The Project Open meeting on the 16th September 2009 gets a mention.

If you haven’t looked at their newsletter before then it is worth a look.

My final posting about the i3 conference sessions I attended relate to information literacy and schools plus information literacy and the unemployed and information literacy boundaries. As most of you know the schools arena is an area in which the project is heavily involved in and the two session speakers are well known to the project. We haven’t however until now come across information literacy and the unemployed but then there is no reason why information literacy should play a major role in the unemployed or those seeking employment. In relation to the later we have and are working with the former Careers Scotland now part of Skills Development Scotland on career self management and decision making. Information literacy boundaries or where information literacy sits with and within other literacies is a discussion we have had on numerous occasions both within and outwith the LIS profession.

Professor Eero Sormunsen – Students request for help and the teacher’s strategies of suport in a secondary school working classroom working on a research assignment

I know Eero from a visit he and his colleagues made to the project in December 2007. For anyone who has seen one of the project presentations which includes a picture of ‘Our friends in the North’ then Eero is one of those friends and in that picture.  Unfortunately I arrived late at Eero’s presentation as the previous presentation I was listening to was in another room / part of the building. Fortunately Sheila Webber was there for both presentations in this paralel session about two studies concerning schools in Finland and has posted about them in i3 schools 2 and i3 report: school libraries studies  

James Herring – Students, question formulation and the issues of transfer

I didn’t manage to attend this session but Jim Herring has blogged about it himself

Jim is well known to secondary schools in Scotland primarily in relation to his research interest information literacy and his information literacy PLUS Model in schools those who studied Information Management at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh (like myself).  He currently teaches a range of subjects in Teacher Librarianship at Charles Sturt University in Australia but manages to do this both from Wagga Wagga in Australia and from his home in Scotland. Not sure if that is a first or if there is anyone else out there doing a similar thing. He is also finishing off his PHd studies.   

Jim also reported back in the first of two plenary sessions regard emergent themes (which Sheila Webber has posted about) – as chair of the schools sector sessions he reported on the issue of ”engaging teachers in understanding information literacy: including teachers investigating it for themselves” and information literacy and teacher education / training. The later is an issue that the project has been interested in for some time and is currently pursuing in collaboration with existing and new partners. In relation to teacher training Ruth Stubbings informed me that Teacher Training at Loughborough University came to see them when they saw information literacy in Key Stage 3 of the English school curriculum. Which is great news and I look forward to hearing more about it from Ruth as she has said she wants contacts me later to discuss it.  

My final posting is

Reiija Perttila – Information behaviour and coping functions of long term unemployed people in Finland

This a fairly unexplored area of research and the results in the accompanying paper show that

there is a connection between coping functions unemployed people use and their information practices. Based on the results it seems that high problem-focused copers, who use more concrete coping strategies, seem to tune in to news slightly more often than emotion-focused and mixed-focused copers. High mixed-focused copers, who use active interpersonal coping strategies then again, appear to seek more often information about issues connected with unemployment and health than others.

It is interesting to note the mention of unemployment and health which raises the question of a possible link between the two. Long term unemployed refers to unemployed for more than a year.

The information this research provides increases the overall knowledge of different factors that define a person’s information behaviour. It also contributes to the research of ELIS by providing information about the information practices of people, whose daily activities are not divided between work and leisure, but consist of coping with a special life situation and the challenges it brings.

ELIS stands for Everyday Life Information Seeking 

Savolainen, R. (1995). Everyday life information seeking: Approaching information seeking in the context of “Way of Life”. Library & Information Seeking Science Research, 17(3), 259-294.

Savolainen, R. (2007). Tyota ja tietoa etsimassa [Seeking information about jobs. Unemployed people's perseptions of information sources and information seeking channels]. Informaatiotutkimus, 26(3), 66-75.

From my experience people’s information practices seem to reflect their present knowledge, past experience, current environment and availability of information resoures what I am currently referring to as the chameleon effect. I now need to add to that people’s sense making, coping strategies (problem based and emotional) plus their decision making practices.

For me this conference has truly made my head buzz and taken me into areas outwith my professional field but not my professional interest.

Before heading home after the conference finished I spent the afternoon with one of our project partners who is the Information Literacy Officer for Aberdeenshire. She has been busy working on some amazing things but I plan to blog about that another time.

Finally in case you thought the conference was all work then worry not we did manage some socialising at: a civic reception, the Grampian Information Fair  (see Sheila Webber’s blog posting with a picture of me in the background), the 40th Anniversary of Library and Information Management at Robert Gordon University and the conference dinner at Norwood Hall Hotel. Kornelia Sliwinska has put a selection of the i3 conference photos on Facebook – for those who know me I’m in one or two of them.

I’ve just noticed that some of the conference presentations website are now online.

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.

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.

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