Scottish Information Literacy Project

Last week John and I attended the 2009 Scottish Learning Festival which mainly attracts the school sector in Scotland with an occasional scattering of FE and HE. However this year the main focus was the Curriculum for Excellence and I’m not sure if the later sectors of education were present or not as you never get see a list of who is attending. In addition the sessions I attended were primarily focused on literacy across learning and the primary and early years sector as this is the area I am about to start some work on for the Curriculum for Excellence Literacy Team – ‘Real and Relevant – Information and Critical Literacy Skills for the 21st Century Learner’ (Early and First Level)

I attended the following sessions and keynote over the two days and will simply provide a link to the programme just now but will do some postings from my notes later:

• Improving Scottish Education 2: Pre-school to Early Primary - Kate F Cherry, HMIE
• Achieving a Smarter Scotland: Transforming our Education System to Deliver the Best Outcomes for Every Child and Young Person - Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning, Fiona Hyslop MSP, Scottish Government

The keynote speeches including the Cabinet Secretary’s were videod and are online for viewing / listening to.

• Engaging with Curriculum for Excellence – Small Steps to Success in Primary Schools - Susan Quinn, Educational Institute of Scotland
• Interactive Approaches to Literacy Learning and Teaching – East Dunbartonshire Intervention Team
• A Single Curriculum 0-18: The Same Quality Approach - Keynote Speaker: Professor Ferre Laevers, Director of the Research Centre for Experiential Education, University of Leuven
• Literacy across Learning in the Primary School: The Experiences and Outcomes in Practice 
• Early Years – Making Connections across the National Landscape - Jean Carwood-Edwards, Early Years Team Leader, LTS
  Jane Stirling, Early Years Development Officer, LTS

The work I saw taking place in early years and primary schools was truly inspirational and I will try to take on board / incorporate what I saw into the work I’m about to embark on.

Like most conferences there were sessions that I would loved to have been able to attend but you can’t be in two places at the one time. Sessions like:

• Largs Academy Virtual School Library - Theresa  Newbury the  Librarian is doing some wonderful engaging and interactive work and is included as an exemplar for the National Information Literacy Framework (Scotland)
•  Curriculum for Excellence Outdoors in Primary Schools
• Curriculum for Excellence – Making the Change with Critical Skills
• Improving Learning – Improving Literacy

Last Thursday 24 September 2009, CILIP’s Council unanimously endorsed the proposal to support the campaign to make school libraries statutory.

CILIP has issued a press release announcing their support of the campaign

This is great news – unfortunately I haven’t seen any items in the press.

The petition to make school libraries statutory is available to sign online until 11 December 2009.

The latest issue of Library and Information Research is now available online at http://www.lirg.org.uk/lir/ojs/index.php/lir/issue/current.

 There are several items of interest from a project point of view including for school librarians:

Christina Sacco Ritchie asks “Would evidence-based school librarianship work in the UK?”

Other articles include:

• ‘the important question “Do we need the information professions?”
• “An evaluation of the National Year of Reading in Yorkshire”
• A survey of e-book usage at UWE – LIRG prize-winning research from Jackie Chelin and colleagues
• Janet Clapton’s practical checklist for establishing the context of a new research project.

They (the journal editors) welcome submissions of research articles, reports and book reviews from both practitioners and academic researchers.

With this in mind you may be interested in a recent email from Janet Clapton:

As a LIS practitioner researcher (i.e. in my spare time!) I am exploring the views of those of us who would like to write for publication but experience barriers.

Pilot testing showed, not surprisingly, that time was a major constraint, although lack of support was also a problem. However we are all experts in what we do every day, and therefore have important knowledge to share.

 While the views of all LIS practitioners are of interest, those who work outside academic settings are particularly encouraged to take part.

Please carry out the short survey below (before the end of 9th October).

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=budG_2bTzSM3ayB8XwIf07BA_3d_3d

Writing an article can be daunting but I’ve found that co writing with someone more experienced can help you pick up tips and techniques plus gain confidence. Also writing a short piece about attending an event is a good way to start.  So why not give it a go.

1st october 2009 update

The above survey by Janet Clapton is now closed due to the sheer response size. Janet apologies to those who wanted to contribute but were unable to: but says please contact her Janet.Clapton@SCIE.ORG.UK if you have something burning to say about writing for publication.

She is looking forwards to sharing the published findings when available.

Open Meeting 2009

The Scottish Information Literacy Project’s third Open meeting took place on Wednesday 16^th September 2009 at Glasgow Caledonian University and about 45 people attended. It was a genuinely cross sectoral event with people attending from all library sectors, educational agencies, government organisations including the Scottish Government and academia.  Inevitably a few people dropped out at the last moment through illness or other commitments. Unfortunately this included our keynote speaker, Professor David Smith, who had to pull out through illness.  

The theme of the day was information literacy as part of the wider skills agenda as one of the Project’s successes has been locating information literacy (IL) within this agenda. I began the day by giving an overview and update of the Project including some of the initial findings of the evaluation which we have done of the excellent employability skills courses which Inverclyde Libraries run.  This drew attention to health as an employability issue and the difficulty in disentangling personal from vocational motivations. This provoked a lively audience discussion during which it emerged that people from different library and educational sectors had shared concerns.  Next Jenny Foreman, the Scottish Government’s Information Literacy Librarian spoke about the Scottish Government’s Information Literacy Strategy. This was very much a policy level presentation explaining the need for a strategy and the issues likely to be encountered in developing it. Jenny also described how the policy is turned into practical training. Her colleague, Lesley Thomson, Knowledge Management Officer at the Scottish Centre for Regeneration then described the Information Literacy Community of Practice which she and Jenny are launching and will host and lead. She explained the principles behind a community of practice and how the website will operate. All are welcome to join and contribute. For further details contact either Lesley.Thomson2@scotland.gsi.gov.uk or Jenny.Foreman@scotland.gsi.gov.uk who will gladly sign you up.

After lunch Christine Irving, the Project Officer on the Scottish Information Literacy Project, spoke about the restructuring of the Scottish Information Literacy Framework which is being restructured to make it a genuine lifelong learning document incorporating early years, the workplace, employability and lifelong learning. It is being physically restructured as a weblog so that postings of current activities and developments can be added. It is also interactive and comments and postings can be made. It includes exemplars of good practice from all educational sectors. There is, as yet, less on the workplace and lifelong learning but the work we are doing on the workplace and employability is helping to enrich it. It can be found at http://caledonianblogs.net/nilfs/ and through the project website http://www.gcal.ac.uk/ils/framework.html .

Next Lou McGill, an elearning and Information Management Consultant reported on a JISC funded study Learning Literacies for the Digital Age (LLiDA) - http://prezi.com/vv_ynswlwwkv/ see also Project website http://www.academy.gcal.ac.uk/llida/ . LLiDA is a study of academic, ICT and information literacies across a range of HE institutions including Glasgow Caledonian and takes the form of institutional audits with overall analyses and best practice exemplars drawn from participating institutions. She found that IL people were further ahead in their thinking than other learning literacies areas. Flexible education will be needed as it is impossible to predict future employer needs. She feels that there are still to many ‘silos’ in HE each with its own language. Academic teaching is slow to change and there is resistance to a holistic agenda.

IMcCracken Open Meeting 2009

The last speaker was Ian McCracken, Learning Resources Manager at Govan High School – Connections between Information Skills and wider skills: the Future Skills Project where he and his colleagues have developed a Future Skills System of 71 skills which pupils can acquire which includes IL.  The Future Skills System is matched to Standard Grades, local and national business requirements, curricular and extra curricular work and the Curriculum for Excellence. Ian also mentioned the problem of a common language as Lou had. The Framework has been in existence long enough for Ian to be able to identify the most used skills throughout Curriculum for Excellence Experiences and Outcomes as ‘Analytical Skills’, ‘ICT E-Lit’ and ‘Gathering facts’ which have pretty obvious IL implications.

All in all it was a most useful day and a great deal of information was exchanged in informal discussions as well as the formal sessions. Similar issues were identified across a range of sectors and practical difficulties round employability and linking vocational skill training and personal development were reviewed.  The PPTs and accompanying documents will appear shortly on Slideshare as we are running out of space on allocated space with the university and will be linked to the project web event page http://www.caledonian.ac.uk/ils/events.html. All the presentations were excellent and represent a great deal of work by those who gave them and I would like to thank all who contributed.

the increasingly important role of school libraries to equip students in the 21st century with the abilities to use information effectively and develop critical thinking and life-long learning skills that are essential to responsible citizenship.

School librarians will therefore be increasingly contributing to UNESCO’s mandate for building knowledge societies. In particular school libraries will play a key role as catalysts for the introduction of media and information literacy policies in schools by engaging both students and teachers to acquire a combination of skills, competencies, knowledge, attitudes and behaviours.

The topics discussed at the Conference are closely connected with UNESCO’s work on a teacher-training curriculum for media and information literacy to be introduced worldwide. The curriculum aims to integrate media education and information literacy in the initial training of teachers at secondary school levels, and will be designed according to the needs of each country.

Hopefully this will add some weight to the  online petition to campaign for statutory school libraries for England & Wales and to support / promote the role of the school librarian in Scotland.

For anyone like me unable to attend IFLA due to financial constraints then Sheila Webber’s reports have been great. Most have been information literacy related as she has just started as a member of the Information Literacy Section committee of IFLA.

There has been nine reports in total  the latest IFLA reports: E-learning will be of interest to many.

As always Sheila includes pictures – some of the conference, posters or diagrams from the session, Milam and for cat lovers there are a few cat pictures as well.

Latest posting from Peter Godwin on Information Literacy meets Library 2.0 blog   about three videos he has made with his friend and colleague Alan Bullimore at University of Bedfordshire on YouTube, with the help of their Learning Technology department.  Al and Pete’s Search Tips

They are all short and are intended to get students to contrast journals with magazines ; Google with databases ; and newspaper tabloids with broadsheets. Very happy for anyone to use if they feel the urge!