During my two day visit I also had a meeting with some of the Aberdeenshire Library and Information Service staff – Primary School Librarian and Early Years / Young People in Schools Librarian plus one of Aberdeenshires Literacy Development Officers (Katherine who is an English teacher on secondment). We had an interesting session where I shared information on the information literacy work I’m involved with specifically the LTS Real and Relevant – Information and Critical Literacy Skills for the 21st Century Learner’ (Early and First Level) CPD Toolkit.

Katherine was amazed to hear that Aberdeenshire Library and Information Service is not just about books, they also have objects / educational tools – religious artefacts, puppets, costumes etc that teachers can use for lessons. As a teachers she is probably not alone in thinking that libraries are just about books. She was also not aware that tours of the service have been organised for probationer teachers and that several teachers have requested visits once they heard of the resources available from the probationer teachers. I made a note to myself to remember to include Library and Information Services as a resource for teachers in the Real and Relevant  CPD Toolkit.

I also had an interesting conversation with the network librarian at Meldrum Accademy about transition initiatives (primary 7 – S1) and also about my experience todate of information literacy in the early years specifically regarding my thoughts that information literacy involves all our senses (sight, touch, smell, taste, hearing) plus our memories not just reading of text from books and or the Internet. I think we forget about the power of visual images and how this helps us learn languages, remember / recall past experiences, knowledge etc.

Destination Information is the name of a successful staff development day held to introduce staff to information literacy (IL) and make them aware of some of the activity around IL - their own role in promoting IL and their own IL skills. The topic used was planning a holiday and the pre-selected teams had to present their plan as a poster and handout, the idea being to replicate the students’ experience. Interestingly the staff did behave like students in the strategies they employed and not those of their profession. The day was very successful  with an increase in the uptake of staff development particularly among the library para-professional staff, some of whom have gone on to be use blogs for their NVQs. They also talked about some initiatives including:

·  a University wide interactive website Prepup (includes: course information; virtual tours; student and tutor videos; useful academic development materials) to engage students pre-entry to the university

· taking part in Freshers Fair using a Pirate theme which attracted students to their stand

· using a specifically designed Fortune Teller (see short video below) to demonstrate how randomly students find information; also did one for staff / lecturers for a teaching and learning event – novel. 

The wonderful thing is that the staff development event had been inspired by a session at last years LILAC – ‘Information Literacy at the Issue / Service desk’ (Hannah Hauxwell, University of the West of England). This demonstrates what conferences like LILAC are all about sharing good ideas and inspiring people.

Download

Michelle Schneider, University of Leeds – Reach for Excellence: Information Literacy supports widening participation

This scheme supports academically able young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, who for a variety of reasons feel higher education is out of their reach. It gives year 12 and 13 students residing in Yorkshire a taster of the social life, as well as offering guidance and advice in actually gaining a place to university. The students have to apply and some of the criteria for eligibility e.g. first one in family to go to university; on benefits. The programme run by the universities Access and Communication Service offers:

·         Subject specific taster sessions

·         Impartial pre-entry guidance

·         5 day residential summer school

·         Study skills workshops (this is where the library and information literacy fits in).

The library became involved as they saw it as; an opportunity to further their commitment to widening participation; a great way to introduce essential information literacy skills, an opportunity to gauge current skills and knowledge of students before they get to university. For the first workshops in 2007 they designed a 2hr workshop looking at research skills and academic literature (where it comes from, what to look for and evaluate it), referencing (showing your sources and avoiding plagiarism). To get a sense of what they were doing, they got the students to think about the last time they researched a piece of college work and to write down which resources they used to find the information and why did they use them. Not surprisingly Wikipedia and Google were most used. They looked at where knowledge comes from and journal articles were discussed as many of the students hadn’t heard about journals. When looking at evaluating information on the web the librarian showed how easy it is to change an entry in Wikipedia – this surprised the students and was a really useful exercise which I’m sure others could use both in schools, colleges and universities. For plagiarism they used a plagiarism pub quiz with teams and prizes which went down well.  

In 2008/09 they changed the workshop and introduced an icebreaker where the students said what they expected to find in a library and then given the chance to go to the library and ‘find and seek’ – given an adapted floor plan and 12 questions instead of a tour. This was really enjoyed by the students, giving them a sense of how an academic library runs and encouraged them to use their library cards after the session as it was now less intimidating.

From comments from the students, they did learn that – the library wasn’t as daunting as they thought, evaluate, not to always trust Wikipedia, not all websites are reliable, the existence of Google Scholar. The librarians learnt a snapshot of pre-university student skills and used that knowledge in staff development training sessions and shared it with other colleagues to inform student induction sessions. Also that it was useful to work with other departments to further their commitment to widening participation.

Whilst this type of activity may not be new – Birmingham are running similar schemes but the students came with their teacher or school librarian there are some useful techniques that others could use.

More on this area later.