Author Archives: christine irving

About christine irving

Christine Irving is the Researcher / Project Officer of the Information Scottish Information Literacy Project at Glasgow Caledonian University where she is working on the development of a National Information Literacy Framework (Scotland). She holds a BA (Hons) in Information Management from Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh and an MSc in Lifelong Learning and Development from Glasgow Caledonian University. She has a longstanding interest in information, people’s interaction with information and lifelong learning. She has authored and co-authored several journal articles and conference papers. Previous projects she has been involved in include a Scottish cross sector project on Information Handling Skills where she was one of three authors of online interactive material for lifelong learners / post 16 year olds. As a result of this work, in 2004 she co-authored an Information Handling Skills national qualification at Intermediate 2 for SQA (Scottish Qualifications Authority) and the accompanying assessment (NAB). She is a chartered member of the Information Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP) and has recently become a LIRG (Library and Information Research Group) committee member.

Sharing practice information literacy case studies (Curriculum for Excellence)

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The Scottish Information Literacy Project worked with Learning and Teaching Scotland and Project partners:           

  • North Lanarkshire Council, Education Resource Service
  • Information and Learning Resources, City of Edinburgh Council, Children and Families Department
  • North Ayrshire Education Resources Service

to identify case Studies / exemplars of good practice within the cross curricular area of information literacy for dissemination through the LTS Information Literacy website under sharing practice.

April 2009

Literacy Skills Project – Dundee College

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Following a visit to Dundee College by Catherine Kearney, Sam Stirling, Learning Resources Manager at Dundee College contacted me about a Literacy Skills Project they are currently running for their Special Education Needs students at the College.

It is an amazing project which arose out of “a library service review which identified that they had limlited resources that were specifically aimed at Special Programme students. To ensure that they provided the necessary material to meet their special needs, a partnership project between the Library and Special programmes was established”.

The project has been running successfully for a few years and includes various external trips (Waterstones and DC Thomson) class based literacy sessions and project work. Last session the students created next year’s SEN Library Guide using Comic Life software.

The Comic Edition of the library and learning centres user guide 09/10 Dundee College is well worth a look and is an inspiration to us all along with the wider aims of this literacy skills project which has resulted in

The learners have taken ownership of the environment, as they have actively participated in the selection of the resources. Their voice has been heard and changes made that help develop their core skills and promote independent learning.

If you would like to find out some more about this project then I’m sure Sam Stirling s.stirling@dundeecollege.ac.uk would be happy to help.

Aberdeenshire information literacy activities update

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There has been much information literacy (IL) activity in Aberdeenshire lately as Sue Cromar sue.cromar@aberdeenshire.gov.uk their Information Literacy Officer outlines:

  • draft IL Strategy, which includes reference to the Curriculum for Excellence
  • paper drawn up for Aberdeenshire’s Literacy Steering Group on Supporting Literacies Across Learning, which includes elements of both IL and reader development.
  • working on a CPD powerpoint for teaching staff on: What is IL? the skills, integrating IL, partnership opportunities etc. 
  • working with one of the local academies to get an IL course for S1s up on GLOW – including workbook, powerpoints and teachers notes for each lesson
  • about to start working with Portlethen Academy to organise a shire-wide IL ‘competition’, based on a webquest they have been using for the past couple of years – core topic is geography
  • got funding from SLIC to develop an advocacy programme for school libraries, focusing on IL across the curriculum – outcomes will include staff development, and a DVD highlighting the vital role of IL skills within learning, leisure and working life .  This will be created under a creative commons license and shared with other Scottish  libraries/schools – hopefully in time for the start of the 2010/11 academic year. See Libraries R 4 Learning: supporting the Curriculum for Excellence in Aberdeenshire article by Sue Cromar (February 2010) and subsequent postings.
  • doing some work on setting Dewey to rap  
  • working on linking the library resources / IL to CfE outcomes and experiences.

I’m sure I am not the only one who will be interested in seeing this work come to fruition.

See also previous work in Aberdeenshire exemplar – Schools toolKit for Information Literacy – Nursery – primary 7 (12 year olds)

School policy for Information Literacy

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In May 2008 Anne Mathews a school librarian at Benton Park High School in Leeds contacted the project to say that she was chairing a working party where they were starting to put together a whole school information literacy policy. However she had been unable to find school policy for Information Literacy; a problem we had encountered ourselves although a few of our project partners had just started to look at this issue themselves. 

Some six months later I contacted Anne to check on her progress and found that they had produced a School Information Literacy Policy . Hopefully this will spur others to create an information literacy policy for their school.

My thanks to Anne and her colleagues for their willingness to share their policy with us.

Welcome to The National Information Literacy Framework (Scotland) Weblog

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Following the successful piloting of the draft National Information Literacy Framework (Scotland) there emerged the need to transform the 68 page draft information literacy framework pdf  into a more flexible tool that enabled case studies / exemplars of good practice to be added. Work also needed to be done on:

The idea of using a weblog to facilitate the above emerged as experience with the project blog grew and the potential of what could be done with blogs apart from blogging. The static pages contain the framework details whilst the blog postings will facilitate the communication of any news, activities and developments plus enable interested parties to comment on any of the postings or on the framework pages.

This is very much a work in progress as there is a lot going on in the world of education and skills.

 

Our thanks go to:

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for funding to restructure the framework / add the exemplars of good practice/case studies

 

Eduserv_cmyk                                                 

 for provided funding for the draft framework and the piloting  exercise.
 
 
Christine & John