Promoting employability through specific literacies’: conference at the University of Greenwich

Cutty Sark, Greenwich VillageOn Tuesday last week (11.03.14) Christine and I gave a presentation at a conference of educationalists held at the University of Greenwich. The conference occupied the whole of the week (10^th-16^th March) but our presence was only required on the Tuesday morning.

The conference was organised by Dr. Gordon O. Ade-Ojo, Principal Lecturer and LLUK Sector Network Coordinator and Co-Director of the Literacy Research and Development Centre at the Faculty of Education and Health at the University of Greenwich.University of Greenwich (Old Royal Navel College)

The conference theme was ‘Promoting employability through specific literacies’ and Christine and I were invited to speak about information literacy. There were some 20+ delegates drawn from all over Europe but as we were only there for a short time we did not have much opportunity to meet the delegates although we did talk to some over coffee including some jolly Spaniards and some Dutch people who seemed reasonably well informed about higher education library activities. I spoke about information literacy in fairly general terms and talked about the various library sectors and how they support employability and outlined the problems and possibilities. I did not dwell too much on the workplace as Mark Hepworth from Loughborough was speaking about that the following day.  After a coffee break Christine shared concrete examples of good practice, based on our experience of the Scottish Information Literacy Project and the Community of Practice. As far as we could see it went OK.

Gordon hopes to establish collaborative partnerships across Europe as a result of the conference.

The University of University of Greenwich (Old Royal Naval College)Greenwich is housed in the old Royal Naval College and we had a prowl about afterwards and visited the chapel where a choir was performing and also the impressive 18^th century Painted Hall.

At Gordon’s request I have written a chapter for a book he is co- editing for the publishers Routledge which will hopefully be out in August.  There may also be a special issue of an educational journal based on the conference.

John Crawford