JISC Podcast - Interview with Philip Pothen

On Friday 28^th, November last year Christine and I attended  the Scottish Library and Information Council Further Education  conference, at the invitation of Catherine Kearney, Assistant Director of SLIC to whom, Many Thanks. At the end of the day we were interviewed about our work by Philip Pothen, at that time, the JISC Press and PR manager. JISC has now posted the interview on its website. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2009/02/podcast71johncrawfordchristineirving.aspx

There are a few Ahs and Ums but the main points are there.  We spoke to Philip about the role of information literacy in the education sector, the workplace, in libraries and how government agencies can be encouraged to promote it. We also emphasised that information literacy is the democratic right of every learner and citizen. The noise in the background is the sound of librarians consuming the free food and wine thoughtfully provided by JISC.

Librarians should get out there ... and start knocking on doors

Brilliant article about school librarians in TESS includes our very own Ian McCracken, Govan High who is a project partner and on our project advisory group. Article also includes quotes / case studies from other activists in the field: Duncan Wright, convener of the School Library Association (Scotland) and librarian at Stewart Melville's College; Wendy Pieroni, learning resource co-ordinator at Blairgowrie High in Perth and Kinross; Mary Sherriffs, Pitlochry High's librarian; and Ayr Academy librarian Heather Stewart.

Douglas Blane reports:
School libraries and the people who run them can play a central role in A Curriculum for Excellence, inspiring new initiatives and pulling various departments together.

I would certainly endorse that and have been saying so for quite some time. Advocacy at its best.

Read the full artilce 'Librarians should get out there ... and start knocking on doors'

Social Networking

Thanks to Carol Stewart who notified me about the BBC Learning Officer's blog in which Cathy Fraser talks about students and social networking. Here is her final comment from the blog posting.

"Students are certainly taking advantage of social networking on their own. Might as well tap into that passion and use it to improve the delivery of education. The potential value of online learning communities and global networking is too great to fathom. David Warlick, who was a keynote speaker I heard recently, said that educators are trying to prepare youth for a future that we cannot describe. I was struck by the absolute truth of that statement. Nothing is certain or impossible for that matter. December 4, I attended a technology in education conference myself and it was an eye-opening experience. I was heartened to learn that students have not lost their inquiring minds. They've simply taken them underground or online. What they're not asking in school, they are asking people in social networking situations and creating amazing things in the process. There is no doubt that the landscape of education is changing and that these changes are powerful and positive. However, I wonder about the ramifications of too much interacting online. Are young people losing their ability to conduct personal relationships face-to-face? Second Life is a place where people can develop alter egos which take the form of avatars. This "place" is being touted as a way for students who have difficulty relating to their peers to transcend these problems and succeed. At what are they succeeding? It's not real, or is it? Are they learning important life and coping skills by creating a graphic of themselves and existing in cyberspace? There has to be a balance. Humans will adapt to new technologies as soon as they're available in the mainstream, but at what cost?"
Cathy Fraser
Fri Dec 19 04:39:45 2008

Cathy raises some interesting questions and I know that Phil Bradley would agree that we should be taking advantage of social networking. Whilst I like to blog and email, for me nothing beats a face to face chat but then it's not always possible to meet face to face and I know of some people that are not comfortable talking face to face but are very expressive through other mediums. The old expression horses for courses springs to mind.

Web 2.0 Tools

At the end of November John and I attended the SLIC FE Conference ( see John's post) and one of the speakers was Phil Bradley described in the programme as the "Well known Internet consultant, librarian and popular CILIP 'Update' columnist".

During his presentation he talked about practical uses for Web 2.0 which he described as a load of stuff, state of mind, which requires us to think differently now and in the future and that websites were traditional, non interactive, dull and boring and that Web 2.0 allowed us to take back control.

Questions that we need to ask include: What do you want to do? What can you do better? What would you like to do?

Some of the things he covered included:

Wiki's and their advantages - flexibility, easy and quick to update

Bookmarks - share with others, can access wherever we are e.g. delicious

Weblogs - quick, easy, non technical, current, interactive, a site in it's own right

RSS - bringing information to you, filtering in different ways

Provide data in different ways:

Podcasts - for example audio tours of the library

YouTube - can be used as a good information tool

Flickr

Slideshare - useful to find experts, introduction to subject/s. See his presentation from this event on Slideshare Web 2.0 in the library.

Communication - we need to go where the conversations are taking place, space is becoming an information resource, don't just look at email (email is for old people) look at other forms - weblogs, twitter. Social networks - utilise them.

Expect obstacles that can be put in the way of librarians who want to engage in Web 2.00 tools: it can't be done, we don't have the resources, bandwidth problems, security issues, not enough time, not your job. His answer to that was ignore it because Web 2 is changing the way we use information, find information, do our jobs, interact with people, look at everything.

I found his presentation informative and inspiring, giving me ideas on how to take the National Information Literacy Framework (Scotland) from a large pdf to a tabbed interactive website. I've spent some time playing around with creating a website with tabs in Netvibes (one of the a tools suggested by Phil in his presentation) but felt it still didn't give me the interactivity so have decided to use a weblog. Our project blog has been working well and a blog would give me tabbed pages for the framework, posts for: comments on the framework; relevant exemplars that could be linked to the framework levels; information literacy policies or strategies; any other items of interest or relevance. Will keep you posted on progress.

His webisite www.philb.com is a mine of information and worth having a look at.

New year activities

This is the first blog of 2009 and I have delayed writing until I had something to report.   We got our first statistics report earlier this month which showed that the blog had been visited 1,086 times between December 13^th, 2008 and January 12^th 2009. There was a peak of activity about mid December with an understandable tailing off between 22^nd December and 5^th January   with a revival in visits thereafter. This seems like a healthy start and hopefully visits will increase as the blog becomes better known. We should get a clearer picture by the end of February.  Last week I was speaking to Alistair McCleery at the Scottish Centre for the Book at Napier University who is a reader so we are casting our net wide.

Our first meeting of the year, on 8^th January, was at Glasgow Chamber of Commerce with Elaine Rodger, their Training and Workforce Development Manager, who has agreed to distribute a questionnaire on the information needs of small businesses, designed by us, to Chamber members. We are currently focusing on identifying possible content of information literacy training programmes for the workplace and the wider employability agenda. This will help us to plan content effectively and identify the needs of specific stakeholder groups.

Coincidentally I came across newspaper reports at the beginning of the year indicating that the Business School at Robert Gordon University has secured large funding to develop training programmes for small businesses in the Aberdeen area.  I have been in contact with David Gibbons-Wood who is leading on this and we are currently exchanging information. On Friday 9^th January we met further with Skills Development Scotland to plan the symposium on the role of information literacy in career choice, progression and work situations. We have had to revise the date to Friday 27^th March.

On Thursday 15^th January we had a visit from two of our most enthusiastic Project partners, Jenny Foreman and Lesley Thomson of the Scottish Government Library Services. They were active participants in our interview based study of the use of Information in the workplace. The refereed article reporting on the research as a whole should appear in the next issue of Journal of librarianship and information science and we hope it will be widely read as not a great deal has been published in this area. Meanwhile a shorter piece focusing on the use of information in the Scottish Government and how the problems identified in the study, specific to the Scottish Government, are being addressed has recently appeared.  (Crawford, John et al, (2008) Use of information in the Scottish Government, Library & information update, December, pp. 48-49.)  We discussed with them the first draft of their Scottish Government Information Literacy Strategy which was partly inspired by our joint working and made a few suggestions towards the next draft. No doubt we will hear much more about it in due course.

On Monday 26^th January I had a visit from Tanya Wiseman of the International Development Association of Scotland who is working on a three year Project to get teacher educators to think about global citizenship. This involves changing practices of teacher educators including a focus on information literacy.  We share an interest in influencing teacher educators and trainee teachers so we hope we will be able to work together on this.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we are trying to raise our internal profile but more of this later.