Event programme: the mince pies were lovely.

This post is a copy of the original, hosted at the University of Leicester institutional blog at http://uollibraryblog.wordpress.com/2012/01/24/information-literacy-graduate-attribute/. It is replicated here to preserve this blog as a central record of my professional development.

This event was a University of West London (UWL) event focusing on information literacy and its relationship to graduate attributes. Graduate attributes are qualities that a university aims for graduates to obtain (many universities have explicit lists of these expected qualities) and tend to be linked explicitly to the employability of students. With employability high on the agenda at universities I think most university libraries are keen to make sure that the value of information literate graduates is reflected in such discussions, so we were all eager to find out more.

Transport issues meant that I missed the introductory talks from the University of West London, but arrived in time for Ruth Stubbings’ talk. She got us all thinking about both the small and big picture of information literacy: what it meant to us personally, and then how it should be seen more globally. In the context of this event her broad perspective seemed very relevant, particularly her discussion of who ‘owns’ information literacy: practically I felt this was currently librarians, but the consensus was that this should be much wider, with discussion focusing on how information literacy could be ‘quality assured’ at governmental level.

Next up was Marc Forster, discussing information literacy as a graduate attribute in the context of nursing. Nursing is a profession with a heavy focus on evidence-based practice, with nurses needing to find up-to-date information on health. He had worked on a standalone module in UWL’s virtual learning environment, which is supported by nursing tutors (as first point of help) with Marc advising those tutors. Marc will be evaluating the course as part of his PhD on the experience of information literacy by nurses, the results of which I’m sure will be interesting reading.

Jason Eyre then discussed a project he’d been doing with information literacy in social work (another discipline with a focus on evidence-based practice). Jason had worked with key stakeholders in De Montfort University’s social work course to establish a mediated discussion board, intending to facilitate conversation between students (on placements and thus crossing student and practitioner boundaries), practitioners, the department, and the library. Although the discussion board received limited use, it’s development and evaluation allowed him to gather a whole range of data students’ experience of information behaviours. A particularly interesting finding was that while the academic environment encouraged written, formal and critical information seeking, the practitioner environment used verbal, informal information seeking, with a strong respect for authority. Jason concluded that ‘authentic’ tasks were needed, and that students needed to be supported in developing criticality as a verbal skill, to allow transition of evidence-based practice from the academic to practitioner environment.

The last talk was from Jo Lozinska from the University of West London’s Careers section spoke about trying to help students articulate and communicate the skills that they gained at university. She went through some application forms for graduate jobs, picking out areas where they had to demonstrate information skills, particularly problem solving and decision making skills. It was very interesting to see information literacy discussed in this context and to see someone from the ‘other side’ making these connections.

Finally, we split into groups to discuss whether we needed to reassess our information literacy teaching to make them relevant when students became graduates (short answer: yes!) and some of the issues around this. Key needs identified included making sure that the library, student development and careers gave out a consistent message.

This was a timely session with some highly thought-provoking presentations. I think my strongest resolution is to make more of an effort to think about the employment context that students will be (or, for professional courses, are) experiencing: how the information literacy support I provide will translate into that context, and how I can improve the likelihood of that translation.

Programme for the day

This Monday I attended the University Science and Technology Librarians’ Group (USTLG) Spring meeting on Information Literacy. It was my first USTLG meeting (regular blog readers will have gathered that we try and send at least one science librarian to each) and was at the University of Sheffield, where I studied for my MA in Librarianship. The full information literacy presentations are available on the USTLG website.

The talks fell into three themes: two on researcher support, two on outreach, and two on online tutorials, alongside a presentation from the British Standards Institution, which sponsored the lunch. I’ll tackle the talks in terms of theme, rather than in the order they occurred.

Researcher Support

Moira Bent, from the University of Newcastle, spoke about the revised version of the 7 Pillars model of Information Literacy. This model, well known in the library world, mapped the different skills an information literate person should possess. The revised model addresses some concerns which have been raised in recent years: it is no longer linear, the focus is not just on skills, and each ‘pillar’ has a simple name (Identify, Scope, Plan, Gather, Evaluate, Manage and Present).

To further increase the model’s ease of application, a ‘research lens’ has been produced: looking at which skills and attitudes researchers would find productive under each pillar. The lens draws some of its terminology from theResearcher Development Framework, the UK’s widely-endorsed model of researcher development, in order to ensure its relevance. Moira emphasised that she was keen to use other ‘lenses’ to more increase the accessibility of the model in the long-term, perhaps for schools, undergraduates, or the workplace.

Further pursuing this theme, Sheila Webber, from the University of Sheffield, spoke about the influence of PhD supervisors on information literacy. She related Brew (2001)’s model of conceptions of research and Lee (2008)’s work on conceptions of supervision to simply demonstrate how a supervisor’s views were likely to influence the types of training they directed PhD students towards. She also made the interesting point that information literacy might not look the same in every field: a small field might be relatively easy to keep up-to-date with, while other PhDs might require a broad interdisciplinary approach and need a student to access many different tools and literatures.

Outreach

The two talks on outreach looked at science / technology librarians working with academic departments: one from Evi Tramatza at the University of Surrey, and one from Elizabeth Gadd at Loughborough University. Evi’s was a real success story, about the work she’d done to embed herself into the departments she supports using a focus on shared ground, pilot lectures and the support of the wider library to make sure she delivered on her promises.

Elizabeth talked about a more specific contribution she’d made towards improving teaching for a Civil Engineering literature review assignment. Elizabeth’s talk really emphasised for me how useful evidence can be in developing teaching: she’d used simple measures of the quality of the reviews before and after the teaching was introduced to demonstrate its impact, and was building upon this with other departments. You can see more of the evidence she used in Loughborough’s Institutional Repository.

Online Tutorials

Lastly, the two talks on online tutorials. The first was David Stacey, from the University of Bath, talking about the library’s role in creating an online tutorial on academic writing skills. This was a great illustration of how different specialists across the university (including the library and a Fellow from the Royal Literary Fund) had worked together to obtain funding to create this helpful resource. Unfortunately the tutorial is not currently accessible to those outside Bath (there’s some screenshots in his presentation slides) but they may produce an Open Educational Resource (OER) in the future.

The second, I already knew a little about, as Leicester is an observer on the project. This was the East Midlands Research Support Group (EMRSG), represented at USTLG by Elizabeth Martin from De Montfort University and Jenny Coombs from the University of Nottingham, who have been working together to produce a resource for researcher training. Again, this project was a triumph for collaboration, with four different universities – Loughborough and Coventry being the other key players – working together to get funding. I was really pleased to see how far the project has come since the last meeting I attended: they have developed a fantastic resource, with videos of senior researchers explaining core concepts and plenty of interactivity. Again, screenshots are available in the presentation slides right now, but the group intend to make an OER available in Jorum and Xpert in the future.

Overall, this was a great event, with good breadth, and plenty of practical ideas to bring back (particularly the focus on evidence and collaboration). I’ll look forward to my next USTLG meeting.

Springtime blossoming in the East Midlands

Last Tuesday I attended the Members’ Day and Annual General Meeting of the East Midlands Branch of CILIP, the regional wing of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals. It was held in Derby this year, and featured the Annual General Meeting of the branch, alongside talks from Annie Mauger, CILIP’s new Chief Executive on ‘The future structure and role of CILIP’ and Biddy Fisher, CILIP’s Immediate past President on information literacy.

As one of the project board who worked on the Conversation section of CILIP’s Defining Our Professional Future (DOPF) programme I was interested to hear Annie talk about the institution’s new approach to advocacy, identified in the DOPF Conversation Report as an area of future focus for CILIP. I’m not the only one who’s noticed that CILIP’s presence in the media has grown hugely in the last few months, and I’ll confess that I’m just a teeny bit proud that my work on DOPF contributed to this change.

The part of CILIP’s future which generated most interest around my table at Members’ Day was how advocacy for public libraries could grow to include other sectors in which information professionals work (academic, government, corporate etc.) and it was nice that Annie explicitly asked us to feed back on what we’d like to see in those areas (while reassuring us that they’re next on the agenda). Discussion around our table also focused on CILIP’s qualifications (primarily chartership), which I believe are currently under review. It was interesting to me that because of my work with CILIP I’m pretty well clued up on how such procedures work in comparison to the average member, which suggests that communication about what’s available does need to improve.

One thing I didn’t know about was that on the 8th June the National Federation of Women’s Institutes are voting on whether to make local libraries a focus of their nationwide campaigning and there were many calls for information professionals to engage with our local branches to promote the cause where possible – do check out the link for more details.

The Annual General Meeting was the usual fare, with the exception of a change in committee, from outgoing president Joan Bray to incoming president Mary Bryceland. I know there’s also a review of branches and groups going on at the moment, and there was some discussion of impending changes, but mainly of a ‘watch this space’ nature.

Finally, Biddy Fisher spoke about information literacy and its potential as a central uniting issue for CILIP members. In redistributed groups we discussed some of the issues, and agreed that information literacy was definitely a uniting concern for information professionals, no matter where we worked. We found our group task – unpacking CILIP’s definition of information literacy in simple language – quite hard. The consensus was that it was something we did so naturally ourselves that it was often hard to make explicit what we did. This contrasts with what I’ve found in universities – that librarians can be better at describing what being information literate involves than the (often highly information literate) academics we support, especially when it comes to teaching skills to students. I guess it’s a challenge for anyone! Our major conclusion was that the concept was better explained by example than by description.

I had an absolutely fabulous day – kudos to the East Midlands Branch committee for arranging it, and Annie and Biddy for making their presentations highly engaging, and giving us the opportunity to feed back on what we discussed. I’ve often been unsure what the exact role of regional branches of CILIP is, and this seemed an excellent exemplar of what they can do: bring discussion about the purpose and future of CILIP to the region, and allow engagement with profession-wide issues in a scalable way.

Leicester's New Walk in snow

This is my third set of posts as part of the Library Day in the Life project, although it’s the sixth round of the project as a whole, which aims to record typical (and atypical) days of library workers around the world. You can find all of my posts within this project under the librarydayinthelife tag. For those new to this blog, I am an academic librarian, providing scientific subject support at a UK university.

A slightly strange day for me: usually I work on Tuesday, Wednesday and on Friday morning, but this week I moved my Friday morning to Monday afternoon so I could attend a talk in Leicester’s new ‘Intrepid Researcher’ series.

As usual on a half day, one event sucks away all time except that I have to wade through my emails and ‘must do’ work items, sorting out immediate problems – such as a workshop arranged for a day I’m not in next week. Then I headed off for the talk.

The seminar was Ray Land, talking about the educational implications of ‘Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge’ (more on Threshold Concepts here). It’s a topic I know a little about as I produced an annotated bibliography and short literature review on it in an exercise during my MA Librarianship course. I was particularly interested in attending because I’m reflecting on my teaching in my chartership, and because most of the sessions I am teaching this year are new to me, so I’m curious to identify topics students struggle with (find ‘troublesome’. Jo Webb informs me that Moria Bent has looked into applying this theory in the context of information literacy, as evidenced by a brief mention in their joint presentation together here – I’ll update if I can find anything with more detail. Critical analysis is one idea Ray mentioned which I have particularly identified students struggling with in my classes.

Often my days (especially my half days!) offer little chance for reflection, so I always try to take the chance to go to a session like this, which offers some structured space to think about how I do what I do. However, it meant that this, a little constructive chat with other attendees, and email checking was practically the sum of my day!

Screenshot of part of the Prezi

My last post ended in somewhat of a challenge to myself: to use my love of playing with new technologies to experiment a little with the format of my teaching. I’ve therefore been trying out Prezi, the “zooming presentation tool”, as a way of presenting a teaching session I’ve been working on.

It’s still very much a work in progress, which is why I’ve gone with a screenshot rather than a link to the Prezi itself! However, I’m quite happy with how it’s going.

Because Prezi is a big canvas you can move around, zooming in and out, it acts as a mindmap of the stuff I want to cover in my session, and has encouraged me to think about how different aspects of the teaching link together, and how to make a narrative out of them. This has helped me develop the session, and hopefully should make it more coherent.

Another benefit is that I can use this mindmap as an archive of the presentation and the resources I cover, allowing students to retrace my actions, and acting as a tangible reminder of how I interpreted the resources. As well, of course, as mundanely linking to the resources I covered!

However, now I’ve arranged the Prezi as I want I’m starting to think that I could take the information back into a Powerpoint presentation, using other cues to indicate when a concept is a key idea, and when its more of an aside – which I’m currently using zoom to indicate. The zooming mechanism has acted as a useful tool for making me distinguish between key points, the meat of the presentation, and hints and tips, but it isn’t the only way I could present these different types of information now I have identified them.

I suspect the proof of the pudding will be in the eating, and I won’t really decide what I think of Prezi until after I’ve used it in a session! Furthermore, the educational technologist in me knows that even if it is a success, it may just be the novelty of the tool catching students’ attention and not its inherent usefulness as a way of displaying information and ideas. However, the new teacher in me isn’t above using a little bit of novelty in an attempt to help students learn! That said, I will post the Prezi here after I’ve used it in my teaching, and see what conclusions I can draw on its effectiveness.

Word Cloud of tweets during LILAC 2010 courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/davepattern/

Just before Easter I attended the Librarians’ Information Literacy Annual Conference, held this year in Limerick, Ireland. It was my first chance to step back and think about my new role as an Information Librarian at the university, so great timing for me.

I attended a range of different talks on areas relevant to my own personal development (on librarians’ roles as teachers, and case studies of online tool use), but in this post I’m focusing on talks which I felt had institutional significance in terms of what we’re doing with information literacy, how we’re doing it, and what else we can do.

What are we doing?
The amount and kind of information literacy teaching inevitably varies within as well as between institutions: different courses and different disciplines have different needs. However, when responsibilities for information literacy are split between different departments and services across a university there are obvious benefits from tracking who does what: to make sure students acquire key skills, and to identify opportunities for collaboration. I believe librarians, as specialists in the area, have the responsibility to make sure these skills are developed, even if we are not always responsible for delivering them ourselves.

Gillian Fielding’s presentation on The Information Literacy Audit at the University of Salford described an institutional audit as one way of doing this. The team at Salford took a checklist of key information skills to programme leaders across the university to determine what training was provided, how it was provided, at which level (pre-entry, induction, year 1, 2, or 3, or at Masters or PhD) and by which department / service. Despite difficulties with timing of the audit 70% of undergraduate course leaders participated, and it seemed like a really good way of opening up dialogues between central services and departments about what needs covering and how it can be offered. It certainly sounded like information I’d find useful, although they did have large number of subject specialists to carry out the audit compared to us!

How are we doing it?
One of the big themes of the conference for me was about how the library collaborates with others in the university. In fact, the workshop I was at the conference to lead (focusing on central services’ roles in supporting research student communities of practice) was looking explicitly at the library’s role in the wider university community. Sophie Bury from York University in Canada covered a similar theme in her presentation on academics’ views of information literacy.

The academics she surveyed pretty universally agreed that information literacy skills (as defined by the ACRL standards) were important. Furthermore, the majority thought librarians and academics should be working together to deliver sessions, a finding that she noted was echoed in some previous studies, with others suggesting that librarians should be handling this area. However, she also found a fairly even split between academics believing that sesssions should take place outside or within class time. This is an ongoing issue: sessions which take places outside of class time are not as well attended, but it’s easy to understand why academics are reluctant to jettison discipline-specific content for more general skills. How we fit information literacy into the student experience AND the student timetable is something I’ll be thinking about more over the summer as I look at my teaching for next year.

What else can we do?
Finally, as well as more ‘traditional’ information literacy, the conference also got me thinking about ways in which information literacy teaching can impact on a broader range of skills (see also Selina’s previous post about Critical Appraisal). Stephanie Rosenblatt from California State University gave a talk entitled They can find it, but they don’t know what to do with it looking at students’ use of academic literature and found that students were already competent enough at finding scholarly literature (the main focus of her teaching) but that they didn’t know how to use the academic materials. Should librarians be developing a more rounded approach to teaching information literacy? Aoife Geraghty and her colleagues from the Writing Centre at the University of Limerick discussed a way in which centralised student services could work together to support such activities.

Lastly, Andy Jackson from the University of Dundee ran a workshop on generic graduate attributes, challenging us to develop attributes such as ‘cultural and social and ethics’ into teaching Endnote and Refworks use. This was immense fun (once we’d worked out that attribution and intellectual property could be seen as cultural and social ethical issues!) and made me think about all the different angles and educational opportunities that even the most basic software training workshops offer.

Where Now?
The conference ended with a Keynote from Dr Ralph Catts talking about developing our research methods and evaluation (in time for the conference next year!). The appeal for librarians to involve educational researchers in their planning and evaluation was a little misplaced for me (I have a background in educational research, and was rankled by the implication that librarians universally lacked the ability to evaluate, rather than the resources to do so). However, I think his message about the importance of evidence in instigating, developing and evaluating our practices was sound. I definitely hope to use the research I learnt about at LILAC in the next few months, and I hope to do more reflection and evaluation as I settle in to the post.

LILAC Programme and Workshop Worksheet

Following on from my previous post on LILAC – LILAC: Part One – Workshop Presentation I wanted to reflect on sessions I’d been to discussing teaching. Over the summer one of my priorities is to think about the teaching I’ll be doing in my new job. LILAC started to help me with this, and there were a few sessions I wanted to pick out to share.

In her talk on librarians as teachers Claire McGuinness found librarians often seemed insecure in their teacher identities and covered some reasons why it’s been argued librarians are not ‘true’ teachers (e.g. not doing the same type of teaching as academics).

Claire’s discussion of teacher identify resonated with a talk I’d attended at the SRHE Conference in 2009 on The challenges for new academics in adopting student-centred approaches to learning by Ian Sadler. Ian found that unfamiliarity with material meant new academics were often nervous about experimenting with pedagogy. Perhaps the insecurity of librarians can be attributed to us being seen as ‘new academics’ as a profession, and I wonder if this has impact on the kinds of teaching we attempt.

Another aspect of teacher librarian development is training, and a session with Amanda Click and Claire Walker about on-the-job training was also helpful. They discovered that line managers of new instructional librarians are twice more likely to think they’re providing training than the instructional librarians themselves! There’s an interesting point there about making sure new teachers feel like they’re supported, and signalling when it’s appropriate for them to reflect and regroup.

A lot of the things Amanda and Claire found new teacher librarians had tried were similar to the teaching development section of my chartership plan, and it’s good to know that new teachers found reading and membership of professional groups beneficial. It was also great to hear the enthusiasm in the room for peer observation and review as a method for developing teaching skills during questions, and something I’ll definitely be exploring.

Finally, I already mentioned Andy Jackson‘s workshop on generic graduate attributes in my institutional blog post but also wanted to mention how empowering it was to realise how we can put information literacy teaching into a wider context, such as social and ethical responsibility. While still at De Montfort I sat in on a session discussing plagiarism run by a colleague, and was really interested to see students’ grasp of the issues behind such authorship and intellectual property. I really believe that getting students to relate their learning to what they know already is important in getting students to understand, remember, and apply information literacy skills. I guess therefore it’s vital to embed what we teach in a wider setting of ethics, citizenship and life skills.

What have I learnt? Being a better teacher is partly about practice and confidence. But attending LILAC has helped consolidate some ideas that have been swimming round in my head about the importance of pedagogy and contextualisation in making student skills useful and transferable. How can I make the ideas I cover in my sessions relevant to students, and is it even possible to make sure these ideas stick with students in future study, employment and lifelong learning? My next step is to actually try and answer these questions while designing my teaching: sounds like a process to document in my chartership portfolio!

After two years of attendance I can’t recommend LILAC enough. It seems to be a really great conference, the sessions are peer reviewed, and I always seem to come away with a new perspective on my professional development. I hope I’ll be able to go next year!

View of the Clarion Hotel, Limerick, my accommodation, from bridge by the Conference Venue

It goes to show that funding student places at a conference pays off! Last year I visited LILAC 2009 in Cardiff on a sponsored student place and this year I was back again presenting a workshop!

The workshop was called Building research student communities: is there a role for library and information services (slides can be found via the link). The workshop was based on activities at De Montfort University and the theory of  Communities of Practice, and was written with my colleagues Melanie Petch, Lecturer in English Language from the Centre for Learning and Study Support and  Jo Webb, Head of Academic Services.

The workshop seemed to go well, although the timing slipped a little so there wasn’t time for as much interactivity as I’d have liked. Still, it was fantastic to feel like I was moving towards the centre of our very own librarian Community of Practice and I really enjoyed being an active participant in the conference.

I’ve already written a little about the event in relation to my new job on our library blog in a post called Information Literacy within our Institution: Thoughts from LILAC. However, as I mention there, I felt LILAC was strong in both supporting reflection on work, and reflection on personal professional development, so wanted to take a chance to reflect on some sessions that had covered the latter, which I’ve done in my second post: LILAC 2010: Part two – Reflections on Teaching.

One of the most interesting themes of the conference for me was the idea of doing information literacy without saying information literacy. I think that generally people outside the information professions don’t really know what the ‘information’ in ‘information professions’ means. Whether we within the information professions agree with what it means is another blogpost entirely! More than one speaker (such as Jonathan Westaway and Moira Bent) mentioned needing students to acquire habits rather than skills, expressing that it’s not really the ability to spot the seven pillars that counts, but making effective use of information so automatic that it might not even be articulated. Keynote Melissa Highton suggested that maybe digital literacy might be a more inspirational phrase for non-librarians, and in the final session of the conference Claire Packham from the British Library mentioned that the major factor in increasing attendance at the Information Literacy sessions in their new reader education programmes was stopping calling it information literacy.

On the other hand, if we’re not saying information literacy we hide the message that certain key skills transfer across contexts. Perhaps the solution is to make the information professions synonymous with information literacy practices in the minds of the public so they automatically see new contexts of information use as under our remit. I think librarianship suffers from the idea that librarians are experts on the resources under the library’s roof (physical or digital). An awareness that we are experts on doing information literacy even if we aren’t saying information literacy requires us to focus on our practices rather than our products. Therefore the importance of the information professions acting as advocates and implementers of information literacy practices is what I’ll be taking away from LILAC.

Photograph of the Cardiff University dragon reading the LILAC 2009 Conference Pack taken by Katie Fraser.

On the course, I’m one week into the second semester and starting to find my bearings after a busy week working out my new schedule. This semester we get to pick and choose our own modules, and I’m taking Academic, Research and Special libraries (which pretty much fits perfectly the range of libraries I’m hoping to work in), Electronic Publishing and Educational Informatics.

Although some of the Electronic Publishing and Educational Informatics work overlaps with what I’ve studied in my PhD (or self-taught skills, such as the creation of xhtml / css websites) I think I can learn a lot from information scientists’ perspectives on these areas. For example, Electronic Publishing concentrates on standards and legislation, and the Educational Informatics modules focuses on the use of established technologies for formal education, whereas my own research covered more informal uses of emerging technologies.

Finally, I’m currently discussing working with Sheffield’s Information Commons for my dissertation, which promises to be an exciting exploration of evaluating new learning spaces. More on this soon as the details get worked out – I submit a proposal at the start of March.

Note: The picture accompanying this post was taken at the Apple Store in London. It’s my website on the largest computer screen I think I’ve ever seen, which for some reason I found incredibly amusing.