London Libraries Learning Research Reading Group meets on 5th June

The London Libraries Learning Research Reading Group is next meeting on 5th June - this is a face to face meeting (not virtual ;-) at the LSE in London, UK. They will be discussing Intersections of Scholarly Communication and Information Literacy: Creating Strategic Collaborations for a Changing Academic Environment. More info at http://lllrrg.wordpress.com/2013/05/28/june-meeting/

TeachMeets: discussion on 21st May

The next online journal club will take place at 8pm UK time (see here for times elsewhere in the world) on Tuesday 21st May here on this blog, as a discussion in blog comments.

The topic will be TeachMeets - originating in the schools sector, a TeachMeet is an ‘unconference’, organised by teachers for teachers. The TeachMeet has been adapted into the LibTeachMeet, with the first Library TeachMeet taking place in Cambridge in 2010. 

The role of librarian as teacher has gained increasing prominence over the last few years, with a range of conferences, resources and networks appearing to support this. Many librarians do gain some kind of teaching qualification, but this formal education can be complemented by informal sharing of ideas through events such as TeachMeets. 

The following article gives the background and provides the starting point for our discussion:

Chapter: Tumelty, N., Kuhn, I., & Birkwood, K. (2012). TeachMeet: Librarians, learning from each other. In P. Godwin & J. Parker (Eds.),Information,Literacy Beyond Library 2.0 (pp. 191-201).  London: Facet Publishing.  http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/244069

As well as running a LibTeachMeet in Newcastle (ToonLibTeachmeet), I’ve recently been attending some teachers’ teachmeets to gain inspiration. My blog post about this could provide some ideas for discussion: 

#tmblakes13– a TeachMeet with real live teachers and real live music, hblanchett.com

Whether you’ve been involved in organising or participating in a LibTeachMeet, or are simply interested in the concept, join in our discussion. 

Questions

• What do you think of the concept?
• In what way are TeachMeets for librarians different?
• What techniques did you find successful? What didn’t work?
• Why do you think there haven’t been more LibTeachMeets?
• How could you see TeachMeets changing? What would you like to see?
• How else could librarians support each other in their roles as teachers?

Further Links

CambridgeLibTeachMeet

ToonLibTeachMeet

Teachmeet.org.uk

Some links from last week's ANCIL discussion

There was a good discussion about A New Curriculum for Information Literacy (ANCIL) last week (and you can still add a comment if you want: the post is here http://infolitjournalclub.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/online-journal-club-13-march-ancil.html#comment-form)

I said I would gather up the links that were mentioned during the session, and here they are:

- ANCIL website http://newcurriculum.wordpress.com

- ANCIL wiki http://implementingancil.pbworks.com/w/page/48731612/Introduction

- UNESCO's Media and Information Literacy curriculum for teachers http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/resources/publications-and-communication-materials/publications/full-list/media-and-information-literacy-curriculum-for-teachers/

- Helen Webster's ANCIL: Information Literacy First Aid http://implementingancil.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/49095011/Information%20Literacy%20First%20Aid.pdf

- Alexandria Proclamation http://archive.ifla.org/III/wsis/BeaconInfSoc.html

- Welsh Information Literacy project http://librarywales.org/en/information-literacy/project/

- Scottish Information Literacy project http://www.therightinformation.org/archive-silp/

- Sturges, Paul, and Almuth Gastinger. “Information Literacy as a Human Right.” Libri: International Journal of Libraries & Information Services 60.3 (2010): 195-202. copy here

- 10th ALDinHE Conference 2013: Celebrating Learning Development Plymouth University 25th – 27th March 2013 http://www.aldinhe.ac.uk/plymouth13.htm

Online Journal Club: 13 March: ANCIL

The next online online blog-comment information literacy Journal Club meeting takes place at 8-9 pm UK time on Wednesday 13th March 2013 (see http://tinyurl.com/chs7qu3 for times elsewhere - and note that this is one of those pesky times of year when the difference between times in the UK and times in North America are different from usual, because we go over to summertime later than the USA/Canada!).

The topic will be A New Curriculum for Information Literacy (ANCIL). For those new to ANCIL, you may want to start with the Executive Summary, which is here:
http://ccfil.pbworks.com/f/Executive_summary.pdf
or by paging through the powerpoint which is embedded below.

As before, the real-time discussion will take place in comments to this blog post during the hour mentioned above. During that time the authors of ANCIL, Jane Secker and her colleagues, will be present and helping Niamh Tumelty and me facilitate discussion. People are also very welcome to add comments and questions before and after this real-time event. Note that moderation is usually turned on for comments (because otherwise we get spammed!), but we will turn moderation off on the day of the discussion, so that your comments appear immediately.

There is lots of information about ANCIL on the ANCIL website at http://newcurriculum.wordpress.com/. On the website it explains that "ANCIL is the product of a two-phase research fellowship funded by the Arcadia Programme at Cambridge University Library. The original project research by Jane Secker & Emma Coonan (May-July 2011) produced A New Curriculum for Information Literacy, a structured and holistic framework for meeting the information literacy needs of undergraduates entering higher education over the next five years. A second phase researched by Helen Webster and Katy Wrathall (October-December 2011) looked at Strategies for Implementing the New Curriculum at a number of UK higher education institutions, including Cambridge."

There has been much interest in ANCIL internationally so we hope people will take this opportunity to discuss it ;-)

We will add some questions for discussion nearer the time!

Developing and implementing a new curriculum for information literacy from Jane Secker

Online Journal Club: 13th February! #ILread

Scroll down to see, and join in, the blog-post discussion of today's article!
The next blog-post discussion for our online Journal Club will be on this open-access article:
McKinney, P., and Sen, B. (2012). Reflection for learning: understanding the value of reflective writing for information literacy development. Journal of Information Literacy, 6(2), http://ojs.lboro.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/JIL/article/view/LLC-V6-I2-2012-5

The date and time will be Wednesday 13th February 8pm-9pm UK time (see http://tinyurl.com/byg2dze for times elsewhere) . The live discussion will take place by posting blog comments on this blog. You can see what happened at the last discussion, here: http://infolitjournalclub.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/first-journal-club-discussion-thurs.html. People are obviously welcome to post comments before and after the "live" session.

Our February article reports on the use of a reflective information literacy report as part of the assessment for a business intelligence module, where the main piece of coursework was a business report (for a real local company). Hopefully you will have time to read the whole article, but I have also put up a few powerpoint slides to summarise the main points (see below) The article is by two of my colleagues here at the Information School (and I taught this module in the past).
I've set up some questions below, but people can jump into the discussion with their own questions and comments:

Questions for discussion could include:
- What did you think of the "Sea Change" model of reflection? (it is explained in more detail, with a clearer diagram here: http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/polopoly_fs/1.232881!/file/Modes_of_Learning_Reflective_Learning_Sen.pdf )
- The students were told to use the SCONUL 7 Pillars as a framework for reflection, and the authors mapped the students' reflections against the Pillars and elements in them. Students reflected more deeply on some pillars than others e.g. for "Evaluate" there were quite a lot of reflective statements, but they were not at a particularly deep level, whilst the reflections on "Identify" were deeper. Deeper reflection is taken as an indicator of deeper learning with "critical self-questioning, and ability to see others point of view". Question: Have you noticed any differences in the depth of students' reflection from one Pillar to another?

- Do you think the student quotations might be helpful when working with other students?

(and more broadly)
- If you have input into modules (e.g. in a Business School) which entail producing a company report or market analysis, what kind of assessment is used, and are you involved?
-  Have you used reflective reports for learning and assessment of IL (in any subject)?
(Photo by me, boat reflected in Torshavn harbour)

Here are a few slides in which I have identified what I think are some key points in the article:

Slides highlighting key points in McKinney and Sen (2012) from Sheila Webber

More journal clubs

We hope that this blog can be "home" for links to other people's blog posts discussing articles etc. and also for news on other Journal Clubs.

1. The other club which I have been co-organising (with Marshall Dozier) for a couple of years meets in the virtual world, Second Life (see right, November 2012). The next meeting is this week:
When: Weds 23 January 2013: 12 noon Second Life time, 8pm UK time.
Where: Infolit iSchool, Second Life, http://slurl.com/secondlife/Infolit%20iSchool/106/208/30/ (you need a SL avatar and the SL browser)
What: Marshall Dozier (Edinburgh University) will lead a discussion of: Detmering R, and Johnson AM. (2012) "'Research Papers Have Always Seemed Very Daunting': Information Literacy Narratives and the Student Research Experience." Portal: Libraries and the Academy 12(1), 5-22. Available from: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/portal_libraries_and_the_academy/v012/12.1.detmering.html

2. A face to face group started up last year is London Libraries Learning Research Reading Group: they had a meeting in November 2012 and their blog is here: http://lllrrg.wordpress.com/ and Jane Secker outlined what they would discuss here.

If you run a Journal Club (i.e. any group meeting face to face or virtually, to discuss articles or other literature in the library and information field) please let us know, e.g. by commenting below. If you run one and would like to post information about upcoming sessions on the blog regularly, do contact us.

First Journal Club discussion Thurs 17th Jan at 8pm UK time!

The first Information Literacy online Journal Club is on Thursday January 17th 2013. The live discussion will start at 8pm UK time (which is 3pm US Eastern Time, see http://tinyurl.com/avadgw3 for times elesewhere) and end at 9.15pm. We will be discussing the 2011 revision of the SCONUL 7 Pillars model of information literacy, available here: http://tinyurl.com/bxdp5sy. The 7 Pillars diagram is reproduced on the right (under a Creative Commons license). This is the UK's chief framework for information literacy in Higher/Further Education, and the first edition came out in 1999.

The Journal Club discussion will take place in the comments beneath this introductory blog post. You can start adding comments now if you want.
The live discussion hosted by Niamh Tumelty and me (Sheila Webber) will be between 8pm and 9.15pm on 17th January. As facilitators, we will be aiming keep the discussion going and introduce the questions through the session. In the next few months we will probably be trying a few different channels for this online journal club (e.g. possibly a Twitter discussion) so we will be grateful if people are willing to stay for a bit after 9.15 to tell us how/whether the blog comment format worked.

Of course people can also contribute to the discussion by commenting (on the topic or the format for discussion) after the 17th January. Alternatively (or additionally!) you can write your reflections on your own blog now or later. Just make sure to tag it ILread and give us the link) or comment on Twitter using #ILread. These are the questions we thought of, to stimulate discussion. Do add further ideas for topics and questions as comments, below.

- How do you think the SCONUL model compares with other models or information literacy standards (e.g. ACRL)?

- Have you used the SCONUL 7 Pillars in practice? If so, how and what are your thoughts about it? for example:
- - Do you mostly just use the basic headings and diagram, or the longer explanations?
- - Are there pillar(s) that you find more difficult to address (or that learners find more difficult to understand)?
- - How do academics take to the model?

- What do you think of the various lenses that are already available for this model (e.g. the Research lens and digital literacy lens) and are there ones that have not yet been written but you think should be?