Developing your teaching skills: 23 March; Cambridge

A CILIP Career Development Group East of England Division event: Developing your teaching skills; 23rd March 2012 (afternoon); Cambridge University Library, UK. "Take your teaching skills to the next level with this stimulating half-day event. This participative course provides the opportunity to share teaching experiences, develop skills, and ensure you meet users' learning needs" Talks include:
- adapting your teaching to fit different learning styles (by Suzanne Griffiths and Clare Humphries, University of Cranfield)
- engaging users with interactive teaching sessions using the Cephalonian Method (by Isla Kuhn and Clair Castle, University of Cambridge)
- developing practical teaching skills (by Chris Powis, University of Northampton)
- sharing best practice (by Jo Harcus, Cambridge Librarian TeachMeet Team)
Cost: CDG members: £25 + VAT = £30; CDG members early bird special payable by 29 February: £20 + VAT = £24; Non CDG members: £30 + VAT = £36
For more information or to book a place email kathy.teague@rnib.org.uk
Photo by Sheila Webber: "danger, unsafe ice"; pond, Sheffield, February 2012.

LOEX registration open 10 February

Registration for the LOEX (information literacy) conference will open February 10, 2012 at 1PM USA Eastern time. The conference takes place May 3 - May 5, 2012 in Columbus, Ohio, USA and always books out VERY quickly. http://www.loexconference.org/
Photo by Sheila Webber: Duck on ice, duck in the water; Sheffield, February 2012

National Libraries Day #nld12

Today is the United Kingdom's National Libraries Day "a national celebration of libraries, librarians and library staff." There is a website at http://www.nationallibrariesday.org.uk with news about events around the country. The logo shown here,by richhawk57, is available under a Creative Commons License.

Teens, Virtual Environments and Information Literacy

In the new issue of the ASIST bulletin (free online): Beheshti, J. (2012) "Teens, Virtual Environments and Information Literacy." Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 38(3). http://asis.org/Bulletin/Feb-12/FebMar12_Beheshti.pdf
"EDITOR’S SUMMARY: As digital natives, the vast majority of teens are used to cellphones, text messaging, social networking sites and other forms of electronic communications and technologies. Though rooted in the digital world for many of their daily activities, teens lack basic information literacy skills for academic tasks and other demands. Specific instruction through the educational system may not be feasible, but it may be possible to build teens’ information competence through interactive virtual learning environments. Game-style virtual environments are highly motivating and engaging, providing opportunities for repeated practice and reward for persistence and achieving goals. A virtual reality library, VRLibrary, was constructed, collaboratively designed by young teens and adults, based on the metaphor of a physical library. Teens could wander the virtual space and browse links to age-appropriate websites presented as virtual books. VRLibrary was very positively received and succeeded at engaging teen users. A librarian avatar could be incorporated to provide help as needed with a user’s information seeking"
Photo by Sheila Webber: Winter tree, Blackheath, January 2012

Information literacy meets E-learning: Let’s talk about interconnections and outcomes: deadline extended

The Call for papers for IFLA Information Literacy Section and E-learning Special Interest Group Joint Open Session is extended. This is a session at the IFLA conference to be held in Helsinki, Finland, 11-17 August 2012. The new deadline for proposals is 15th February. Proposals must focus on one or more of the following topics :
- Is there any evidence to show that E-learning effectively promotes self-paced and sustainable learning in the area of information literacy skills?
- Has E-learning enabled libraries to extend their reach to new populations, or provided their existing population with new services and fresh possibilities for learning?
- While online tutorials are mainly used in the academic environment for large populations of students, what strategies have been introduced in public libraries to encourage lifelong E-learning?
- Are there any advantages in teaching information literacy skills using a virtual learning environment (VLE) or course management systems (such as Moodle, Blackboard, WebCT) in a blended learning context?
- Can information literacy education benefit from collaborative learning through forum, chat and distance learning class experiences?
- What aspects of information literacy (eg information skills instruction, research process education…) are significantly enhanced by the E-learning experience? What elements of the E-learning have the greatest value in information literacy training?
- Many tutorials focus specifically on information seeking and citing sources; can E-learning go beyond this to address a wider range of information literacy outcomes?

Proposals should include an abstract of paper approximately 500 words; a summary of the author(s) details (name, institution, position) and brief biographical statement of no more than 50 words. Email proposals to infolitelearn@gmail.com no later than February 15, 2012 and indicate “IFLA proposal” in the subject line.
Photo by Sheila Webber: quizzical cat, January 2012

My 2000th blog post! I celebrate with Toonway and Xtranormal

This is the 2000th post on this weblog, which started in September 2005. In fact the total for the Information Literacy Weblog is more than this, as it ran in a similar form under different software from April 2003, until the server it was on got hacked into in 2005.

I have celebrated this milestone by using two cloud-based applications I just came across. The first one allows you to create animated cartoon frames easily (Toonway, a French application that is targetting the English-speaking market, although some fragments of French remain).
I am not sure whether this has been used much for information literacy, but the second one, Xtranormal Movie Maker certainly has. There has been a recent discussion on the North American ili information literacy discussion list about videos for explaining Boolean Operators, and one of them was made using Xtranormal. When I played it, loads of other Xtranormal information literacy videos popped up.
The speech is synthesised, and I think this means that anything serious swiftly starts to sound like a parody of itself, but some people have used this to good advantage. Just as examples, these four all deal with evaluating websites: http://youtu.be/dKVL1ehDQB0; http://youtu.be/5No4TOu5v84; http://youtu.be/TVh6dma6vJ0; http://youtu.be/kO3dOD6-UAY.
When you sign up, you start with 300 points and then pay points for using characters and sets: you are bound to run out of points after doing a couple of videos unless you use the same characters and sets all the time. It is easy to do a video quickly (you type in the dialog, and it synthesises it immediately) - it is also very easy to do rather bad videos. Below is my own celebratory effort, in which Bruce asks what Information Literacy is, and Sheila tells him. It is only 40 seconds long.



By the way, the above isn't my main Youtube account (that's http://www.youtube.com/user/sheilawebber)

Short articles: PBL; Twitter; Discovery tools; QR codes

A new issue of SCONUL Focus (Number 53, 2012) has, as usual, numerous short and readable articles about academic libraries. These include:
- 'Twitter ye not?' by Emma Cragg (aka 'ekcragg') & Antony Brewerton (aka 'librarian boy')
- Focusing on students' discovery tool preferences by Sarah Elsegood
- Introducing problem-based learning into one-shot information literacy instruction at Waterford Institute of Technology Libraries by Alan Carbery & Nora Hegarty
There is also an item by one of the students currently on our MA Librarianship programme, written about the library where he was a trainee: Using QR codes in the library at Leeds Metropolitan University by John Bottomley
http://www.sconul.ac.uk/publications/newsletter/53/
Photo by Sheila Webber: birch and winter sky, January 2012