Literacy Information

For German-speakers: a useful set of materials for running a workshop about information searching, evaluation of websites etc. You get teacher's materials, worksheets, powerpoint etc. It was produced by the Landesanstalt für Medien Nordrhein-Westfalen (LfM) in cooperation with the German UNESCO Commission and the Verband der Bibliotheken des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen Bildungsinstitutionen. Go to http://www.medienkompetenzportal-nrw.de/themen/informationskompetenz/workshop.html
Photo by Sheila Webber: hawthorn, Blackheath, May 2015

Volume 8, issue 2 of the open access Journal of Information Literacy has been published.
It includes:
- Fostering the integration of information literacy and journalism practice: a long-term study of journalism students by Margy Elizabeth MacMillan
- Developing a new approach to information literacy learning design by Sarah McNicol, Emily Shields
- Faculty-library collaboration: two pedagogical approaches by Karen Marie Øvern
- The value of collaboration: raising confidence and skills in information literacy with first year Initial Teacher Education students by Sarah Purcell, Rachel Barrell
- Teaching information literacy - the role of the university libraries in Germany by Fabian Franke, Wilfried Suhl-Strohmenger
- Welsh Information Literacy Project: Phase 4 2013/14 by Andrew Eynon
- InformAll - information literacy for all by Stephane Goldstein

Special Section: Information Literacy in Schools with an introduction from Ross Todd
- An examination of information literacy instruction on the information seeking skills of primary school children in Jamaica: an experiment using grade six students by Kerry-Ann Rodney-Wellington
- Practices of ambiguity: becoming "information literate" in two Norwegian schools by Margrethe B. Søvik
- Professional self-efficacy and role perception of school librarians and their impact on the development of students' information literacy: an evidence-based study by Ruth Ash-Argyle, Snunith Shoham
Go to http://ojs.lboro.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/JIL
Photo by Sheila Webber: Advent zoo, Freedom Square, Brno, Czech Republic, December 2014

Next item I'll blog from the European Conference on Information Literacy, held in Dubrovnik is From Know That to How From Know That to How From Know That – Providing New Learning Strategies for Information Literacy Instruction, authored by Kathrin Knautz, Anja Wintermeyer, Lisa Orszullok and Simone Soubusta (Heinrich-Heine-University). They are using a computer role play game, Legend of Zyren, as part of a credit bearing course on knowledge representation. This approach is also carried outside the game. She said that the students reacted much more positively to group work when it became "forming a guild to compete against other guilds" - she gave an example of having to explain a technical term through drawing or mime. She also gave an example from the computer game - a murder mystery quest. In order to solve it you have to create a faceted classification (e.g. for the murder weapon). There was an evaluation, with a positive response. At the end of the course no one thought it uninteresting, no one thought it was useless and grades improved. A nice touch was that they had used students from another class who worked on developing the game, for credits!
Photo by Sheila Webber