Liveblogging the final day of the i3 conference in Aberdeen. Meriem Tebourbi presented a paper coauthored with Hideo Joh: Information Seeking Behaviour of International Students: A Case study of the University of Tsukuba, Japan . Her research aim was to uncover the information needs of international students at the university and to understand the patterns of information seeking behaviour. This was done through an online questionnaire aimed at English speaking students at the university. The background is the growing internationalisation of Japanese higher education, with the Ministry of Education setting targets for recruiting more international students, and the actual number rising steadily. The University of Tsukuba has exchange agreements with over 300 institutions and has students coming from very different cultures, which leads to many information needs, with differences in language and culture being major barriers to acquiring information. Previous studies of international students in Japan have, for example, identified that material needs, but not emotional needs, might be met by the host universities. The participants were asked about their information needs relating to campus life, and had separate sections about different types of information channel (e.g. social networking, offline sources). They were also asked about helpfulness of, and frustrations with, the channels.The respondents came from many different countries. All channels (online, offline, mailing list and official website) were all used, with mailing lists being most used, and the offline sources were the favourite ones. Different channels were used for different kinds of topic but (for example) all were useful for campus life information. This seemed to reflect their wide range of needs e.g. university procedures, events, visa information, job opportunities, news about natural disasters (as Japan has a lot of earthquakes, typhoons etc.: social media was best for that). Problems particularly centred around lanuguage (e.g. no English translation; an example was given of an incorrect translation of vital information about a coursework deadline), and spam or overposting of information. This led to the observation that students tended to overlook information when it's only in Japanese, and they did not make so many efforts to understand it. Since students also preferred human information channels, then it would be beneficial if the university employed more English-speaking tutors to support the students. Photo by Sheila Webber: the room the talk took place in (though obviously not during the talk)
I’m liveblogging from the i3 conference held this week at Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, Scotland. The next short paper is from Sara Chizari (PhD student at the University of South Carolina and a Sheffield University alumna ;-) on How do cultural differences and cognitive styles affect online information searching behaviour? A case study of American, Chinese and Iranian graduate students. Her theoretical framework is Nisbett's cultural cognition theory (2001) (proposing that Westerners tend to have more analytic cognitive styles than East Asians). She invited 10 participants from each of the three ethnic groups to undertake searches in a lab where the computers had logging and eye tracking software. The participants' disciplines were either Engineering or Social sciences. There was a pre-test questionnaire, and then they each undertook four tasks, using Google: they had remembering, understanding, analysing and evaluating tasks. Chizari is still analysing the data, and has not finished her reseach, but has emerging results. In terms of activities (e.g. mouse clicks, time, right click searching, query reformulation) there was the lowest level of activity amongst the Americans (that's people who have grown up in the USA), then the Iranians and the most active were the Chinese participants. An ANOVA analysis showed that there WAS a statistically significant difference between nationalities. The next phase of the research will include asking the Iranians and Chinese to do searches in their mother languages. Photo by Sheila Webber: chair in one of the few places that had a roof, at Dunnottar Castle, Stonehaven, Scotland, June 2015
The 75th Anniversary Issue of College and Research Libraries (volume 76 no. 3) has an interesting format: reprinting some classic articles and providing a contemporary commentary on each. For example Megan Oakleaf responds to the article (first published in 2003) by George Kuh and Robert Gonyea The Role of the Academic Library in Promoting Student Engagement in Learning. http://crl.acrl.org/content/76/3.toc The latest C and RL (volume 76 no. 4 http://crl.acrl.org/content/76/4.toc) includes - Katy Kavanagh Webb and Jeanne Hoover Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in the Academic Library: A Methodology for Mapping Multiple Means of Representation in Library Tutorials - Amanda Rinehart, Jennifer Sharkey, and Chad Kahl Learning Style Dimensions and Professional Characteristics of Academic Librarians Photo by Sheila Webber: Cow parsley, Gilbert's Pit, South London, May 2015
A scheme organised by NICE (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, in the UK) selects students to be student champions, aiming "to improve the routine use of evidence-based information by future doctors, pharmacists, nursing and other healthcare professionals. ... These students receive bespoke training and support to enable them to disseminate information about NICE Evidence Search to their fellow undergraduates in structured hands-on learning sessions." The scheme launched in 2011. Another good example of making students active in information literacy! https://www.nice.org.uk/get-involved/student-champions Photo by Sheila Webber: One of the Sheffield peregrines feeding the chicks see http://peregrine.group.shef.ac.uk/peregrines/ - at the moment the chicks seem to love huddling in the corner the camera can't see, but there is often a parent bird visible on the perch outside the nest platform
In my second post about the University of Sheffield Faculty of Social Sciences learning and teaching conference (that I attended on 19 March), I’ll say something about three presentations I attended: on failure, on group work and on “real world” projects. Firstly, Tim Herrick (from the Education School) talked about Have we got it wrong? Rethinking failure, in which he was reflecting on what happens when student work fails. He asked us to think about failures in our own lives, and whether we’d used those experiences of failure with our students (many of us had e.g. talking about the “messiness” of getting an article published, or using examples of mistakes one has made in one’s own teaching practice when talking with students learning about teaching).
He identified three ways of diagnosing failure: as lack of capability (and he felt there were issues with this: could capability always be accurately assessed?); as “a standard level of performance temporarily affected by external factors” (aka as “my gran died” i.e. it refers to the type of circumstances that (someone decides) are allowable as a reason for not having performed well); and finally as “a misalignment of task and effort”.
It was this last one which he found most persuasive. Tim stressed that the learner has always been doing “something”, even if it wasn’t what the educator hoped or wanted (e.g. the learner might have been out having a good time, or have paid someone else to do the work – but that was still “something”). He felt that identifying the “something” gave a starting point for engaging with the student. It also helped to focus on identifying – why has this misalignment happened? what could educator and student do to prevent the misalignment? One of Tim’s recommendations was: Holt, J. (1982). How children fail. Rev. ed. DaCapo Press. ISBN 9780201484021
Leo Care and Daniel Jary, from the School of Architecture, talked about two types of projects: MatterReality (a first year project) and Live Projects (a Masters level project). They are not to do with information literacy, but I’ll put links to some of the projects’ websites and social media as I found them interesting. For MatterReality, students end up constructing a conversation space out of one material, which gets displayed in the centre of Sheffield https://instagram.com/matterreality and https://matterreality15.wordpress.com/. In Live Projects http://www.liveprojects.org/, the students work on projects for real clients (mostly 3rd sector, community groups). Care and Jary did provide some interesting points on how the group work was managed, and as with the next speakers, they included reflective elements in assignments.
Finally, my colleagues in the Information School, Pam McKinney and Barbara Sen, talked about their analysis of reflections on groupwork: the reflections were worth 20% of the mark in an assignment where the main output was a business report for a real life client. Their talk was entitled Situational analysis of group work: student reflective assessment.
Pam and Barbara analysed 25 students’ work, using (as you would guess from the title) situational analysis. Using this technique they identified actors (e.g. the student, the client), actants (e.g. ways of communicating), temporal elements (e.g. reflecting on past experiences of group work), silent actors/actants (i.e. things not mentioned e.g. very little mention of internet, wifi), discursive constructions (e.g. valuing each other’s contributions) and major issues or debates(e.g. importance of keeping in touch with the group).
In terms of implications for teaching, these included that (i) students used lots of different ways to communicate, with groups settling on the way that pragmatically worked best for that group (so the same way e.g. Facebook, email, was not best for every group); (ii) face to face group meetings were important, but there were issues around arranging and attending them; (iii) although the educators had put in a good deal of support and scaffolding, this was not mentioned by students (it was a “silent” item; (iv) students were not distinguishing work from social identities. This identified (for example) the need to make it easier for students to arrange and manage face to face group meetings; the issue of the educator support could be seen as a positive (something the students used and took for granted), or perhaps its contribution to successful group work needed to be emphasised more. Photo at the start of the post by Sheila Webber: blackthorn blossom, March 2015
Articles in the latest issue of Portal: libraries and the academy (Volume 15, Number 1, January 2015) include - Faculty Research and Publication Practices by Kate Zoellner, Samantha Hines, Teressa Keenan, Sue Samson - Google vs. the Library (Part III): Assessing the Quality of Sources Found by Undergraduates by Helen Georgas - Building a Peer-Learning Service for Students in an Academic Library by Mary O’Kelly, Julie Garrison, Brian Merry, Jennifer Torreano - Pausing at the Threshold by Patrick K. Morgan [looking at threshold concepts] http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/portal_libraries_and_the_academy/toc/pla.15.1.html Photo by Sheila Webber: bunting, Sheffield, February 2015
Steve Draper presented a paper by him and Sarah Honeychurch, MOOC Research about peer interaction at the FLAN meeting in Edinburgh which I'm liveblogging (so, again, these are my imperfect notes on what was said). He reflected on Honeychurch's experience of a MOOC where various platforms were used for peer interaction, none of which were on the official platform. This has implications for research: just looking at learning analytics from a main MOOC platform would be poor at capturing all peer interaction. Draper identified types of platform and issues/usage of each Twitter, Blogs, Facebook, and Google docs. They can be used for different things, have different privacy issues, and also might be used in sequence, migrating between types e.g. chat in Facebook, then someone might move this to a longer piece on a blog or Google docs. Draper identified that learning is already amiguous with relation to public or private - the amount of privacy needs to vary (e.g. what students keep private, show to peers, show to tutor, show to the public). In terms of siftware/apps issues of changing privacy do not seem to be managed very well. One way of classifying peer interaction is about roles and types of interaction e.g. collaboration on a joint project, discussion which leads to "different personal gains in understanding" or peer review/support. "Confident (life-long) learners move fluidly and fluently" between these different modes, able to undertake the different roles and seeing the benefits of engaging in each. Draper identified that you can also classify the communication by "content type" e.g. aiming to get information, around understanding things, to vent feelings, to socialise. Sometimes this might be aimed at no specific audience (but rather to feel better) or it could be aimed at different audiences (peers, tutors etc.) Draper then discussed the Vygotskian approach of scaffolding learning through interaction with an expert, and also about (my labeling) learning to think and practice in a discipline. In a MOOC the interaction is more likely to happen with peers; since there is a wide range of expertise, there will also probably be people above the level of a learner who could interact with him/her to progress. However, this interaction has to be designed and scaffolded. Summing up, there was interaction by platform, by task/goal interaction and by how peer interaction supports the neo-Vygotskian learning process, and each type has different research implications. Photo: blurry impression of Draper anwering questions, as seen over my netbook.
One of my current PhD students has just had an article published about his PhD research. This journal is a priced publication: Wella, K. (2014) The information experience and learning needs of couples living with HIV in Malawi. Health Information and Libraries Journal, 31 (4), 325–329 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/enhanced/doi/10.1111/hir.12086/
Other articles in this issue include: - Lê, M. (2014) Information needs of public health students. Health Information and Libraries Journal, 31 (4), 274–292. - Joshi, A. and Trout, K. (2014) The role of health information kiosks in diverse settings: a systematic review. Health Information and Libraries Journal, 31 (4), 254–273. Contents page at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hir.2014.31.issue-4/issuetoc
In the previous issue of the journal, articles included: - Kelham, C. (2014) Health care librarians and information literacy: an investigation. Health Information and Libraries Journal, 31 (3), 235–238. This is based on her dissertation, which she did here at the iSchool and the full text of the dissertation is at: http://dagda.shef.ac.uk/dispub/dissertations/2012-13/External/Kelham_C_Y67.pdf - Spring, H. (2014) Health information, what happens when there isn't any? Information literacy and the challenges for rare and orphan diseases. Health Information and Libraries Journal, 31 (3), 243–246. - Brennan, N. et al (204) Qualified doctor and medical students' use of resources for accessing information: what is used and why? Health Information and Libraries Journal, 31 (3), 204–214 The contents page of this issue is at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hir.2014.31.issue-3/issuetoc Photo by Sheila Webber: old town hall in Brno (view from hotel window)
Easybib have released further results from their questionnaire survey of 1,182 school and academic librarians: Perspectives on Student Research Skills in K-12 and Academic Communities. A copy of the questionnaire isn't given, but the main results reported relate to librarians perceptions of learners' skills in evaluating websites (they mostly rate them as rudimentary or average) and the type of IL education given (i.e. is it: Combination (in class, in library), One-shot Only, In Development or non-existent). There were more "one shot" answers from academic librarians and more "none" answers from school librarians (e.g. 26% of "high school" librarians gave the response "no instruction"). The page where you can download the report is at http://info.easybib.com/perspectives-on-student-research-skills-ink-12-and-academic-communities (you have to give them your name and email address before you can download). They quote statistics of a survey of students too, but I can't see any results from that in this report. However, there are some results in the report released earlier in the year here http://info.easybib.com/trends-in-information-literacy-comparative-view e.g. comparing students' perceptions of whether they are good at evaluating websites with librarians' perceptions (though obviously the students don't necessarily some from the same institutions as the librarians, so there have to be caveats about the comparison). Photo by Sheila Webber: Today is Remembrance Day in the UK. New wreaths and crosses were placed on the Sheffield Weston Park war memorial in the ceremony on Sunday.
Next from ECIL in Dubrovnik, Maria Bell and Jane Secker talked about Transitions from school to higher education: understanding the needs of undergraduates at London School of Economics. The presentation is already on slideshare here: http://www.slideshare.net/seckerj/2014-bell-secker-final2 They started by giving some basic information about the LSE, noting that they have a relatively small undergraduate population. They had done an audit of undergraduate support using A New Curriculum for Information Literacy as an auditing tool in 2012, made recommendations, developed an LSE Digital and Information Literacy Framework and then created the Student Ambassadors for Digital Literacy project. They recruited 20 undergraduates from the Statistics and the Social Policy departments: they were helped by both the departments and the student union. They tried to keep people engaged by offering Amazon vouchers, online badges and also giving the students credit to put on their HEAR (Higher Education Achievement Report). To start with they administered a questionnaire to find out where the students saw their information literacy skills. (Questions were: where do you start? How did you learn to use your favourite research tool? What do you think of the Library search tools? Assessing quality: library resources and internet resources? Identify strengths and weaknesses of your research practices).
There were workshops to develop the students' skills and encourage and enable them to share practice with other students. As an example, students were asked to share ways on which they worked on assignments, managed information, or kept up to date. One of the workshops focused on Managing your digital identity, including an exercise in which pairs of students googled each other (sometimes to their horror at what was doscovered aabout them). There are some resources here http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsesadl/resources/ including some worksheets and student videos. LSE also developed 3 workshops for schools (and including access to the library) and this material is archived on JORUM: one of the things that was liked most were talks from the undergraduates on "what I wish I'd known when I was 16/17". There is more (e.g. on "lessons learnt") on the powerpoint linked above. The website about the SADL project is here http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsesadl/ Photo by Sheila Webber: cat, Dubriovnik, October 2014
