Literacy Information

My twitterstream is filled with conference hashtags at the moment. Some which are current, or just past, and you might want to check up on are:
- Centre for Study of Literacies 2015 conference: https://twitter.com/hashtag/15csl?src=hash
- ISHIMR (health informatics) conference https://twitter.com/hashtag/ISHIMR2015?src=hash
- International Conference on Informetrics and Scientometrics see https://twitter.com/hashtag/issi2015?src=hash
- America Library Association annual conference see https://twitter.com/hashtag/alaac15?src=hash
- Eurovariety in Chemistry Education (some interesting stuff about learning and teaching that might apply to other disciplines, too) see https://twitter.com/hashtag/eurovariety15?src=hash
- CILIP conference see https://twitter.com/hashtag/cilip2015?src=hash&lang=en-gb
I also have some last posts about the 2 conferences I attended: my hayfever is slowing me down at the moment ;-(
Picture is a tagxedo of the ALA conference page

I have previously blogged Information Literacy in the workplace: an annotated bibliography, by Dorothy Williams, Katie Cooper and Caroline Wavell, produced last year (2014) for InformAll. There was a session at the i3 conference when Katie Cooper and Stéphane Goldstein called for contributions to a 2015 edition, to be published in September/ October.
Information on the 2014 publication, and how to contribute to the 2015 one, is at http://www.researchinfonet.org/infolit/ridls/transferable-skills/updating-bibliography/
Photo by Sheila Webber: no drones at Dunnottir Castle! June 2015

The US Center for Media and Information Literacy actually focuses on Media Literacy rather than MIL, but it does have some useful links to resources and events etc. http://centermil.org
Events include the NAMLE / Global MIL Conference (26-7 June) http://centermil.org/2015/02/11/2015-namle-milid-conference/
Photo by Sheila Webber, June 2012

The Primo Site of the Month for May is: Big Picture Information Literacy Tutorials. There is an interview with the producers (Anne Burke, Kim Duckett, & Andreas Orphanides, North Carolina State University, USA) at http://www.ala.org/acrl/aboutacrl/directoryofleadership/sections/is/iswebsite/projpubs/primo/site/2015may
The tutorials themselves ("videos and interactive guides") are at http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/tutorials/#bigpicture
Photo by Sheila Webber: Gilbert's pit, South London, May 2015

Mick Healey is a long-established educational researcher in the UK. His website is a treasure trove of resources relevant to higher education (particularly in the UK). Through searching my own blog, I realise that I highlighted his bibliographies a few years ago, but it is worth mentioning them again as he continues to update them periodically (e.g. selective bibliographies on: Active learning and learning styles; Discipline based approaches to supporting learning and teaching; Pedagogic research and development; Students as change agents; Research-based curricula in college-based higher education). He also has substantial handouts from workshops that he runs e.g. one on Refreshing the Curriculum: Approaches to Curriculum Design (updated March 2015) and another useful item is a spreadsheet with a list of links to the archives of the former Higher Education Academy subject centres (which were centres in the UK focusing on pedgagy in different subject areas e.g. psychology, history, law; they all had some useful resources such as open access journals, teaching resources, but the centres were victims of government budget cuts). http://www.mickhealey.co.uk/resources
Photo by Sheila Webber: fallen cherry blossom petals, April 2015

I webinar I attended alerted me to the DigiLit Leicester project. This is a project in the city of Leicester (UK) involving secondary schools, the city council and De Montfort University. "The project focuses on supporting secondary school teaching and teaching support staff in developing their digital literacy knowledge, skills and practice, and their effective use of digital tools, environments and approaches in their work with learners." Go to http://www.digilitleic.com/
Specifically, I was alerted to work with teachers on exploring OERs (Open Educational Resources) and there is asite for the OERs Schools conference that took place in Leicester in January 2015: there are presentations and reports here http://www.digilitleic.com/?page_id=700 and the hashtag was #OERSCH15.
Two general sites to do with OERs that were also mentioned are: OER Map and OER Research Hub
Photo by Sheila Webber: my cherry blossom, April 2015

Yesterday I attended a workshop on visualisation literacy. This was part of dissemination from the Seeing data research project.
I'll skip straight to the "what might you want to use yourself" part, since there is a website http://seeingdata.org/ which includes a section for people to work through, to develop their data visualisation literacy. It includes a "rate these visualisations" subsection http://seeingdata.org/understanding-data-visualisations/rate-these-visualisations/. This presents you with some real examples of data visualisations, and then asks you to decide whether you "Disliked it but learnt something", "Disliked it and didn't learn anything", "Liked it and learnt something" or "Liked it but didn't learn anything" and then drag and drop them onto a grid. In the workshop, we first of all examined visualisations and were told to place paper copies of the visualisation on the relevant quadrant of a paper copy of the grid. After this we had to stand up and stand in the relevant quadrant (e.g. "Disliked but learnt something") of a giant grid pencilled on the floor. We were then asked to say why we'd gone into that quadrant. If you have the space, this is something you could do in an information literacy class (using either the examples on the site, or your own examples).

Another exercise involved looking, in small groups, at a data set and proposing different ways to "tell the story" or "answer a question" through a particular kind of chart. As a final exercise we were asked to think of the elements that affected our engagement with a data visualisation e.g. subject matter, source, beliefs, emotions, confidence and the amount of time you have to devote to engaging with the visualisation.

There is some good material in the Understanding Data Visualisation part of the Seeing Data website. For example, one of the speakers took us through some of the different chart types listed on this page http://seeingdata.org/sections/inside-the-chart/: if you click on a chart type it gives some summarised information on "What it shows", "How to read it" and "What to beware". Another section defines 10 key terms i.e. Format, Chart type, Dataset, ata source, Axis, Scale, Legend, Variables, Outliers and Input area.

Helen Kennedy (Professor of Digital Society at the Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield) is the project director, with Andy Kirk ("a UK-based freelance data visualisation specialist" (he has got a useful site, http://visualisingdata.com, which lists loads of data visualisation tools), Rosemary Lucy Hill (a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Leeds) and Will Allen (a researcher at The Migration Observatory based at the University of Oxford). The project is funded by the AHRC and their twitter stream is https://twitter.com/seeing_data
Picture: Mario Klingemann's Dada Visualization I, used under Creative Commons license: original at https://flic.kr/p/6W1ewA (do go there and read the notes about the picture, I think they are amusing)