Literacy Information

There are presentations from the LILi (Lifelong Information Literacy) conference (that had the theme Collaboration for Lifelong Learning: Innovative and Effective Approaches to Information Literacy) that was held on 3 August 2015 in Los Angeles, USA. Presentations are entitled:
- Gaining Ground: Building Lifelong Information Literacy Skills
- Getting Students College-Career Ready
- "Lightning round" talks: Creating a Local Computer Skill Cooperative; Information Literacy for Educators; Long Night Against Procrastination: Connecting Stressed Out Students with Library and Writing Resources; Outreach to Your Child Development Center.
The presentations are at https://sites.google.com/site/lifelonginformationliteracy/annual-conference-1 and there is a Storify for the conference at https://storify.com/LILiCon2015/2nd-lili-conference (spot the Californian palm trees!)
Photo by Sheila Webber: autumn anemone, August 2015

The presentations from the LIRG (Library and Information Research Group) AGM and Members Day, held July 1st 2015, have been put online. They were:
- Teaching or training? Academic librarians’ conceptions of their IL activities by Emily Wheeler
- An exploration of the information literacy experiences of home educating families by Jess Elmore
- Developing a research culture in the workplace: top down and bottom up approaches by Miggie Pickton
Go to: https://sites.google.com/site/lirgweb/home/events/agm-2015
Photo by Sheila Webber: cape daisies, July 2015

Issue 45 (2015) of Comunicar focuses on Communicating in an Ageing World. It includes (in Spanish and English language)
- Use, Consumption and Knowledge of New Technologies by Elderly People in France, United Kingdom and Spain by Cristina González, Carlos Fanjul, Francisco Cabezuel
- Internet and the Elderly: Enhancing Active Ageing by Carmen Llorente, Mónica Viñarás, María Sánchez
- Active Ageing and Access to Technology: An Evolving Empirical Study by Raquel Casado Fernando Lezcano, María José Rodríguez
- From Digital Divide to Psycho-digital Divide: Elders and Online Social Networks by Begoña Peral, Jorge Arenas, Ángel Francisco Villarejo
- A Mobile Augmented Reality Assistive Technology for the Elderly by Rafael Saracchini, Carlos Catalina, Luca Bordoni
- Using Technology to Connect Generations: Some Considerations of Form and Function by Mariano Sánchez, Matthew Kaplan, Leah Bradley
and a number of others all at http://www.revistacomunicar.com/index.php?contenido=revista&numero=45
There are also some articles outside the main theme, notably:
Álvarez, J.F. and Cervera, M.G. (2015). Information Literacy Grade of Secondary School Teachers in Spain: Beliefs and Self-Perceptions. Comunicar, 23 (24), 187-194. http://dx.doi.org/10.3916/C45-2015-20 The abstract reads "Information Literacy is one of the dimensions of digital competence and, in today’s information and media-based society, it should be a skill that everyone develops, especially secondary school teachers due to their influence on this crucial stage of student development. In this investigation we aim to determine the current level of information literacy of secondary school teachers in Spain. For this purpose we have designed a questionnaire (n=2,656) which is divided into two parts: the first asks questions related to belief and self-perception of information literacy indicators, and the second presents practical cases in which the teachers have to demonstrate their skills in information literacy. The results confirm that secondary school teachers’ beliefs show rather high values but that, even if the level of information literacy that the teachers have is acceptable, there are certain aspects of the indicators related to assessment, management and transformation of information in which the teachers display serious shortcomings. This highlights the need to establish a training plan for information literacy for secondary school teachers in Spain."
Photo by Sheila Webber: pink dahlia, July 2015

A few unconnected catchup links for Friday:
- An interview with Troy Swanson conducted by Brian Mathews: Practicing Critical Information Literacy. (published June 10 2015) http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/theubiquitouslibrarian/2015/06/10/practicing-critical-information-literacy-interview-with-troy-swanson/
- Avery, S., and Hinchliffe, L. (2014). Hopes, impressions, and reality: Is a Discovery Layer the answer? Presentation presented at the annual LOEX meeting, Grand Rapids. http://www.loexconference.org/2014/presentations/'LOEX2014_'Hopes%20Impressions%20and%20Reality-AveryHinchliffe.pdf
- The Digilit Leicester project (in the UK) is spending £30,00 on a project to develop schoolchildren's ability to evaluate information as part of a "games based approach to information literacy". There is a local news report on it here: the deadline to apply for the tender to do the work is just past so the information seems to have disappeared off the Digilit site, but it is reproduced here.
Photo by Sheila Webber: celebration, July 2015

Liveblogging from the i3 conference held this week at Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, Scotland. Syeda Hina Shahid is one of my doctoral students at Sheffield University in the Information School, and is also a faculty member at the University of the Punjab, Pakistan. Her talk, which reported on some of her research findings, was Assessing children’s IL skills: Findings from a multiple case study of six primary schools in Pakistan. A large proportion of the population in Pakistan do not have education past primary level, and therefore looking at information literacy at this level is particularly important. There is also a lack of research into information literacy in Pakistani schools. Syeda has carried out six case studies, in different kinds of primary school (both public and private), investigating the information literacy of school children in her home city of Lahore, Pakistan. She interviewed teachers and (where there was one) the librarian, conducted focus groups and task-based activities with the children, and looked at documents and the physical setting of the school. It is worth noting that some of these schools had a lack of resources for students and teachers to use, but Syeda also included (for example) an elite school.
In this talk, Syeda focused on the task based activities with the children. She had devised exercises based on existing frameworks for primary schools and she gave examples of how the children had responded to activities. For example, in one activity she read out a story about a lion, and asked the children to draw a lion, house and food. There were different levels in their response, not following instructions at all (drawing something completely different) through to combining background knowledge, and using all the information from the story. She had developed a model identifying thesedifferent levels.
She finished by identifying that her research should contribute to local literature and practice, as well as contributing to the knowledge of IL more widely.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Dunnottar Castle, Stonehaven, Scotland, June 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

The latest issue (online early publication) of the (subscription-only) Journal of Documentation (volume 71 issue 3) includes an article by my colleague Dr Peter Stordy which provides an analysis of various kinds of literacy using a matrix:
Taxonomy of Literacies by Peter Howard Stordy
There is also a research article on a less usual topic: Information Literacies of Self-Identified Sadomasochists: An Ethnographic Case Study by J. Tuomas Harviainen
and one on a perenially interesting theme: As simple as that?: Tween credibility assessment in a complex online world by Mega Subramaniam , Natalie Greene Taylor , Beth St. Jean , Rebecca Follman , Christie Kodama, Dana Casciotti
Abstracts at http://www.emeraldinsight.com/toc/jd/71/3
I haven't covered JDoc for a while, so I'll also pick some articles from the last couple of issues
Koltay, T. (2015) Data literacy: in search of a name and identity. Journal of Documentation, 71(2), 401 - 415. http://www.emeraldinsight.com/toc/jd/71/2
Kostagiolas, P. et al (2015) Music, musicians and information seeking behaviour: A case study on a community concert band. Journal of Documentation, 71(1), 3-24.
Hampson Lundh, A., Francke, H. and Sundin, O. (2015) To assess and be assessed: Upper secondary school students’ narratives of credibility judgements. Journal of Documentation, 71(1), 80-95.
Savolainen, R. (2015) The interplay of affective and cognitive factors in information seeking and use: Comparing Kuhlthau’s and Nahl’s models. Journal of Documentation, 71(1), 175 - 197. http://www.emeraldinsight.com/toc/jd/71/1
Photo by Sheila Webber: Cherry Blossom, April 2015

The transcript of an interview with S. Craig Watkins (University of Texas at Austin professor and MacArthur Foundation researcher) has been published by Project Information Literacy. In the release about this he is quoted as saying "While schools do not always suffer from a lack of technology, they consistently suffer from a lack of vision in how the technology will be used. In high-poverty schools, technology is rarely used to promote the development of higher-order thinking skills, such as design, problem-solving, or coding. Schools must invest in highly-skilled instructors and curricula that cultivate the skills associated with innovation. This is not necessarily a technological
barrier, but rather a social barrier. By expanding what we help students learn to do with technology, we increase the likelihood that they can begin to more fully leverage the power and possibilities of social, digital, and mobile platforms." Go to http://projectinfolit.org/smart-talks/item/143-craig-watkins-smart-talk His website is http://theyoungandthedigital.com/
Image created from Craig Watkins' website using tagxedo

An article giving examples of collaboration on information between sectors to help students transition.
Peet, L. (2014, 3 December) Conspiring to Educate: Working together for transitioning students. Library Journal. http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2014/12/library-services/conspiring-to-educate-working-together-for-transitioning-students/#_
And - Happy 2015!
Photo by Sheila Webber: All Saints Church, Sherbourne December 2014

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

The International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement published (last Thursday) the IEA International Computer and Information Literacy Study (ICILS) 2013, which reports on results of an assessment that was carried out in 21 countries, surveying almost 60000 students and almost 35000 teachers. The research questions were concerned with "Variations in CIL within and across countries; Aspects of schools, education systems, and teaching associated with student achievement in CIL; The extent to which students’ access to, familiarity with, and self-reported proficiency in using computers is associated with student achievement in CIL; Aspects of students’ personal and social backgrounds associated with CIL."

Schoolchildren had to do things like respond to an email, cut and paste a URL, register someone at a website and create a poster with specified elements. I would therefore say it was more "computer literacy" than "information literacy" (and the emphasis is on the need for people to be able to use computers to do things). However, it it is an interesting report that I have only skimmed. As well as administering the assessment, questions about home and school use of computers were asked, and information on age, socio-economic class and gender was collected. There were variations between countries, but e.g. "Among the socioeconomic
indicators, parental occupational status and home literacy resources in particular were positively associated with CIL across the participating countries." Girls performed better than boys, particularly in some countries e.g. the Sydney Herald pointed out that Australian girls ahead of boys in computer literacy
Additionally, teachers were asked questions about availability, use of, experience with, and attitudes to use of computers. One set of question asked them the extent to which they used ICT with students "The capability most widely emphasized in their teaching was “accessing information efficiently.” Overall across countries, 63 percent (the ICILS 2013 average) of teachers said they emphasized this skill in their teaching. The highest national percentage was recorded in Australia (76%) and the lowest in Lithuania (40%)." (p.215).
International Computer and Information Literacy Study (ICILS) 2013: Preparing for Life in a Digital Age: http://www.iea.nl/fileadmin/user_upload/Publications/Electronic_versions/ICILS_2013_International_Report.pdf
Additionally a press release gives these links:
The European Commission report on findings for the European countries participating in ICILS 2013, Main findings and implications for education policies in Europe http://ec.europa.eu/education/library/study/2014/ec-icils_en.pdf
A package of press materials, including the press release and infographic on the study highlights http://www.iea.nl/fileadmin/user_upload/Studies/ICILS_2013/IEA_ICILS_2013_Press_Release.zip
"View a video demonstration of an example student test module from ICILS 2013, After-school Exercise" http://www.iea.nl/index.php?id=475
Photo by Sheila Webber: autumn leaves, November 2014

A new Ofcom (the UK communications watchdog organisation) report was published in October, with a much statistical data about children's use of devices, the internet etc. Children and Parents: Media Use and Attitudes Report 2014. As usual, they are drawing on a relatively robust data set, including 1,660 interviews carried out with parents in May/June 2014. Just snatching some headlines from the executive summary "There has been a significant increase in access to, ownership of and use of tablet computers by children of all ages. In contrast, the incidence of TVs and games consoles in the bedroom is declining, while smartphone ownership remains steady. ... 12-15s are twice as likely to say they would miss their mobile phone than the TV, say they spend more time going online than watching television in a typical week, and say they prefer to socialise online rather than watch TV. In contrast, younger children still prefer TV to any other device, and spend more time in a typical week watching TV than doing any other media activity. ... Gender differences are evident from an early age. Differences include a preference for gaming among boys and for communicating online among girls. Parents also treat boys and girls differently, monitoring some aspects of girls’ online activity more closely than boys’" and particularly interesting for this blog "Older children are making judgements about the truthfulness of online content, including search engine results and how accurately people present themselves online." Extracting a paragraph from the section that goes into this in more detail "The number of 12-15s who believe that all of the information they see on websites used for school work or homework is true almost halved between 2013 and 2014: from 30% to 16%. Similarly, there was a two-fold increase in the number of children aged 12-15 who say that only some of the information is true (29% in 2014 vs. 12% in 2013). These findings indicate an increase in critical awareness for this age group." (p90)
http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/market-data-research/other/research-publications/childrens/children-parents-oct-14/
Photo by Sheila Webber: Autumn park, November 2014

I found some notes on a couple of presentations I attended at the European Conference on Information Literacy last week which I hadn’t blogged. One was on a book review website for Serbian primary school children, and the other on assessing photographic work.

Sharpening of Little Quill Pen: Research on MIL in primary schools by Slađana Galuška (Primary school „Milorad Mića Marković“, Mala Ivanča, Belgrade, Serbia, Anđelka Tančić-Radosavljević (Primary school „Ratko Mitrović“, Belgrade, Serbia) and Gordana Ljubanović (National Library of Montenegro). The authors described an initiative from the Association of School Librarians of Serbia which aimed to improve pupils Media and Information Literacy (MIL). The aim was to encourage the young children’s creativity and critical thinking by getting them to contribute reviews, posters, descriptive/promotional videos, author interviews, create plays etc. about books they had read, on a specially created website. The presenters showed some creative examples from the website. This initiative had been running for four years, with 500 students from 20 different primary schools involved in the 4th year. The presenters had carried out two evaluation surveys with mostly multiple choice questions, one for students (299 respondents) and one for teachers and school librarians (94 respondents). One finding was that the teachers were not using the web very creatively and had limited conceptions of MIL. The teachers underutilized librarians and librarians felt they did not have influence: the relationship between teachers and librarians was characterised as “co-operation, co-ordination, but not collaboration”.

Development of Visual Skills: Digital Photography as a Tool for Research and Teaching in Architectural Education by Mayra Jiménez-Montano and Laurie Ortiz-Rivera (University of Puerto Rico). This presentation described an initative where they had developed a rubric for assessing a photographic sequence. Architectural students had to take 5 photographs at a place of their choice in the city, that captured that place’s function as an architectural space. The four headings on the rubric used for marking were: General Image, Cinema Conventions in Photography, Visual Narratives, and Design Process.
Photo by Sheila Webber: blue and gold sea, looking out from Lokrum island, Croatia, October 2014

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

Ross Todd, one of the invited speakers, is talking next at the European Conference on Information Literacy, held in Dubrovnik, on Collaborative Inquiry In Digital Information Environments: Expanding Perspectives on Information. He is Director of the Center for International Scholarship in School Libraries (CISSL) http://cissl.rutgers.edu/. He said he was troubled in "in-house territorial battleground for intellectual possession" and the multiplicity of models, which he felt was a "model media". Additionally he felt that information literacy needed better theoretical foundations and that there needed to be "deeper exploration of what constitutes meaningful pedagogy for information literacy intervention".
Todd referred to John Hattie's meta analysis of educational studies, and called for a similar meta analysis for the information literacy field, to identify a better theoretical base for information literacy. Todd put forward Carol Kuhlthau https://comminfo.rutgers.edu/~kuhlthau/ as a model of a researcher researching and working in the information literacy field (her work on the information search process and on guided inquiry will be familiar to many and there is a good deal of information about them on her website).
Todd made further points, based on his research with CISSL. This included moving from a "find" framework to "doing something with the found". Currently CISSL is looking at questions such as: team-based inquiry, collaborative learning, and (for example) investigating groups of school children engaged in tasks using a guided inquiry approach. Todd quickly presented some findings from the latter study to do with the dynamics of group works, one element of which was "social justice" (e.g. expecting equity of contribution), which "social justice" element was one he was particularly interested in pursuing ("information literacy through a social justice lens").
Photo by Sheila Webber: washing in the old town, Dubrovnik, October 2014

Today's final session (for me) at the European Conference on Information Literacy, held in Dubrovnik. Ruth Ash-Argyle (University of Haifa) and Snunith Shoham (Bar Ilan University) talked about Evaluating the Degree of School Librarians' Involvement in Providing Information Literacy skills to Students using The Big6 Model as an Assessment Tool. The purpose was to study how involved the school librarian was in teaching students information literacy and also to investigate the librarians' self-efficacy. They used the Big 6 model, because it takes account of stages in the information research process and it is a widely used model.
The researchers hypothesised that schools librarians would be more involved in the Big 6 stages associated with searching and sources, and that higher involvement would correlate with higher professional self-efficacy. They administered a questionnaire to school librarians. The participants were asked to rate their involvement in each of the Big 6 stages. The results were that stages 2 (Information Seeking Strategies) and 3 (Location and access) did have the highest involvement from librarians. Barriers to more involvement included lack of time, lack of cooperation from teachers etc.
The researchers identified (from previous research) four domains of professional self-efficacy: teaching, technical skills, interpersonal communication and self-teaching skills. The school librarian participants rated themselves as having high communication skills, with self-teaching as the lowest point. The domain that correlated significantly with high involvement in the curriculum was that of self-teaching and professional updating.
The participants were also asked to self-identify their role e.g. information expert, promoter of reading skills (there were 6 roles listed). The results were that "Promoter of reading skills" rated highest and "Educational consultant" lowest. Relating these results to the degree of involvement in the curriculum, the higher role of leader correlated with higher involvement in the curriculum.
Recommendations included developing school lbrarians to embrace the roles of leader, teacher etc. and encouraging continuing development and professional updating.
Photo by Sheila Webber: Flower pot, Dubrovnik old town, October 2014