The Cambridge Curriculum for Information Literacy

Heron near Falkirk Wheel (thanks Kathy)

Last week I was interviewed by Jane Secker and Emme Coonan as part of their research for their Arcadia Fellowship. It was nice to be called an "expert witness" - not sure I agree with that description, I'm more just an enthusiastic amateur! The project is fascinating. Jane and Emma are aiming to understand the information needs of future undergraduate students on entering UK higher education and so develop a revolutionary curriculum for information literacy that can be used with them. The curriculum aims to be flexible so that it can be can be used and adapted in a variety of settings and will support face to face, blended and online learning provision. I really enjoyed our chat. Having the opportunity to reflect back on my own NTF research was useful too.One of the useful outcomes from my NTF work was encouraging me to think about how the way in which teachers perceive IL affects how they integrate it into their teaching - if they think of it as skills, or even just using the library, then they may not address the underlying attitudes, understandings and behaviours which need to be taught alongside the skills

E-Books and E-Content

Falkirk wheel again (courtesy of Kathy)

I was disappointed to miss the e-books and e-content event last month due to illness, so I'm pleased to see all the presentations are now available. Over the last couple of years I have been using some of my NTF fund to buy a range of different e-book readers. In my little collection I have: a bebook, a cybook, a sony touch, sony pocket and sony prs505, an iriver story, a kindle, an archos and an ipad. So far not one of them is an outright winner for me in terms of academic library use (well, maybe the ipad...). I feel the Sonys should be, as at least it's possible to add non DRM controlled EPUB documents onto them, so a few subscribed titles maybe. Certainly they seem to be the best bet for using with public library ebooks. I do like the Newcastle City Library pages, and the Overdrive summary page of different devices. Sony's are not so easy to read PDFs on though. We loan a few sony readers out to our users and they are very popular, but it's frustrating that they don't work with all our ebook content. I must say I like the option via Amazon to email a PDF to your kindle and have it reformatted - that's much better for EJ articles, but really only works for a personal reader, not loanable equipment. I know other folks are experimenting a lot with readers now - I'll be interested to know your experience if you'd like to leave me a comment.

Social media: re-conceptualising information literacy?

The Falkirk Wheel (courtesy of Kathy) - lots more Scottish photos to come!

Helen Partridge from QUT is giving a talk today in Manchester  about her research on the issues, challenges and opportunities social media brings to the information world. It promises to be a thought provoking discussion. She gave the same talk last month and there were some very interesting blog posts about it - see Neil's Random Letters and Emma Wood's Librarian Identity. There'sa  twitter tag for today's talk too: #infolit

23 things for professional development

I've just registered with the 23 Things for Professional Development programme which starts on 20th June. It looks like an excellent idea - it's a free online programme open to information professionals at all stages of their career, in all types of role, and anywhere across the world. The text below is copied from Katie Birkwood's publicity:

"Inspired by the 23 Things programmes for social media, this new programme will consist of a mixture of social media "Things" and "Things" to do with professional development. The programme starts on 20 June and will run until early October 2011. Each week the CPD23 blog  will be updated with details of the next thing to be explored.  Catch up weeks and reflection weeks are built into the programme, so it's not a problem if you’re going to be away for a week or two!"