Understanding Information Literacy

If you thought you know it all, think again - here is the UNESCO IL Primer by Forest Woody Horton Jr. 87 pages all free : which print out beautifully. Documents outcomes from the international meetings held in Prague, 2003 and Alexandria, 2005, Ljubljana and Kuala Lumpur, 2006 and more. I must admit to being skeptical about international efforts when these began, but this document is a useful reference for any sector in any country who wants to raise the profile of IL. Annex B - the IL life cycle explained is presented in a useful grid format.

Information Literacy using interactive whiteboards

There is an excellent article "Active learning with interactive whiteboards" by Robert Schroeder of Portland State University, in Communications in Information Literacy. It is both literature review and case study for college freshmen. He makes important points about the investment in whiteboards in the UK schools. Many will be coming into Uni (as they call it) being used to lessons with smartboards... Research seems to show that use of these whiteboards is better for assisting affective rather than the cognitive domain of learning. Certainly it helps group learning as students see their skills and knowledge valued by peers at the same time they begin to value these traits in others.
My own experience at University of Bedfordshire in IL teaching in our Business School new teaching spaces and in our LRC Social Learning Space facilitating project support has been very positive. My colleague, Alan Bullimore and I will be presenting a paper which will include this at the LILAC Conference in a few weeks time.

Six Techniques to Get More from the Web than Google Will Tell You

Going through some links earlier today I came across a useful summary for librarians who serve business staff and students. It's by Margaret Locher of CIO, and she recommends use of search engines and Wikipedia, blogs, Business School sites, Government statistical data, trade magazines and trade associations, and library databases! It's good to see a range of sources but pity that library subscription databases come last!

How to be a super Conference attendee

I love this post from Will Richardson about the ultimate Conference attendee. It's Web 2.0 gone mad! Gone are the days of the typed Conference report to your manager - now it's all about sharing, remember?

How to save the world

I came upon this interesting post, which takes a chart by Chris Lott on Information Fluency, (which puts Information Fluency at the junction between critical thinking, presentation skills and discipline knowldge) a stage further to creating a model for social fluency.This is put at the junction between knowledge, thinking and communication skills. Maybe this is a bit deep for me on a Monday morning but the charts are interesting (or challenging, as they say..)

How to teach stuff

It's not particularly Web 2.0 but it made me laugh and there's lot of good advice : it's a little document by John Baez which a friend of mine passed on to me. I hope I haven't got like the last point - yet.

Wikipedia and how to use it in IL

Michael Lorenzen in his Information Literacy Land of Confusion blog has made an excellent and thoughtful post on the situation with Wikipedia. Students will use it, should be told about it, and instructors can use it as a tool for critical thinking and evaluation.