Alternatives to using a wiki to teach?

I’m looking for some advice or suggestions on alternatives to using a wiki during a session.

Last year I blogged about my experience using a wetpaint wiki with 1st year computer scientists which overall went well as the students liked the option to interact online, rather than interact verbally in the classroom. We found last year and so far with the group this year that they are far happier doing things in front of a computer!

Anyway, there are up to 70 students and I would like them to comment on issues such as the pros and concs of wikipedia during the session. The wetpaint wiki would not allow several people to edit at once so most of the students entries were lost or overwritten last year.

If anyone can recommend an alternative solution?

- wiki software that will let multiple people edit?

- chat room software that can deal with a big group?

- discussion forum software?

- would a blog allow lots of people to comment at once? Or would it fall over?

I only really need the software during the session, as I’m not expecting them to add to it afterwards, so it needs to be free and easy to use/register for. I would have used a Blackboard discussion board but this module isn’t using Blackboard!

Visualising Information Literacy

Getting across to students what information resources they need to use and when

cc luisvilla: http://is.gd/4xkiI

to use them can seem a thankless task.  Its often pretty dry material and training sessions aren’t usually scheduled to link in with the point at which students immediately need to use the resources.  Medical librarians at the Clinical Sciences Library are in the halfway through running some sessions this year which we hope begin to address this problem. 

We have been experimenting with a new approach to our library training with our first year medics giving them a mindmap of information resources they need for their course.  The School of Medicine invited us to get involved in their new ‘clinical problem solving’ module, which aims to get new students making connections between their modules and understanding deeper processes rather than trying to get by learning by rote.  The students have to solve problems by making these connections and they are expected to be able to do their own research to before they can work out the answers. Google and Wikipedia alone won’t do this for them. This is where our information literacy training fit in. 

Previously we have dived straight into Medline to get them conversant with the research literature and how to find it.  This time we created a map of information resources.  The map links directly out to the resources and is organised to help the students see which places to go for either an overview of a topic or for more detailed information.  The resources range from dictionaries and clinical guidelines to statistics and bibliographic databases.  It is hoped that the students can return to this map to help them clarify where to look for information at any time within their course. 

In our training session the students are introduced to the resources on the map by integrating voting questions using Turning Point to ensure they understand them.  Later in the session they are given the task to find the answer to a clinical question using two contrasting resources, explaining where they found the information to support their answer and also how they found it. 

Its early days and when we have finished our sessions we will compile our feedback from the students and the course tutors.  We are hopeful that the map has the potential to be developed into a more ambitious elearning tool useful for many different contexts.

Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World Reprise

Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World: Cover

Following on from Gareth’s earlier post on this subject, here’s my thoughts & questions:

• Information Literacy is a major component of this report – it argues that it is a growing area that students are deficient in. Recommends that it is a high priority for HEIs to train their students in & keep their staff updated on.
• “Information literacies, including searching, retrieving, critically evaluating information from a range of appropriate sources and also attributing it – represent a significant and growing deficit area”
• However, no mention anywhere of how to do this or that libraris have been struggling to get this on the agenda for years.
• Q: What do we do with this report? Take it to VC? Take it to teaching & learning committees? What strategies & solutions do we suggest for training students & staff? Do we take a take roots approach with lecturers? Do all of the above?
• Web 2.0 skills (communication, networking, sharing) are becoming employability skills.
• Students are living in a Web 2.0 world and might expect Web 2.0 solutions in the future – though at present they expect a traditional face to face approahc in HE and do not equate social software with learning. This may change as the next few generations come through the school system.
• Students are currently consumers of content in the Web 2.0 world rather than creators – we need to find hooks i.e. show them how the technology helps them.
• Q: What are the hooks for staff and for students in using Web 2.0 in a learning context?
• Three types of online space: Personal (emails & messaging), Group (social networking sites) and publishing (blogs, wikis, youtube).  Students will not want us in their personal space but there is scope for utilising group and publishing space for learning & teaching.
• Information literacy should incorporate other web awareness issues e.g. plagarism, data protection, personal data on the web and online identities.
• Q: How do we do this? How do we work with others in the institution who teach/train on these issues? How do we update ourselves in all these areas?
• Upskill staff on e-pedagogy: as this will be needed for them to take advantage of using Web 2.0 technologies.
• Q: How skilled are we as librarians in this? What training do we need in order to offer the information literacy teaching the report advocates?
• Report suggests there are already examples out there of good practice in the use of digitised materials and online learning resources at module level. Though no specific examples included. It asks how these can be supported and used on a wider/larger scale.
• Q: What good practice are we already using or aware of with regards Web 2.0? Does it upscale? What opportunities are there for us to work with other colleagues inside & outside the institution to provide services?
• Take into account the prior experience and the expectations of students.
• Q: How do we do this? Do we cultivate more links with school librarians in the UK? What about overseas, distance learning and mature students?
• Digital divide still exists – don’t forget that!
• “Means of access will be multimedia, mobile and pocket-sized”
• Q: Are we prepared for the next wave of multimedia and mobile type resources?

Overall, this report is good for librarians and the information literacy cause as long as we DO something about it. Take action & not just talk about it!

Higher Education in a Web 2.0 – some thoughts

I’m currently reading through the the HEA and JISC’s report “Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World ” that’s just been published on the Web.  A few thoughts and highlights follow.

p8 – “Students are looking for traditional approaches, notably personal contact, in a modern setting…The bridge between Web 2.0 in social user and in learning is as yet only dimly perceived by students“.  I’m taking this to mean that students are viewing Web 2 as more of a social thing, and not a learning activity.  I know talking with people like Alan (Cann) that students can take a dim view of our intruding on what they view as their “personal space”.  There is the broader debate of the where the divide between private/public lies in social media (mine are certainly blended and intertwined) that has to be remembered – do the students really want us being their “friends” on Facebook or following them on twitter – or vice versa.

p10 Recommendations “HEIs to take steps to keep abreast of the prior experience and expectations of their student bodies“. Er yes, always useful – question is how? In the past I’ve been involved in pre-assessing students (for future ICT skills training) and the picture has been spotty and incomplete. Asking students about their skills base is not a good metric, most of them either considerably over or under estimate their ability.  On the other hand, this might mean HEI has to work more closely with secondary education – OK for the UK, but what about for our thousands of overseas students?  Sounds quite a job.

“HEIs support staff to become proficient users of an appropriate range of technologies and skilled practitioners of e-pedagogy” Well yes I agree, but this might be with some considerable reluctance – going on the experience of people I meet at conferences, those of us up skilled and enthusiastically engaging in this area is still very much in minority right now.  A lot of time and resource will be needed in training, and from senior levels in advocating staff to really engage here.

p15 I see in their definition of Web 2.0 and social software that “Media sharing” is mentioned, but doesn’t include “file sharing”. I wonder as I delve further in, if the culture of free/open access sharing of information, music etc is going to be included as a consideration.  It might breach (c) laws left right and centre, but I bet a lot of students are doing it, and don’t see if as a problem.  Online essay banks might be the least of our worries.

p19 The Five principal perspectives on the Social Web.  I’m a point 4 man myself (force for good and offers possibilities – IDIC I say!).  I seem to know a lot of people who’ll embody the other points though.

p20/21 Ah good, access and the digital divide is getting  a look in.  I keep worrying that we’ll get to a point of assuming students have a certain skills/access base but won’t require them to have it to join an institution.

p23 “Students may think they are doing this [checking validity of courses] although their methods may not be sufficiently rigorous”.  Oh yes indeed, as I said about p10 – self perception of ability can be seriously flawed.  On the other hand on the same page there’s a good quote in support of peer-peer enabled support.

p24 “Information literacies…represent a significant and growing deficit area“. Not news to we librarians who have (all of my professional working life at least) been striving to get these onto the agenda across institutions (with mixed results).  This might well be the single most important point for us LIS types

p29-32 Focus is on current Web 2 being used, bit thin on details to be honest “Facebook and Second Life presences for most HEIs”.  Would have preferred a few exemplars in here, maybe even some best practice models.

p34-35 Back to focus on information literacies – will it actually mention the key role librarians have been playing here? Nope, they raised my hopes.  All the same what the report stresses are important considerations are well worth the read (if nothing else) for librarians involved in supporting learners.  Which is, let’s face it, all of us.

p37 Some very timely comments about the danger to HEIs in the UK if they continue to focus on throughput and efficacy, rather than excellence and relevance.  I’ve commented elsewhere on this myself, so it is sobering but timely to see this appearing in black and white in this report.

p40 The new learners and the old HEI structures currently co-existing, but for how much longer? One of the themes of this report that it keeps coming back to is that the learning styles and mores of school carry over into HE.  I don’t think personally I’m familiar enough with how secondary (or even primary) educators are training their students in terms of information literacy and ICT skills, let alone their approaches to study and learning.  I’m sure I’m not alone.  Perhaps that’s the key lesson I’m taking away from this report – a need to understand the adjacent educational realms more.  The stark phrase in the report “The next generation is unlikely to be so accommodating” – sent more than a few shivers down my spine.

This is a very readable report, with a lot of very interesting points made in it – if you do get the chance, I’d certainly advocate reading it yourself; don’t take my interpretations for gospel in any way!  Access the report directly here.

Librarians Information Literacy Annual Conference Cardiff ‘09

 I’ve just come back from an all too brief visit to the LILAC conference (Librarians Information Literacy Annual Conference) at Cardiff University.  Sadly I could only be there for a very short visit, but its still great to hear about everyones ideas and developments, and I came away with lots of ideas. 

 For those who either were or weren’t there, the #lilac09 Twitter stream has lots of interesting snippets and comments tweeted live during the sessions. 

There was a heck of a lot more I would have love to have heard and seen, however from my brief visit the following will stay with me:

• Andrew Walsh from Huddersfield University talked about how he has experimented with mobile phones during his information literacy sessions.  I absolutely love the idea of using mobiles during classes.  It can also feed into the ‘text a librarian’ service at Huddersfield (as a way of making sure they know about it).  I wondered what the benefits of using mobiles were compared to clickers, as most of the uses seemed to related to polling people.  It seems like clickers have less technical problems and problems with take-up.  There is something slightly more fun and personal about the idea of using phones though. 

 

• Patricia Iannuzzi emphasised how we must align ourselves with the percieved needs and trends of Higher education as set out in policy and government reports – so that its the influencial people and not us librarians saying information literacy is essential. 

 

• Leslie Burger gave an inspiring talk on how information literacy changes people lives, focusing in information literacy and digital citizenship from her background in public libraries.  This made me realise how the work of libraries in all sectors overlapp – public libraries have seen the students we later have in higher education, who then often will go back to public libraries.  It was also interesting to hear that public library membership is at a record high in the US (contrary to what you might expect). 

 

I also gave a paper ‘Using Web 2.0 to Cultivate Information Literacy within a Medical Ethics Course’ on the PLE project here at Leicester.  We ran simulataneous twitter debate – although in truth all the people there with laptops already seemed to be twittering, so perhaps there was no need to ask them to! Its interesting to see what people pick up on, in this case people picked up on the issues around getting students to comment on each others’ work for the blog and wiki during the project.  The reasons are partly that this particular set of students already comment face to face in their sessions, and also as they don’t like to be seen to be ‘criticising’ their colleagues.  We will be looking at this as we develop our resources.

Using a wiki and peer evaluation with 1st year medics

This is our second year of using a wiki in our session with 1st year medics ‘Finding the Evidence’.  The purpose of this session is to make sure that students understand both where to find and how to use resources that support evidence based medicine.  This exercise also aims to support the students as they embark on their 10,000 word dissertations where they follow a real patient for two years, looking at the the patients’ medical condition, treatment and their social context. 

We set the students a clinical question, for example, they may be asked if a particular drug helps a medical condition or what evidence there is to support a particular type of treatment (I don’t want to give away of our real questions here!).  

Before the training sessions the students are given an assignment which they complete in groups of 3.  In the wiki there is list of resources they have to search.  They have to record their search strategy (keywords and more detail if relevant), and what they find in answer to the clinical question. Then they have to write a conclusion based on all the evidence they have found, and make any observations about differences of opinion they find in the literature. 

The resources they search are: Clinical Knowledge Summaries; Intute; Medline; The Cochrane Library; and the British National Formulary.  This is to familiarise students with guidelines for physicians, prescribing doses, patient information, as well as the literature at the highest level of evidence and the more exploratory (but still peer reviewed) levels of research literature. 

When they arrive at the session the students are given some further background to evidence based medicine and are shown some extra tips on searching these tools.  We hope they actually take it in now they have used them the tools for themselves.  We discuss the ‘answer’ to the clinical question they were asked and give feedback to the students on their assignments.  Then the fun starts as they are asked to look at another wiki and enter comments on each others wikis, noting three things another group did differently to themselves.   I think this is quite eye-opening for them – to see that another group answering the same question using the same resources finds different results and emphasises different aspects of the question.  They should (and virtually all did in fact) find the same basic bottom line answer to the question, but there may be a few subtleties for example different situations where different treatments are applicable or where the evidence is unclear.  We also ask the students to say what they would do differently if they were going to do this exercise again.

We are still compiling our feedback from the sessions, but so far it it mostly good, and amazingly the students say they can see the point of the exercise.  I think in future we need to consider ways to focus the students’ comments more.  Some have put in alot of detail and constructive comments, others are more along the lines of  ’ours was better than yours’. 

Overall this is a good way to focus students on particular resources.  It is also very specific to a particular question and plugs straight into resources they are going to be using for their dissertations (or they should be using).

Selina has also used a wiki with the computer scientists if you want to compare notes and outcomes.  Interestingly different groups of students have different characteristics as a whole. This type of exercise may be working for medics and computer sciencists, but would it work for others?  Perhaps its time we tried it.

EMALink seminar on Web 2.0 & information literacy

Yesterday I was a at a well attended and quite sparky EMALink event.  EMALink if you didn’t know is the East Midlands Association of Librarians, an informal events programme arranged by the universities within and between the East Midlands HEI universities, including a few unis who are perhaps on the friges of this region (e.g.Warwick).

The two chunks yesterday were a framing talk from Joanne Dunham and then a longer talk about her and Alan Cann’s work by Sarah Whittaker.  There was also a couple of group work exercises for us to get our teeth into; including planning the ideal information literacy training event’ and reflections on our own Web 2.0 experiences.

I wasn’t originally going to go along, thinking that being a bit clued up on Web 2.0, that I wouldn’t be able to take much away from the day (doubtless I’d have much to say as usual, so apologies to anyone who struggled to get a word in edge-ways over me!).  Actually I was dead wrong, as there were several brilliant ideas that people in my group talked about that I fully intend to steal…erm, re-purpose!

One solid output from the day was the suggestion that we ought to have a directory of sorts for all the Web 2.0 networking librarians in the region.  unfortunately once again my loud mouth/native enthusiasm resulted in myself being tasked with the job.  Not that I really minded!

And so I am proud to roll out the East Midlands Librarians Networking site – a directory for EM librarians to share their social networking IDs (or at least as many as they want to) and to help us forge some strong local routes of communication.  The site, such as it is, is here.

Information literacy at Staffordshire University (SUILCoP event)

I went over to University of Staffordshire on Wednesday to take part in one of their information literacy scholarly community events SUILCoP. It was a really worthwhile session and I was deeply privileged to take part. After a spot of networking with the senior librarians at Stafford the day kicked off with an introduction by Alison Pope (Staffordshire University). This was then followed by myself speaking about the practicalities of making and using videos for information literacy, along with my now streamlined scriptwriting for beginners 101 course. It’s a development of my highly regarded workshops from last year’s CoFHE/UC&R Conference. It was quite a packed and enthusiastic room at the start of the event and thankfully still was at the end. Hopefully all the folks there will go onto televisual greatness and continue to develop their scripts to fruition.

After my workshop Chris Wakeman (Centre for Professional Development, University of Staffordshire) spoke about information and its implications for contemporary facilitation methods in HE. Chris asked us to think about our perspective of information literacy (something that immediately made my mind go blank), something that he was coming at from a practitioner’s point of view. He mentioned paper by Bruce Edwards & Larson on information literacy that defines the topic. Chris suggested that he was going to focus on information literacy as dialogue between two people – to consider modern facilitation methods in higher education and to ponder how information literacy skills may influence ultimate success of failure for students. He looked at dialectic (including Socratic dialogue) and teaching by asking/discussion (assuming students bring with them a knowledge base) teaching. There is also enquiry based learning that covers a whole range of other techniques including cognitive problem solving and Webquests (a technique now used in modern schools). People discussed what they thought information literacy was – a variety of concepts were aired and I was very impressed by the deep level of scholastic thought demonstrated by those present.

Chris described himself as a social constructivist in terms of IL, which wasn’t a term I was overly familiar with; which didn’t help with my following of his talk. Glancing at the faces in the rest of the room I sensed I wasn’t alone in this. Chris’ talk was at a very high level, considerably more academic than I’ve come to expect for a workshop session. Whilst it is good to be pushed sometimes, unfortunately there was just far too much to take in, and delivered at a pace and professional lexicon that didn’t help the audience to pick up the threads.

I did later have the opportunity to read a paper on constructivist learning (or at least skim through it while he talked) and discovered that it is the concept that “humans can understand only what they have themselves constructed” – and involves the learner learning through developing their own problem solving techniques and solutions. This helped a little in following the session, but obviously whilst reading it Chris had bounded onwards to talk about more exotic concepts and definitions of IL.

He provided various definitions of information literacy, including the Australia & New Zealand Literacy Framework ANZILF one which defines IL in terms of people whom are information literate and skills and aptitudes they display. The idea that an IL citizen “used information and knowledge for participative citizenship and social responsibility”; was at least an interesting concept. Even more important was the idea that IL is embedded within teaching and skills delivery rather than being taught as a separate skill. There was a nice juicy algebraic problem on Chris’ slides, which I ended up solving in a minute or two for personal satisfaction, though as he explained this would have been previously taught by showing the solutions, which means only about 20-40% of people would have learned it. For enquiry based learning the learner would experiment with solving it themselves, which should ensure their memory of the learning experience would be much stronger.

Next he talked more about Webquests and explained how students enjoy this sort of activity, though it is very much one that cannot be run in a single session; rather it is one that takes place over a period of time. They sound a very attractive approach, but I can see some significant practical difficulties with the way teaching sessions at UoL I’m involved in applying them. I think as he talked about how they could be used over a course stretching over a term, this rather illustrated just how little Chris understood about the environment and opportunists that librarians have to teach in. To have the luxury of more than a single hour on a module is rare and hard won treat, and much as I would welcome the opportunity myself to make use of this kind of training strategy, none of my current departments are set up to embrace it. There is clearly a long way to go for academics themselves in understanding the importance of information literacy and the vital importance of ensuring sessions from librarians are not seen simply as box ticking skills sessions.

Indeed the audience politely made the point that Chris’ POV of the traditional librarian was somewhat blinkered, and didn’t encompass the wealth of what modern librarians teach. Personally I think the truth lies somewhere between the two points of view.

Chris followed the session up with a somewhat bewildering workshop exercise matching training styles to statements. Frankly since he’d pitched the whole session at the wrong level for the audience the room was filled with baffled faces, I think if he’d cut his lecture down to about half the length, and tried not to go for information overload (as I’d warned against earlier in the day) and given us a good half an hour on the exercise, that the participants wouldn’t have been able to work through it using their own learning and problem solving styles. As it was in the time allotted there was little our group could establish in coherent form, or take from the work. This was a pity as correctly pitched Chris had a lot to say that was of interest.

So whilst this might have been a slightly odd counterpoint to my advocacy and communication session, it did give me plenty to mull over and consider on the long drive back home. If you get the chance to attend one of the future SUILCoP sessions, I can highly recommend them as they are pitched at a higher level than most EMALink sessions I’ve attended.

Digital Britain – governmental interim report from DCMS

On 29 January 2009 the Government published a plan to secure Britain’s place at the forefront of the global digital economy. The interim report contains more than 20 recommendations, including specific proposals on:

• next generation networks
• universal access to broadband
• the creation of a second public service provider of scale
• the modernisation of wireless radio spectrum holdings
• a digital future for radio
• a new deal for digital content rights
• enhancing the digital delivery of public services

You can read the report here (and yes there is a executive summary if you don’t feel like wading through the whole report – I know it’s a bit much for a Monday morning for me!)  Obviously, aside from libraries being under the DCMS’ umbrella, how the rest of the country are interacting with the digital society before they come to us will have a signicant impact on how and what they teach us.  This set me thinking that personally I’ve long since thought that the age of pure skills teaching (“this is how you search”) style of library educational activity is dying away; perhaps not totally but no longer as a core activity.  What we need to be teaching more is how to critically evaluate material (“Okay, why is that a good resource?”) as well as understanding your own informational search style.  Let me expand on this (and go slightly off on a tangent from the report)

Sadly this isn’t the sort of thing that can be taught standing at the front of a class of 100+ students running through a demo.  It’s a more interrogative and iterative style of teaching; something that requires all the more that user education from us is embedded within the curriculum rather than bolted on.  Are we equipped to teach this sort of thing?  Personally I’d argue yes; most librarian trainers I know are more than capable of; we just need to find the right in with departments (and I’m talking globally here, not particularly at Leics).  So how do we achieve this?

A discussion we had in the office last week was along the lines of “Should information librarians be effectively departmental staff first rather than library staff first?”.  I know some places embed their librarians actually within departments, rather than basing them in the library; from memory Australia is especially good at this.  Being within the department, physically and strategically would have the knock on advantages of keeping us as librarians better informed of what departmental needs and challenges are, getting us closer to our user communities and ensuring that when it comes time to turn to people to set up courses – well we’re close at hand and embedded from day one.

After all, just how beneficial is it for us to be based in a central building these days?  But I digress.  Doubtless there are examples of this kind of practise out there already; and perhaps we need to be paying closer attention to them to cope with the Digital Britain of tomorrow!

EMALINK event on the changing undergrad library environment

Here’s a round-up of the EMALINK event I attended on the 18th Feb 2009 at the Pilkington Library, Loughborough University.

Sally Patalong highlighted some of the points made by the 2008 Ciber Briefing paper and talked about some of the technologies they’ve used with students at Coventry University.

• The briefing paper highlighted that students will be “power browsers” and have worryingly low levels of information literacy.
• Sally thought that VLEs are teacher-centred as they emphasise tracking and automation.
• Research conducted at Coventry have shown that students want: smaller groups, more contact time, new experiences, independence, resources, support, qualifications, group work, friends, fun, a social life and to be inspired.
• Some of the technologies being used at Coventry that are more student-centred include voice tools (e.g. wimba) to record feedback and email it to students, Echi360 to record lectures and have them uploaded to web and video conferencing with distance learners.
• Sally suggested that institutions needs to move away from all controlling environments (such as VLEs) and use the existing technologies available out there.
• She finished by asking if we still need University Libraries to deliver resources and answered YES. Especially for (as one of her students put it) the “friendly staffs and helpful advices”.

The second talk of the day was from Jo Bryant who did her dissertation on the Open3 library learning spaceat the Pilkington Library. Some of the things Jo highlighted were:

• New innovations in library learning spaces such as sykpe phones being made available Dublin City University Library and inflatable “pods” at Glasgow Caledonian University.
• For her dissertation she used ethnography techniques including observing students in the Open3 learning space 40 hours. Some of her observations were that:
• a lot of group work was taking place (of groups between 3-10 people)
• Whiteboards were popular
• Groups tended to gather around laptops rather than PCs
• Individual study was also happening despite the higher noise levels
• the students liked space to spread out and were quite territorial
• Liked being able to have food & drink – including ordering in pizza when the cafe closed!
• Liked social nature of space
• PCs near the entrance were used for quick visits (printing/email)
• Self-governing space – people tried not to interrupt others but would also not ask people to be quiet.
• Mostly used by undergrads
• the students were mainly using electronic resources rather than books but the study did take palce during the exam period.
• PCs were often logged in but left unattended
• After the study the space was expanded as it was so popular.

The event ended with some group discussions on what important things University Libraries should do in the future. Suggestions included:

• Being flexible in their use of space and the services/resources/technologies they offered and used.
• Asking the students what they wanted.
• Working with academics to improve student’s evaluation skills.
• Considered use of technology.
• Bringing services together in the library building adn ensuring it is an attractive environment to students

TAN: Web 2.0 & Information Literacy

Several of us from the library attended the Teaching Assessment Network presentation yesterday by Sarah Whittaker and Alan Cann.

The slides with an audio commentary for this session can be found in a previous post.

The session mainly consisted of a face to face and simultaneous twitter discussion about using Web 2.0 technologies in teaching, particularly with regards to information literacy skills.

I don’t have a particular problem twittering while listening/discussing issues face to face. However,  it wasn’t everyone’s cup of tea and some people had problems hearing the face verbal discussion due to the tapping of keyboards and/or concentrating on the online discussion due to the amount of tangential “twittering”.

Some of the interesting points I picked up in the room and online were:

• Web 2.0 tools used included a customised google search engine, wikis, and a pageflakes page for relevant journal links and RSS feeds. All bought together through the Blackboard VLE page for the course.
• As the students saw each other daily anyway there was very little interaction online.
• The custom search and the journal pages were very popular with the students.
• The tutor saw an improvement in the quality of resources used.
• suggests it’s best to integrate appropriate Web 2.0 info literacy tools within student courses.
• Academis staff were offered library sessions on RSS and social bookmarking but take up was low – they didn’t come because they didn’t know how it would be useful?
• The library needs to expand on our Web 2.0 knowledge and the support we offer – need web 2.0 evangelists?
• More emphasis on evaluation – less on searching?
• Issues to think about teaching: advanced google searching, specialist image/audio search engines, wikipedia, youtube as reference tool, RSS, blogs/blog searching, citing new types of resources and copyright/creative commons.

Online Seminar: Web 2.0 and Information Literacy

During 2008 Alan Cann and I ran a UoL TEF funded project Using Web 2.0 to Cultivate Information Literacy via Construction of Personal Learning Environments.  On Wednesday 14th January 2009 between 12.30-2pm (GMT) we will be presenting a live TAN session in which we will outline the project and its main outcomes. Most of the session will be a discussion of how information literacy can be developed across the University.

If you would like to attend this seminar, please email the UoL Staff Development Centre on  staffdev@le.ac.uk

Additionally, we will be conducting a live Twitter session at this event. If you would like join as a remote participant, the slides for the session are: