Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

On Monday I gave a talk on MOOCs, Information Literacy and the role of the librarian at Edinburgh university on. The abstract for this was "Sheila Webber will start by briefly outlining some general characteristics of MOOCs and her own experience with them. She will go on to identify types of MOOC and the implications for MOOC pedagogy. As part of this discussion she will note some findings from an investigation into the value of learning analytics for MOOC educators (undertaken by Naomi Colhoun at Sheffield University in summer 2014). In the final part of her presentation she will reflect on the various roles that have been, or could be, adopted by librarians."

I was invited by KISK, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, to give a workshop to Masters students and a presentation as part of their Expert series. This is the presentation I gave on 27 November 2014. I will post my presentation for the Masters students on Monday. My abstract for my Expert talk was that I "argue that there is no need to invent a new literacy, just because people are making increasing use of digital media. Sheila outlines her perspective of a holistic information literacy that takes account of the blended information behaviour of today's citizens, sourcing information digitally, in print and through people and the environment

I just finished chairing a 90 minute panel on Relating research and practice in Information Literacy, which started with presentations by me, Bill Johnston, Louise Limberg, and Ola Pilerot and then had some time for discussion and questions. The presentations (in one document) are embedded below. Afterwards there were interesting points raised by the audience, mentioning barriers such as language (i.e. research being in different languages) and suggesting further studies such as investigating teh experience of people who were successfully conducting research in a practitioner context.

Purdue University has a number of sets of material that they have developed to teach data information literacy in different subject areas. "Each of the DIL case studies includes a description of the educational program and any accompanying supporting materials such as syllabi, lesson plans, rubrics, exercises or other learning objects.

This is the presentation part of the workshop I carried out with the students. In fact there is really more emphasis on thinking about library and information professionals roles in MOOCs than specifically "information literacy", but obviously developing or supporting information literacy in MOOCs are key activities for librarians. I start by talking about types of MOOC, and discuss pedagogy a little, and then provide some examples of possible LIS roles.

The latest PRIMO (Peer-Reviewed Instructional Materials Online) Site of the Month is Research Tracker produced by Jacalyn Kremer and Wit Messangnil (Fairfield University, USA). This site "gives students a framework by which to navigate the complex stages of research and writing and avoid last-minute research panic. This flexible tool can be used in conjunction with face-to-face instruction, in the online learning environment, or independently.

[Available at: http://librarybestbets.fairfield.edu/researchtracker ]

I did some more scanning through tweets from the LOEX conference (which is just finishing), and found a couple of interesting links: