I must apologise for not blogging regularly, I fully intended to write up more detailed notes from LILAC, but events over took me. I have also found a series of great blog posts from our delegates who offer more insights than a member of the organising committee often finds possible.

One reason for being so busy is I have taken on several new projects and responsibilities recently. It is probably now old news, but a few weeks ago I agreed to take on the role of editor of the Journal of Information Literacy, following the surprise resignation of our previous editor, Susie Andretta in March. It’s a real honour to edit a journal which has built up an excellent reputation in the field and is an open access journal. I have been getting to grips with the journal management system and have been really grateful to Cathie Jackson our managing editor, for her work in steering the journal on a steady course during this period of transition. We have an issue coming out in June, but the first issue I really get my teeth into will be out in December.

My work on the ANCIL audit of undergraduate skills at LSE is continuing and we have made an online survey available to staff and graduate teaching assistants at LSE. I’m encouraging them to take part in an interview where possible, as we try to build up a picture of undergraduate skills at LSE and how far the ANCIL curriculum is being supported. I wrote a recent post on the New Curriculum blog last week summarising this work. Emma and I are also busy as the contributions to our forthcoming Facet book on Rethinking Information Literacy, roll in from the contributors. We met today to discuss the book and also prepare for a JISC RSC NorthWest Event we are presenting at next Tuesday in Stockport.

Finally my work with Nancy Graham to consider how we best share information literacy materials globally as OERs is moving on. We had over 100 responses to our survey that we distributed at LILAC and sent out on various email lists. We have submitted a paper to present at the UNESCO OER World Congress in Paris next month and Nancy hopes to be attending the International Conference on Media and Information Literacy for Knowledge Societies in Moscow in June! I’ll be presenting at CILIP UC&R at the same time, but of course I do get to go to Finland in August.

And finally I was pleased this morning to be invited by CONUL, the Irish consortium of research libraries - similar to SCONUL, to present at their annual seminar on information literacy in Dublin in June. It’s going to be a busy few months

I’ve been away for a week so just got round to writing a short report about LILAC 2012 which was from 11th-13th April. More to follow, but this is just a quick round up of what was an exciting and stimulating event.

This year’s conference at Glasgow Caledonian University was our most international conference to date, with over 120 of the 350 delegates coming from outside the UK - the US, Canada, Sweden and Norway had the highest number of delegates. LILAC has really gained recognition as an important event internationally, which is amazing considering the conference is just 8 years old. It was a bitter sweet event for me, as I knew at the outset it would be my last LILAC for a while. I decided it was time to take a break from conference organising. It really is a lot of hard work that goes into the 3 days of LILAC and the dedicated conference committee are all volunteers doing this on top of their day job.

So in brief, what were the highlights for me? Each of our three keynotes this year was truly inspiring - Megan Oakleaf from Syracuse University, Lord David Puttnam and Tara Brabazon. In each case I thought, how would the next keynote top the earlier one and they all left me reeling. The finale of the conference was a return keynote address from Tara Brabazon. Her digital dieting performance was quite incredible and I was disappointed to find out the event hadn’t been recorded as I would dearly love to relive it! But it was an honour to introduce Tara at this year’s conference and to have her join us for the entire 3 days. It was also great to announce that she will be returning to the UK very shortly to take up a position at the University of Bolton.

I chaired a wide range of sessions, and in two cases had to chair my own sessions, including a workshop on my ANCIL research with Emma Coonan and Katy Wrathall and a fun symposium with Peter Godwin and Jo Parker where I put forward my ‘information literacy is like a pizza’ thesis. It was great to catch up with old friends, including my project partner from DELILA, Nancy Graham. We launched a survey about sharing information literacy resources as OERs, which is some work we are doing on behalf of UNESCO and the CILIP Information Literacy Group. It was also great to catch up with friends from previous conferences and to welcome those attending LILAC for the first time. The social events were as ever a real treat, particularly the conference dinner at the Old Fruitmarket in Glasgow. Sheila Webber has done a great round up of some of the LILAC Blog posts. I will add further notes in due course but I have also got a range of photos - of mainly the social events online.

We awoke on Wednesday morning to a covering of snow in Leeds, which meant Emma, Helen and I only just got to our own workshop on time! We were first up the morning after the conference dinner, so were pleased to get a decent turn out for our session. It was really interesting to present ANCIL to a group of mainly learning developers, although we did have a few librarians in the room as well! We were interested in seeing if learning developers saw any gaps in curriculum as well as their more general reaction to whether it might be useful. We also got into quite a lengthy discussion about terminology - is information literacy the right term - it was clear that actually a lot of the time what we are talking about is learning.

After a really positive reaction to our curriculum we headed into the second keynote, from Paul Andrews, who is the Head of E-learning at the University of Newport. Paul looked a whole range of technologies that can help with logistics and admin - most were familiar to me - DropBox, Skype, Google docs and Google forms. However Join Me sounds useful for sharing your desktop (for example when supporting a member of staff remotely) and running online meetings. Paul also talked about how his team don’t have an administrator and use a variety of tools to ensure they work more efficiently as a team. Paul went on to talk about using technology to communicate and build a community of practice. He used a model from Microsoft of how a community of practice operates and suggested ALDinHE could use technology more efficiently than simply running a mailing list.

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Earlier this week I headed up to the University of Leeds for the annual conference of the Association of Learning Developers in Higher Education. Helen Webster, who worked on the second phase of the ANCIL work had suggested we put in a paper at this event and I am so pleased we did. The conference actually started on Monday, but I arrived in time to catch the very end of Helen Beetham’s keynote on Digital Literacy. From what I heard she was making a lot of sense, and Helen worked on the LLIDA project as well as carrying out the evaluation and synthesis for the JISC OER programme. She was talking about the problems students have of developing an online presence and how they use social networks such as academia.edu to rehearse being an academic.

The first workshop I attended was from the Skills@Leeds team, Helen Howard and Michelle Schneider, who were helping us not reinvent the wheel. Their website is impressive and we got some time in the workshop to explore the resources they have put together for academics to help them embed skills into the curriculum. They also have a wealth of resources for students and we had some really interesting discussions in small groups.

After lunch I attended a presentation by Bryony Ramsden from the University of Huddersfield, who is doing research on how space impacts on learning.  Bryony had worked on the Huddersfield library impact data study, which aims to link student attainment with library usage. Observation is going to be important in her research which is really an ethnographic study because how you actually measure learning is difficult. It’s also clear that we base library designs often on what people like, but just because they like a space, does it actually make it a better space for learning?

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My feet don’t have time to touch the ground at the moment, I am preparing presentations left right and centre. Tomorrow I am running a workshop with a colleague at Kings College London, Dr Stylianos Hatzipagos, who is also a fellow at the Centre for Distance Eduction like me. We are doing a lunchtime session on Finding and Evaluating Open Educational Resources. On Monday this week I was up in York - visiting the University of York and also York St John University. It was a great two days and as well as getting a chance to wander about the beautiful city of York in the sunshine, Maria and I also presented a lunchtime seminar about the work we are doing on the ANCIL audit at LSE. We also visited colleagues at YSJ to talk information literacy and get a tour of their learning centre, which has some great features such as a feedback wall! Another highlight was a visit to the King’s Manor library at York University, set in a Tudor building, which is just amazing and holds the collection for Archaeology, Medieval Studies and Eighteenth Century Studies.
Next week is going to be equally busy as I am attending the ALDinHE conference in Leeds, which is the learning developers conference. Again I will be presenting about ANCIL and of course the week after that is LILAC, when as well as being on the organising committee, I will be presenting a workshop. It’s going to be a busy start to April, but hopefully a lot of fun!

Last week I had a visitor from Chalmers University Library in Gothenberg staying for the week and based in CLT. Mauritza Jadefrid was awarded a scholarship from the Swedish Institute for Information Specialists to spend a week finding out about e-learning and information literacy at LSE, and so along with my colleague Maria Bell in the Library, we devised a week of activities for Mauritza. She observed a number of the classes we were teaching, attended various meetings, including a meeting to review our information literacy course in Moodle and we set up meetings with various colleagues at LSE. We also arranged for Mauritza to visit Imperial College, and we had some time for sightseeing and evenings out in various pubs of London!

I hope Mauritza enjoyed herself as much as we both did and I am looking forward to meeting up with her again at LILAC next month. We also benefited from hearing about the use of LibGuides at Chalmers, the compulsory information literacy courses for undergraduate students and the use of Summon for research discovery.

It struck me today that the work I did at Cambridge with Emma Coonan to develop ANCIL (A New Curriculum for Information Literacy) is an example of an open educational resource. We have put the curriculum into LSE Research Online, the DSpace at Cambridge but it could be shared in the new database, LSE Learning Resources Online or perhaps we should deposited in Jorum?

Several people have asked about using ANCIL and it is licensed under Creative Commons, Attribution, ShareAlike licence, which means you are free to use it and adapt it provided you give credit to Emma and I and you share your work under a CC Licence. It occurs to me that it would be great to get people to upload their work to a information literacy OER collection, so someone searching for our work can find all the various adaptations that might develop. Otherwise how will we know what people are doing with our work? We need some sort of bibliometrics for measuring the re-use of teaching materials, similar to the citation analysis we have for research.
There also must be a better way to organise information literacy OERs to improve their findability, and it’s something I have been exploring with my DELILA project partner, Nancy Graham, but also something we have been talking to UNESCO about. As a start Nancy is going to update the list of OERs on the Information Literacy website, but if anyone has any bright ideas about how we could harvest resources from a variety of sources to build some sort of virtual collection, then do get in touch with me. Surely there must be lots of ideas from the library community about how we could organise these materials?

Both these projects are occupying my mind at the moment, and so I have created two new web pages recently, one on the ANCIL audit at LSE and another on OERs. Any feedback or comments is very welcome!

This week is Open Education Week and its fitting that our Learning Resources Online collection got a make-over on Monday. I was really pleased to see the new banner we have added to brand the collection in a similar way to LSE’s two other repositories. It’s also worth highlighting a free workshop that I am running in a couple of weeks time, which still has a few places on it. Details are below and do contact the CDE if you wish to come along.

CDE workshop: Finding and Evaluating Open Educational Resources

Thursday 29 March 2012, 12pm-2pm.

Room G37, Senate House, University of London

Hosted by: Dr Jane Secker (Learning Technology Librarian, London School of Economics) and Dr Stylianos Hatzipanagos (Lecturer in Higher Education/Head of eLearning, King’s College London) . 

This is a reminder that spaces are still available for this workshop - a chance to find out more about open educational resources (OERs). CDE Fellows from London School of Economics (LSE), King’s College London (KCL) and the University of London will discuss recent work they have undertaken to develop and release OERs, including a CDE funded project at KCL and a JISC/HEA project at the LSE. The workshop will provide an overview of the challenges and issues of developing OERs, from scratch as well as converting/repurposing existing materials using the CORRE framework.

It will also be a chance to explore a range of OERs that might be useful in your teaching and discuss the challenges and opportunities that they present.  A large part of the seminar will be hands-on activities with laptops to explore Jorum and other places to find OERs in your own subject area and to evaluate these with a set of criteria.

To book a place at this free event please contact the CDE by email cde@london.ac.uk or phone 0207 8628404.  Lunch will be provided.

Twice in as many days someone has talked about the importance of being a reflective practitioner. Firstly my colleague Athina who decided to finally take the plunge and start a blog for recording thoughts about her master dissertation research as it progresses. And then today, while I was at the iSchool at the University of Sheffield in Pam McKinney’s lecture on teaching and learning support in libraries. I like to think I am a reflective practitioner, partly through writing on this blog, but also constantly reviewing what I do, discussing with colleagues and making changes to my teaching.

The lecture I gave today at the iSchool was part of the module on Academic Libraries and I was really pleased to be invited. I was given a brief, by Professor Sheila Corrall to talk about information literacy, e-learning and a little about my role at LSE and how I got there. It was quite a challenge in just 50 minutes and as ever I think I prepared too much content (too many slides) and didn’t show as many things as I would have liked. There was also not enough time for any discussion and I know, because Pam had some discussion in her session, that there was some interesting experience in information literacy teaching in the room.

One thing that struck me while talking was how some of the work I do seems to cause a tension. On the one hand I strive to help staff to use library resources in Moodle, create direct links to journal articles and e-books, encourage them to use our popular epack service to request scanned readings for their course. However, this works seems to have created a body of students who now find it difficult to know how to locate material without a direct link. So on the other side I am faced with the challenge of trying to encourage staff to embed information literacy into their course, to ensure our students do have the skills for learning.

But back to being a reflective practitioner. I hope the students today found the session useful and it gave them a insight into my role and the way librarians can work with other learning support staff. I also hope they were interested in the ANCIL work and it might encourage them to think of information literacy as a broader ambition, that contributes to social inclusion and is a basic human right.

Tomorrow sees the first in a series of new workshops we are running in CLT, in conjunction with the Library and LSE’s Legal and Compliance Team. The workshops are aimed at PhD students and researchers and ideally we hoped people might sign up for all three sessions which are held on a Tuesday lunchtime. The first session covers Freedom of Information requests - how to use them as a researcher, when not to use FOI and how to get the best response to requests. I am attending the session which is presented by Rachael Maguire, our FOI Officer.

Next week we have a workshop about Data Protection issues and what you need to know as a researcher. The week after is the final workshop covering copyright issues that concern researchers and PhD students. I will be running this workshop and it follows a short presentation I gave last week at the Research Students Consultative Forum. Since LSE now expects students to submit their thesis in electronic format and to put a copy in our open access repository LSE Thesis Online, copyright issues are becoming increasingly important. We had our first thesis which contained a significant amount of third party copyright in the form of over 100 photographs. As the student wanted to publish their thesis it was in their interest to get permission for inclusion of the photographs. But I am interested to see other theses that universities are making available do often contain third party images and some universities are using their take down policy. I hope the courses have good attendance and will report more on how they go.