This is a write-up of sessions I attended on the first day of LILAC, the Librarians Information Literacy Annual Conference, on Monday 30th March 2009, back in the days before I had a blog. For more information about what information literacy is, see yesterday’s blog post.
I have to comment first of all that the conference was very well organized, as I guess you’d expect from librarians! There were arrows leading from the nearest Cardiff railway station to the conference venue, a table in the main foyer with conference handouts which was staffed at all times by friendly and helpful people, and even a cloakroom for storing bags. All session rooms had signs pinned to them with the time and name of sessions, which was very useful! The food was nice, and there was even a packed lunch for delegates as they left after the final morning of the three day conference.
The opening keynote was from Melissa Highton, someone I met when I worked in e-learning, which marks the first time I’ve known a keynote speaker! (I thought it was best I declare a bias before summarising her talk!) She now has the impressive title of Head of Learning Technologies at Oxford University, and gave an interesting presentation, coloured by her experiences at Oxford, and very much of the moment.
Melissa spoke of the profusion of different terms, such as information literacy, media literacy and digital literacy, and urged us to consider how the different concepts overlapped. As a librarian, the message I take from this is to be aware that our users may need help and guidance steering through a wide variety of web 2.0 technologies and different forms of information (books, websites, electronic resources, podcasts, videos and vodcasts, social networking sites, and so on). Melissa’s talk was entitled “Managing Your Flamingo” and opened with a picture of Alice in Wonderland struggling to play croquet with a flamingo mallet, which illustrated the difficulty of managing information in an ever changing world.
She covered a wide range of topics, including the peer review process (academics reading and approving each other’s work for publication in journals and books), and how it can sometimes be so slow that ideas have changed by the time the work is published; the need to consider the role of information literacy in a recession; the necessity of supporting not just international students but also international staff with plagiarism issues (using the work of others without referencing it properly), as other countries often have different practices to the UK education system (something I’d also learnt about recently at a workshop I attended at my own University on supporting people from culturally diverse backgrounds).
Melissa directed us to the Oxford podcasts, a selection of Oxford lectures on itunes, which are very popular. I have missed feelings about podcasts; it’s great to make some lectures available for people to listen to, but people with hearing impairments are unable to listen to podcasts, so cannot access them unless there are text transcripts; and personally, I prefer to skim read information rather than listen to it, so I think text versions are important to provide both for deaf people and for reasons of personal preference too. Questioners at the end of the session also had some issues with podcasts, namely the issue of academics being happy to share their work.
The podcasts were part of a section where Melissa talked about open educational resources, which are very much in vogue at the moment, and are all about people creating and sharing educational materials. Again, this has advantages, but I can also see why not all teachers and lecturers would necessarily want to share their work and their style of teaching with others.
I enjoyed Melissa’s presentation, it was upbeat, intelligent, and very much rooted in current and emerging practices in e-learning, ICT and librarianship within higher education, and the need for librarians to keep abreast of developments.
Melissa heads the Learning Technologies Group at Oxford.
