Blog winners

Congratulations to the winners of the tutors' "best team blog" award. We decided to award joint winners:

Team Q: Chloe Turner, Emily Wheeler, Yixuan Gao, Dongmei Han
http://teamqinf6350.blogspot.co.uk/

Team A: Roisin Cassidy, Jayne Drew, Catherine Hoodless, Lynsey Shenton
http://informationgroupa.blogspot.co.uk/

The criteria for judging were:
1. Sustained effort & team contribution
- contribution from whole team
- Minimum of a post on each of: team introduction; 7 Pillars; Information Universe; search tips; IL in context; Web 2.0

2. Are the posts relevant and interesting?

3. How good is the visual appearance of the blog? e.g.
- Can you read the text easily?
- Is it easy to find your way round the blog?
- Is the blog attractive to look at?
- Have they included visual elements?

4. Have the team used Blogger design & layout features? e.g.
- Have they included a list of links?
- Does it look like they have customised the blog layout?
- Have they included other Blogger widgets (e.g. page, followers, tag cloud, music)?

"Information Literacy in our future careers" poster winners

In week 11 we announced the results of the most popular poster at the Information Literacy in our future careers exhibition:
Winner:
Team M: Marc Muller, Brigette Lee, Foteini Karagianni, Chao Yu
An example of a comment on their poster was was: "Very creative approach - love the 'old-style cinema' theme and the black & white pics of the team! Integrated, clear, attractive poster". The poster is shown on the right.

Runners up:
Team L: Jin He, Chuxiong Zeng, Jie Zhang, Jun Zhang
Team A: Roisin Cassidy, Jayne Drew, Catherine Hoodless, Lynsey Shenton
The picture shows members of teams M, L and A after receiving their prizes.

Evaluation forms:
Random draw: Luqing Zheng
Best comments (special judges prize) Brigette Lee
The picture shows the two prize recipients

Congratulations to all the winners!

An international step forward for Information Literacy

The latest meeting of the UNESCO General Conference voted in favour of the draft resolution on Media and Information Literacy. The text of the draft resolution is here http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0022/002242/224273e.pdf and I blogged a bit more detail here: http://information-literacy.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/unesco-general-conference-endorses.html This short video shows the opening of the conference (with a good deal of clapping).

Teaching Information Literacy: some links

In week 9 you had a session from two of the librarians at Sheffield University: Vicky Grant, and Maria Mawson. Note that if this is a major interest for you, then the module Information Literacy Research will be relevant next semester.

There are a huge number of articles and resources about teaching information literacy, for those that are interested in this topic. A few examples are:

- This site, which has material from a project about a "New Curriculum" for Information Literacy: http://newcurriculum.wordpress.com/

- A "toolkit" developed by the London-based Clinical Librarians and Information Skills Trainers http://www.londonlinks.nhs.uk/groups/clinical-librarians-information-skills-trainers-group/trainers-toolkit

- Cardiff University's Handbook for Information Literacy Teaching http://www.cf.ac.uk/insrv/educationandtraining/infolit/hilt/index.html

- Wilson, C. et al. (2011) Media and Information Literacy Curriculum for Teachers. Paris: UNESCO. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0019/001929/192971e.pdf

- A number of the presentations from the 2013 LILAC (information literacy) conference: http://www.lilacconference.com/WP/past-conferences/lilac-2013/

- Presentations from the main USA conference on information literacy, LOEX (2013): http://www.loexconference.org/2013/sessions.html

- The Peer-Reviewed Instructional Materials Online Database http://www.ala.org/acrl/aboutacrl/directoryofleadership/sections/is/iswebsite/projpubs/primo

Evaluating an article: Preparation for week 11

Individual assignment: a task for next week (week 11, 10 December)

You need to bring along an article which is relevant to you negotiated assignment topic. This article must be a research article i.e. it must contain a report of original research (so it should describe the research aims or question, the research methods, and findings and conclusions). You should have read the article beforehand. In class you will be evaluating the article.
You can increase your chances of finding a research article by e.g.
- Searching a source which contains large numbers of them (e.g. Emerald Library; Google Scholar; LISA)
- Using search features that restrict your search to research articles (e.g. on LISA you can just search for articles in “scholarly journals”; on Emerald you can search for “article type: Research paper” (a pull-down menu on the Advanced Search page)
- Where there is no such feature (e.g. on Google Scholar) adding words like “methodology” and “references” to your search(see example below)

You also may want to look at the optional reading for next week:
Booth, A. and Brice, A., eds. (2004) Evidence-Based Practice for Information Professionals: A Handbook. London: Facet.
Chapter 9, ‘Appraising the evidence’ is available online at
http://www.facetpublishing.co.uk/downloads/file/sample_chapters/481.pdf

Searching the Emerald Journal collection

I produced a 5 minute video about using advanced search on Emerald Insight (journal article collection which is strong in information and management/ marketing topics). The Emerald collection is at http://www.emeraldinsight.com/ (log into MUSE before searching)

Another excellent powerpoint from Karen Blakeman

This focuses on alternatives to Google, and as usual is very up to date and useful

Google and Beyond: NOT Google from Karen Blakeman