Feedback on each others' Team blogs

Today we want you to start by looking at your partner team's blog and giving them some feedback. Aim to give at least:
- one comment which highlights something good about their blog
- one comment which points out a way they could improve their blog.
We will give you a little time to examine your partner team's blog, and note your comments. Then we will ask you to give each other feedback.

Later in the semester (about week 10) the tutors will be announcing the "best team blog". This was the post that announced the 2012 best team blog: http://inf6350-2012.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/team-blog-winners-congrats-to-team-a.html

Today, please consider the following points, which are similar to the ones the tutors will consider when judging the best team blog:

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 (pictures or videos), where appropriate, in the posts?

Have the team used Blogger design and layout features? e.g.
- Have they included a list of of links?
- Does it look like they have customised the blog layout to make it distinctive?
- Have they included other Blogger widgets (e.g. text box, followers, tag cloud)?

How much have they blogged?
- Have they done at least an introductory post, a post on the 7 Pillars, and posts on the Information Universe?
- Are the posts relevant and interesting?
- Has the whole team contributed to the blog, or do the posts seem just to be done by one person?
*Note with this section, please consider that some people are "beginner" bloggers, whilst others are more experienced. At this stage we do not expect perfect posts, but still we hope for the basic number of posts, and for more than one person to have blogged, so everyone gets a chance to learn blogging*


This is connected with the Present pillar of the SCONUL 7 Pillars of Information Literacy.

Information Literacy month in the USA!

It is Information Literacy month in the USA.The USA's National Forum on Information Literacy got Barack Obama to endorse the first IL month, and they also have a campaign for USA States to sign up for the month. This is the page for this year: http://infolit.org/october-2013-national-information-literacy-awareness-month/
The image is a direct link to the image on the NFIL website, courtesy of NFIL.

Week 3 preparation: Information Universe

In either week 3 or week 4, you will have a session on The Information Universe with Sheila or Nigel. This class will focus on Information Resources. Understanding the different types of information resources and their relationships will help you to use information in your assessed coursework.

The preparation for the information universe session is as follows:

1. Think about a time when you needed to find information – for yourself or for others (for example, for a course assignment or a library enquiry). Make notes on the kinds of information that you used in that particular search.

2. Review your notes and identify the different types of reference resources or sources of information found. (By types of resources, we mean categories of material – such as “blog”, “directory”, “report” or “textbook” – not specific titles.)

This is not a competition, so you can discuss it among yourselves if you wish, but you must produce your own list of types of information resources. You can use your own words to describe the types of resource; there is not one particular list of types we want you to use.

3. Please post your list as an individual entry on your team blog, by the end of Monday, 14th October. As you are doing this outside class time, you may prefer for each person to post separately. However, each person should be posting to the team blog.

We shall be looking at examples from different blogs in the class. If you look on the main blog you will see there are links to a couple of examples from last year.

Ask Sheila Webber for help, if you are not sure how to post things to your blog. Sheila will be in the Regent Court lab RC-205 4.15-5pm on Monday 14th October for any last minute help with blog postings. There will also be time to look at team blogs in the week 3 session.

Here are a few examples from previous years. Your blog post does not have to be as long as these, but it gives you an idea of what we have in mind:
- From Chao Sun in 2012: http://ilteamq.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/preparation-of-thing-5-chao-sun.html
- From Anna in 2012 http://the-part-timers.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/the-information-universe.html
- Tseng Peng Chun in 2012 http://inf3650teamb.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/my-information-universe-tseng.html
Note - we want your own example of finding information, do not use anyone else's ;-)

Team blogs are all linked!

I just added all the links to your team blogs: the list of links is on the right of this page.

Information Literacy and the SCONUL 7 Pillars

The SCONUL 7 Pillars model of Information Literacy gives you a framework for understanding areas of information handling that are important for academic study. The 7 Pillars model was first published in 1999, and it was revised in 2011. We will be using the revised version.

The SCONUL 7 Pillars model was developed by a group of British university librarians: SCONUL is the Society of College, National and University Libraries.

The document describing the pillars can be found here: http://www.sconul.ac.uk/sites/default/files/documents/coremodel.pdf

There is an Open Educational Resource that explains about the pillars and includes clickable diagrams of Pillars at http://repository.leedsmet.ac.uk/xerte_output/Sconul_7_Pillars/ (produced by Nick Sheppard)

Post about the 7 Pillars and your team
The purposes of this exercise are to get you familiar with the 7 Pillars, and to start thinking about your own information literacy, and also to get to know each other further as a team.

• Think individually 1) what is your strongest pillar? 2) What is your weakest pillar? 3) Can you think of a time when you were particularly information literate?
• As a team, share your strongest/weakest pillars.
• Write a team blog post on your blog. Discuss what you think are the team’s strongest Pillars and why (you don't have to mention your weakest pillars!), and give at least one example of being information literate.
• Add labels to your blog post and publish it

Blogs: what to do today

1. One member of each team should set up a blog using their Sheffield University identity (logging into MUSE, clicking Google Mail, then selecting More, then clicking on Blogger, then creating a blog).
At this point you may have to sign up for Blogger. Everyone in the team needs to sign up to Blogger, as once your team blog is set up, all team members have to be invited in as authors.

2. Firstly, invite in all the other member of the team, using their Sheffield University email address. This is on tab Settings, Basic, Permissions.

If there is someone who doesn’t have a Sheffield University email address, then use another Google-identity email for now. If they are using another email address, they will have to sign into that email account to accept the invitation and log on. When they respond, upgrade them to admin status so they can change features of the blog.

3. Secondly, email Sheila (s.webber@sheffield.ac.uk) or just tell Sheila, what the web address and name of your blog is, so she can link to it from this main blog.

4. Customise your team blog’s appearance (Template and Layout)

• Change the template first (Template tab)
• Change the background picture
• Try different typefaces and colours for the blog title, text etc.
• Note that if you change your template, you lose any changes you made in Layout, so decide on the template first. However, it is ok to make changes to the font etc. of your template at any time.
• In Layout arrange and add widgets
- - You must add a links gadget and include a link to this main Inf6350 blog, http://inf6350-2013.blogspot.co.uk/ and to the link of your partner team

- - If you have time add some more widgets e.g. a feed from another blog, a poll, features that allow people to subscribe to or follow your blog.
• If you have yet more time, add a page (by selecting Pages, New Page) saying a bit more about your team

5. Post to your blog.

• For your first group post, introduce yourselves
• For your second group post, find another blog you like, and write a couple of sentences about it, with a link

6. Label your posts, so that later on you can find all the posts on the same topic. You describe the subject of the post with words and phrases. Click on Labels (right of screen) and click done when you have finished.

Blogs: What are they and why blog?

Weblogs, or blogs, have some key characteristics:

• Blogs have posts which may contain text, links, pictures or embedded media. This (what you are reading) is a blog post.
• The posts are published one at a time, over a period of time.
• The blog entries are arranged in reverse chronological oder (most recent first)
• Blogs are often written by one person, but there are also collaborative blogs

If you are unfamiliar with blogs, you may want to watch this video: http://www.commoncraft.com/video/blogs

There are various kinds of blog, for example:

• Personal diaries
• Information or knowledge blogs (e.g. http://www.intranetfocus.com/blog, http://information-literacy.blogspot.com/)
• Corporate blogs (e.g. http://fastlane.gmblogs.com/)
• Opinion or issue-based blogs (e.g. http://www.voicesforthelibrary.org.uk/blog/)
• Educational blogs (e.g. the ones for this class)

Here are some articles, and one book, that explain why and how blogging is useful for business and in libraries:

• Cohen, H. (2013, January 20). Blogging ROI: 15 Ways Blogs Make Money [Web log post]. Retrieved 25 September 2013 from http://heidicohen.com/blogging-roi-15-ways-blogs-make-money/ (Short article from a consultant)
• Crosby, C. (2010) Effective blogging for libraries. London, England: Facet.
  
• Li, C. and Stromberg, C. (2007) The ROI of blogging. Retrieved 20 September 2013 from http://www.ieecho.com/pdfs/ROI-of-Blogging.pdf (A Forrester report on the Return on Investment of corporate blogging)
  
• Liao, Q. et al. (2011) Enterprise blogging in a global context: comparing Chinese and American practices. CSCW ’11 Proceedings of the ACM 2011 conference on Computer Supported Coperative Work, pp35-44. Retrieved 25 September 2013 from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1958824.1958831
  
• Potter, N. (2010) Everything you've ever wanted to know about library blogs and blogging! Retrieved 25 September 2013 from http://thewikiman.org/blog/?p=783 (Includes “thewikiman’s” seminar materials)
  
• Yardi, S. Golder, S. and Brzozowski, M. (2009). Blogging at work and the corporate attention economy. CHI '09 Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Human factors in computing systems ACM. Retrieved 20 September from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1519016

Blogging can also be a subject for your research. A number of Masters students in the Sheffield University iSchool have written Masters dissertations which include investigations of blogging e.g.

• Wang, J. (2011) Use of blogging, social networking sites and microblogging for knowledge sharing, focusing on Information Management students in group work. (Masters thesis, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom). Retrieved 29 September 2013 from http://dagda.shef.ac.uk/dispub/dissertations/2010-11/External/JWang_100220696.pdf
  
• Bullingham, L. (2010) What would Goffman think about furries?: Persona adoption and identity masking in blogs and second life. (Masters thesis, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom). Retrieved 29 September 2013 from http://dagda.shef.ac.uk/dispub/dissertations/2009-10/External/LBullingham_Bullingham_090125096.pdf
  
• Evans, I (2008) An evaluation of the user experiences of web 2.0 tools and technologies amongst NHS staff. (Masters thesis, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom). Retrieved 29 September 2013 from http://dagda.shef.ac.uk/dispub/dissertations/2007-08/External/Evans_Ingrid_MScHI.pdf
  
• Rigby, A. (2007) Looking for freedom: An exploration of the Iranian blogosphere. (Masters thesis, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom). Retrieved 29 September 2013 from http://dagda.shef.ac.uk/dispub/dissertations/2006-07/External/Rigby_Alexis_MALib.pdf

Please do add comments if you have examples of useful blogs, or want to say why you blog.