Update on ANCIL at LSE

I returned to work fired up after the AldinHE and Lilac conferences and got stuck into trying to create a simple questionnaire for LSE staff based on the ANCIL strands. It was aimed at staff who might not have time to meet up for am interview. However the questions don’t translate very well into survey format as one in particular looked like a hugely off putting long list.

So building on the handouts we created for the conferences, I have tried to describe each strand of the curriculum concisely to find out if teachers feel they cover aspects in their own teaching either formally or informally, if they refer students elsewhere and if it is embedded in their curriculum or as a standalone session.

This week I also had the opportunity to take this to a forum of departmental tutors responsible for undergraduate students in each academic department at LSE. The forum is chaired by our Dean of Undergraduate Studies who I also had a chance to interview. She seemed to recognise the value of a curriculum such as ANCIL while stressing it must be embedded in the discipline to be meaningful to students! She also suggested immediately that we should be more ambitious saying this went beyond skills and was linked to how education needs to change in light of new technologies. Some of what she said reminded me of Lord Puttnam’s keynote at LILAC about us needing a digital pedagogy not to digitise the old pedagogy.

So what next? More interviews with staff next week and some student focus groups I hope! We have also had questionnaire returned from most of the liaison librarians at LSE now, which is highlighting some interesting issues about the teaching and support they provide. I am now getting very excited and have also circulated the survey to our graduate teaching assistants at LSE! Watch this space.

Four seasons pizza

Yet another food metaphor for information literacy

We’ve been fairly quiet recently – paradoxically, it’s because there’s a lot going on in world of ANCIL! First up, Jane and Katy have been doing an audit of information literacy provision for undergraduates at LSE, using ANCIL to map current provision across the institution. The project is ongoing, and the researchers will be presenting their findings at the IFLA Satellite meeting in August 2012.

In addition, both Katy and Helen have new posts! Helen is working as a Research Associate in Digital Humanities and Transferable Skills Training at CRASSH, University of Cambridge. Meanwhile, Katy will be starting a new post at York St John in May as Academic Services Team Leader.

And finally, we’re just finishing up preparations for our two big conference appearances in April, at ALDinHE and LILAC. The New Curriculum research is (naturally) grounded in information literacy, but has been deeply influenced and enriched by the work of learning developers. We’re excited to have a chance to present our work to both professions, and to see how far each group will perceive connections and consonances between IL and LD – and then discuss whether we can build on them!

Ahead of the conferences, we’ve revised our 10-strand diagram (affectionately nicknamed “the pizza”) to better reflect the learning journey through information literacy as a continuum that ranges from functional skills through to behaviours and values around information.

The four learning bands radiate outwards from the learner at the centre. Starting with the development of practical skills, they expand through increasingly complex processes – establishing an evolving subject context within which to deploy the skills; high-level cognitive operations including critical evaluation, synthesis, and creating new knowledge – and culminate in the conscious, reflective framework that is key to managing one’s own learning.

So, four learning bands on a pizza-shaped diagram = four seasons pizza, right? In case you aren’t convinced, consider this: when you have pizza it’s a whole meal, created out of a blend of ingredients that complement one another – right down to the salad on top of ours. What could be more holistic? : )

ANCIL audit at LSE

I’m really excited to report that we have just started a project to carry out an audit at LSE of our learning support provision based on ANCIL. Even more exciting is that Katy Wrathall will be acting as a consultant on the project, using her experiences of auditing at York St Johns and University of Worcester during her Arcadia Fellowship. You can read more about Katy’s earlier work on the Implementing ANCIL wiki, where there are two case studies.

Working with me will be Maria Bell from the Library and my colleague Darren Moon from CLT. Of course we’ll be inviting many others to join us and will start with choosing two academics departments to review the information literacy provision at undergraduate course level. Katy is suggesting we use interviews to collect our data rather than a survey and where we can we hope to get the Academic Support Librarians to help out. The most exciting part is that Maria, Katy and I will be going to the IFLA Satellite meeting on information literacy in August this year, in Finland! We are still at the planning stage, but I will report more as this project gets underway. One thing we are keen to explore is how many of the ten strands of the ANCIL curriculum are embedded into undergraduate programmes, how many are offered as optional courses for students and whether there are any gaps. We have already decided that we will need to break down the strands to enable people to tell us if they really are teaching these competencies, so I will be doing some work on the ANCIL model to make it a little clearer and to unpack each of the strands.

Blue skies: a new definition of information literacy

Yesterday the full ANCIL team (Jane, Emma, Katy and Helen, with support from John) gave the first in our series of 2012 conference appearances We spoke at libraries@cambridge, the annual conference of – you got it – Cambridge libraries. Given that there are over 100 libraries in the University of Cambridge, this is a really useful opportunity to get together for updates, networking and CPD – and it was our chance to introduce the ANCIL research formally to my colleagues at Cambridge.

The session was brilliantly live-blogged by Lemurph - you can read her lively and entertaining write-up on the conference blog. For the first time we included our own (re)definition of information literacy. Previously we’ve focused on explaining the 10-strand model and the underlying characteristics that inform ANCIL, and have pointed to the wonderful UNESCO proclamation on information literacy as our working definition. However, our own definition seemed to go down well – and the principles behind it were picked up enthusiastically by an academic speaker later in the conference!

So please welcome the ANCIL definition of information literacy, which was unveiled, rather symbolically, at a conference entitled ‘Blue skies’:

ANCIL the movie is launched

Just before Christmas Emma, Katy, Helen and I were asked by John to star in a short video to publicise the work we had been doing on the new curriculum. We were all somewhat nervous about being plonked in front of a camera, but we rose to the occassion and the resulting video was launched on You Tube yesterday. John provided the introduction, and hopes to disseminate this video widely, particularly to university Vice-Chancellors. We are all meeting tomorrow evening for dinner, so I am sure we’ll be discussing strategies for spreading the word. Do add any comments or thoughts about the video and please share it widely!

Ongoing in 2012

A great start to the new year! We’ll be giving workshops about ANCIL at no fewer than four conferences in 2012. You can find me, Jane, Katy and Helen – or some combination of us – speaking at …

libraries@cambridge: “Blue skies: thinking and working in the cloud”

ALDinHE (Association of Learning Developers in Higher Education) “Learning Development in a digital age: emerging literacies and learning spaces”

LILAC (Librarians’ Information Literacy Annual Conference)

CILIP CoFHE and UC&R Joint Conference: “Great Expectations: what do students want and how do we deliver?”

We’ll also be giving the next in our series of workshops at Sheffield Hallam University on 24 January. Although the second phase of the project is now complete, it’s still all go …

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 1,300 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 22 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Information literacy for employers

On 12 December I attended an event at the University of West London called ‘Information as a Graduate Attribute: are employers getting a good deal?’. I was really keen to attend since Strand 10 of ANCIL deals with information literacy beyond academia, in the socio-economic aspects of daily life and also in the workplace.

Speakers included Ruth Stubbings of the CILIP Information Literacy Group, Jason Eyre of De Montfort University, and Joelle Fanghanel, Director of the INSTIL unit at UWL; it was an excellent and thought-provoking lineup. As well as good coffee (an element of primary importance) and excellent presentations, the event had a great deal to offer in terms of exchange of experience and workshopping/discussion opportunities. One significant element was lacking: UWL had tried to attract some local employers to come and give their views, but in the end it didn’t happen.  Perhaps this is because employers, like many other stakeholders, hold a narrow and reductivist view of information literacy as “some kind of library thing”, and can’t imagine what it might have to do with employability attributes … ?

This, of course, was the burning question of the day – and it goes back in many ways to how we market IL. The final speaker of the day, a senior Careers advisor, showed us a number of application forms from major companies and suggested one or two questions where she thought mentioning information literacy might be useful. She clearly struggled to understand why we kept saying  that information literacy underpinned the applicant’s response to every single question on every one of those forms.

Too often IL is perceived as a single, tickbox skill that can be put on the same level as teamwork, communication, problem-solving, or even time management and IT fluency – all those things that employers say they want. The problem is that IL simply can’t be isolated and reduced to a single skill. The ability to analyse the nature of a specific task in a given context and the capacity to frame an appropriate response, based on an informed and judicious use of relevant information, are not simple functional skills but complex intellectual operations.

Is the issue one of language or of education? Should we change what we call this all-important element, or educate the stakeholders who have such influence on our students’ careers to better understand what we mean by ‘information literacy’? When Jane and I ran our expert consultation as part of the ANCIL research, our interviewees were divided down the middle on whether to retain and rehabilitate the term or ditch it completely and find a different label that resonates better with faculty, employers, and students themselves. The problem is to find a label that succeeds in doing this without under-representing or over-simplifying the complex spectrum of skills, competences, and values that makes up information literacy.

Answers on a postcard, please …

Reflecting on Our Sheffield workshop

Today’s workshop was the first time the two former Fellows and the two current Fellows came together to run a workshop on our new curriculum. It was a chance to recognise and thank the University of Sheffield as four of our experts who took part in the expert consultation are based here. Sheffield have always been proactive and leaders in the information literacy field, partly due to the work of the University library but also because of the iSchool and Centre for Information Literacy Research. We invited a group from across the University to hear about our work but also to give the current fellows feedback on how the curriculum might work in practice at their institution. They had to consider who the stakeholders were, who might stand in the way of a more joined up approach and what other resources might be needed. It was a lively discussion following our presentation with some specific issues related to where learning development sits at Sheffield. It seems a real shame that CILASS, which has done such great work on information literacy and inquiry based learning has been disbanded. Perhaps today’s workshop might start a ball rolling to addressing this? I got an insight into who might champion the curriculum at LSE, who might stand in the way. I ended up concluding that a grass roots movement has a lot of merit, compared to a top down approach which without local support might soon fail. I also intend to do an audit to look at which aspects of the curriculum are covered in our undergraduate programmed and by whom. LSE100 clearly is intended to cover many of the skills, but the audit toolkit that Katy is developing should help me pin this down.

Travelling on the train I listened to an LSE podcast from Sherry Turkle at MIT on the concept of a digital dieting, privacy and new technologies. Aside from this being a great lecture I was struck by the realisation that despite working in new technology this was the first time I’d listened to an LSE podcast lecture on my iPad and what a wonderful thing this is. I fully intend to download many more lectures as I am discovering that I actually seem to learn better by listening (and talking of course!) than I do by just reading. I have become addicted to radio since being in Cambridge too. However I was struck by a lot of what Sherry said about the need to have time away from devices, such as meal times or when out walking. I wonder if actually this ‘digital diet’ is all part of information literacy too and where it fits in the new curriculum? It’s partly about managing information more broadly but also about the ethics too perhaps? Or am I stretching the definition too far now? I certainly took her point that kids needed to learn about acceptable behaviour with technology from their parents. So not texting while eating, or sending emails from the sofa when you are having a conversation. With that in mind I am going off line for a few days!

The ANCIL roadshow goes to Sheffield

On Thursday 10th November myself and Emma and the two new Arcadia Fellows, Helen Webster and Katy Wrathall are going to the iSchool at the University of Sheffield to give a workshop about our new curriculum. It will be the first time the four of us present together and we are following the format of the event in York a few weeks ago, so we can get some feedback from participants about how they think the curriculum might work in practice. This will be useful for Helen and Katy’s work, and really interesting for Emma and I. In the two most recent presentations we have done we have highlighted the recent Demos report, Truth, the Lies and the Internet, which while being about school age children, reflects the need for information literacy to be embedded into the curriculum at all levels. At Sheffield we have a mixture of staff from the iSchool attending, library students, library and other learning support staff and academics. Our presentation is on Slideshare but we look forward to reporting back on the event.