This provides a great example for the topic of a seminar I attended yesterday evening, Social media: re-conceptualising information literacy. This seminar was led by Professor Helen Partridge, a librarian-turned-academic from Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane. She is currently halfway through a six month sabbatical at the Oxford Internet Institute and her research is looking at people's information practices within social media. Slides can be found on slideshare. As her research is just at the beginning stages, the seminar involved Helen asking questions and the group sharing their thoughts and, quite often, posing more questions. Helen said that she sees social media and mobile technologies as going hand in hand and that she has always thought of information literacy has being a social concept. Some of the questions/issues raised included:
- Is social media sociable?
- Differences between the various literacies: information, media, digital, trans, meta, etc.
- IL more significant than ever before
- How we conceive information
- Process - how we would like users to behave vs how they want to behave
- Role of IL educators - changing relationship with users now they are content creators
The seminar was my second IL event in the space of a week, as last Thursday I participated in my first ever webinar, IL and the Oprah effect, hosted by Peter Ciuffetti from Credo Reference. It was quite exciting to participate in something with librarians from all over the world. I was impressed with the interactivity involved, including quick polls. Peter's presentation looked at how we could get marketing IL inspiration from phenomena such as the Oprah effect on sales of products featured on her show and the Harry Potter effect on increasing fiction literacy levels of young people. The main issue is that measuring IL is more tricky and we have to rely more on anecdotal evidence. A couple of ideas/thoughts I took away from the webinar were:
- Which web pages are students looking at? i.e. where is it best to advertise IL sessions? Homepage? Portal login? Library pages? What are the restrictions to using these pages?
- Using Google ad words can be a cost effective way to create an impression on students. You can set it up so when certain keywords are searched, your ad appears. The more specific the better. You add a certain amount of credit to the account but money is deducted only when someone clicks on the link. However, getting the searcher to click is not the intention, merely just being on the page places your service into the searchers mind. Cheap way of promoting.
- Who do students listen to? Their peers! By getting students on board and encouraging them to promote IL training, the battle's almost won. A peer mentor scheme has been tried at Brigham Young University.
Next week is a big week in the UK's IL calendar because the Librarians Information Literacy Annual Conference (LILAC) is taking place at the British Library. I attended LILAC last year and was so inspired that I applied to be marketing officer for the group that runs it (the Information Literacy Group). LILAC has therefore been in my mind for some months now as I've been busy getting promotional materials ready in time. Unfortunately, I'm not able to attend this year as on Thursday I'm heading off to Barcelona for a week. Some of my colleagues will be going to LILAC though so I look forward to hearing about it when I get back.
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