The Best of Times

School of Education and
 Communication, Jönköping University

I had a wonderful time in Sweden last week, which began at Jönköping University, where the Phenomenography and Variation Theory Conference (SIG 9) of the European Association of Research for Instruction and Learning (EARLI) was held. I presented the first morning with another doctoral candidate, Christine Yates, from Queensland University of Technology (QUT). Christine  presented the initial findings from her study of health information literacy of aging adults in Australia. I presented on the findings from my pilot (paper on this to hopefully be out soon), and my use of the methods to examine information use as part of overall learning. Christine is a full-time student at QUT in Brisbane AUS, and of course, I am in the Gateway (distance) part of the program, so we had never met. Our presentations both went off successfully and we had an interesting discussion after each. It was exciting, of course, to discuss my work with notable phenomenographers. 

End of Year Musings!

I have been thinking about where I want my scholarship to take me (and hopefully others) over time. I see two strands emerging. The first, which I have described in some detail on this blog, is to investigate how higher education students learn to use information in context (informed learning). The second, which I am just beginning to consider, is the evolving role of librarians. This seems like such an exciting area of investigation! My musing (still forming) questions so far have had to do with the construction of the identity of librarians as teachers. But that may be just the beginning. The real question, I suppose, is what is the role of librarians in making informed learning happen?

The Information Literate University - Inspiring Workshop @ Augustana

I just got back from the wonderful Augustana Information Literacy Workshop held at the Augustana campus of the University of Alberta in Camrose, Canada. There were three great things about the event for me:http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif







Entrance to the library at Augustana with poster of previous workshops.



1) I got to meet Bill Johnston and Sheila Webber (Sheila's well-known IL Weblog), the research team from Britain who conducted a major phenomenographic study of how UK academics understand information literacy and information literacy pedagogy.









Sheila Webber



2) I learned a lot from Bill and Sheila's discussion of what they call the "information literate university." In the morning they outlined this concept and introduced the idea of information literacy as a discipline (read their article cited below for more information), and then in the afternoon they had the attendees map our own institutions' progress in moving from embryonic, or intermediate information literacy programming towards becoming an information literate university.








Bill Johnston told the group we need to "Think Big."


3) The third thing that made the Augustana Workshop so wonderful was the thoughtful arrangements of Nancy Goebel and all the staff at Augustana. Aside from just hosting the workshop each year (a major contribution to the information literacy scholarly conversation), they were so incredibly welcoming and made everything really easy. One small example of their thoughtfulness was the cookie I was given as I checked into my hotel that had the workshop information wrapped around it! A tasty way to convey workshop details! Go Augustana.

Johnston, B. and Webber, S. (2005). As we may think: Information literacy as a discipline for the information age. Reserach Strategies, 20(3), 108-121.
Webber, S. and Johnston, B. (2006). Working towards the information literate university. In G. Walton and A. Pope (Eds.), Information literacy: Recognizing the need. Oxford: Chandos, pp. 47-58.