Several members of the CILIP Information Literacy Group Committee recently attended the European Conference on Information Literacy (ECIL) in Istanbul, Turkey. The conference’s main theme was Information Literacy, Media Literacy and Lifelong Learning, but a wide range of topics was covered during the four-day event.
Nancy Graham (IL Group Committee Chair) and Jane Secker (JIL editor) gave a presentation on Developing a community of practice for sharing IL resources as open educational resources.
Jane also gave a presentation with her colleague Maria Bell (London School of Economics and Political Science) on Developing digital and information literacies in LSE undergraduate students.
Jane also represented the IL Group in the panel discussion on RIDLs: a collective approach to Information Literacy in Higher Education Research. You can find more informationon the Research Information and Digital Literacies Coalition (RIDLs) on their homepage.
Andrew Walsh (IL Group Committee Secretary) led a session on Game based learning for Information Literacy instruction.
Some of the key ideas that the committee members took away from the conference included:
- Higher Education librarians have a role to play in preparing students for the transition from HE to work. This notion of librarians helping library users to move from one context to another can be applied across all sectors (from unemployment to work, work to retirement, etc.)
- We need to work more closely with academic/study skills experts on topics such as writing skills in order to address a number of the SCONUL Seven Pillars of Information Literacy (i.e. Evaluate, Manage, Present),
- We need to find out what our institutions’ learning outcomes are – this should be a baseline from which to measure our Information Literacy contribution
The committee members also made some good contacts with the Czech Republic Information Literacy Group, who are doing some great work on carrying out an annual survey of IL across universities in their country.
Jane has written a blog entry about the conference, and Andrew has also included some initial thoughts on the conference on his blog.
Sheila Webber’s Information Literacy blog also covers many of the conference sessions, including her own presentation on Information literate lives in the 21st Century: Sheila also provides some useful reflections on the keynotes by Christine Bruce and Paul Zurkowski.