Monday, June 27, 2016

Instructor perceptions of student information literacy

Next discussion: Thursday 21 July, 12-1pm BST

Article: Sandercock, P. (2016). Instructor perceptions of student information literacy: comparing international IL models to reality. Journal of Information Literacy, 10(1), 3–29. http://doi.org/10.11645/10.1.2065

Thank you to Pat for writing this introductory blog post and joining in our discussion. 
Pat Sandercock is the Instructional and Reference Librarian at the College of the North Atlantic-Qatar.  She teaches more than 400 students each year in classes that range from 6-12 students per class.  A librarian for almost 30 years, Pat joined the College 2 years ago on a 3 year contract.  The survey being discussed on July 21st was undertaken in the Fall semester of 2015 and written up for submission in November and December 2015 before it was published in the most recent issue of JIL.

How does this discussion work? 
Anyone can join this discussion!  Participants aim to read at least some of the article in advance, then come along at 12 noon BST and join in the discussion by adding comments to this blog post. You can see how this works by looking at previous discussions (just scroll down the blog for previous posts). 

On a campus with a revolving door of instructors, most ‘from industry’ rather than academic backgrounds, and a curriculum that implicitly favours one-shot information literacy classes, librarians at CNA-Q were facing an uphill battle.  The College of the North Atlantic-Qatar is a branch campus of a Canadian College located in Newfoundland, Canada’s eastern-most province.  CNA-Q was founded in Qatar just over a decade ago, promising western-style education and diplomas from accredited Canadian programs.  The problem was, that most of our students had never used a library, had never had a library in their public school system and confused us with the campus bookstore. And our one-shot lessons usually were sessions on how to use Ebsco or ProQuest databases….

The library’s target audience is a group of students in ‘Communications’ classes.  These classes are a requirement in all of the four Schools CNA-Q offers. Typically, each student does one written and one oral communication class each year in their program.  The written communication classes in the first year require students to find information about a company using their website and later in the semester a newspaper article about a company. In their second year written communications class, students must find 2 journal articles and one book on a chosen topic and summarize the findings.

But, there are huge hurdles for students in Qatar wanting a Canadian education.  Besides never having been exposed to libraries, websites are generally unreliable and out of date, newspapers are basically reprints of press releases which are riddled with grammatical errors.  Compound this with the small population of the country, there is a lack of both useful and credible information for students to use.

Consequently, none of us in the library were surprised by what we saw in the survey results.  They were entirely consistent with what has been seen in similar studies done in universities in the ‘western’ world.  We had expected the results to be poorer given the fundamental difference between 2-3 year college students and those on an academic path towards academic degrees.  We had also expected low results given that we work in an EFL environment and all our online content is in English.

Perhaps the most telling results were:

86% of instructors felt that students approached research assignments WITHOUT an information strategy.

 
Do you think you would get the same results at your academic institution?

17% of instructors felt students could not evaluate information for appropriate inclusion in assignments.


Do you think you would get the same results at your academic institution?

We in the library feel that this is a consequence of one-shot instruction (directed by a curriculum that assumes familiarity with libraries and information) and a failure to have a comprehensive ‘Student Success 101’ class with an IL component.

What would you do in this circumstance?

If we are ‘stuck’ with the curriculum we have, what would you do as the Instructional Librarian to affect positive change?

What would you do as the Library Manager to affect positive change?

I didn’t expect the results to be as positive given all the challenges our students face coping with a ‘western’ curriculum and all that encompasses.  Our instructors don’t actually ‘see’ how students choose journal articles like we in the library do.  Were our instructors jaded, un-informed, un-interested or complacent?

116 comments:

  1. The discussion will be beginning shortly. A quick recap on what to do:

    - Refresh the page often, to see the latest conversations

    - Use the "reply" link to reply to a particular comment, or use the "post a comment" box to start a new idea or question.

    We're looking forward to the discussion!

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    1. Forgot to introduce myself! I am the Department of Engineering Librarian at the University of Cambridge.

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  2. Hello! I teach at the Information School, University of Sheffield, and one of the co-organisers of this club with Niamh, and I'm also looking forward to the discussion starting shortly

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  3. Hello. I am currently a Subject Librarian at the University of the West of Scotland. I'm looking forward to joining the discussion!

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  4. Hi Paul - looking forward to seeing your questions/ comments.

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    1. Thanks, Patricia. It was an interesting article. Thanks for sharing.

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    2. Hi Pat, thanks for joining us and thanks so much both for your article and your blog post kicking off this discussion!

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  5. Hi everyone. I'm Assistant Liaison Librarian at Newcastle University and looking forward to discussion too.

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  6. Pat, should we start with the questions you set in your introduction? The first was:

    86% of instructors felt that students approached research assignments WITHOUT an information strategy. Do you think you would get the same results at your academic institution?

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    1. I certainly think that this is the case here in our first year. I, fortunately, have several sessions with the students in year one and can (slowly!) shape their practices.

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    2. I can't talk for other departments in the University, but (apart from the librarianship students!) I would say that a large number of our students come in without a real conception of an information strategy

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  7. Reading the article and also to answer the 2 questions posed above by Pat, I wouldn't be at all surprised if we didn't find similar results particularly for 1st/2nd year undergraduates. Of course it is very often subject dependent on how much students embrace information or digital literacy. Also whether the information literacy teaching is embedded into the module or not, which very often it isn't in higher education. What we find here at Newcastle is that when students are assessed on a particular aspect of what we teach them, e.g. referencing, they tend to focus more on getting it right. And having the support of the academic is really important too.

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    1. I'd agree with that, especially about the importance of academic support. It's really noticeable thatwhere our academics have prepped their students with how important and valuable it will be always seem to get more active engagement during the session, more follow-up drop-in sessions and far better feedback. That's just perception though.

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    2. Yes true. Also a lot depends on the 'transition' from school to college/university. We have a huge outreach programme here which helps local schools to bridge the gap. It is something that obviously isn't available in the college in Qatar.

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    3. Karen - we see the outreach programs at some of the Universities in Qatar. At some times, it's a semester long student success course.

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    4. That sounds great. Have you experience of students coming from these sorts of programmes to the technical college?

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  8. Before we all get going - I'll just note that it's 51C here today in Doha, so I'm balancing the water consumption and air conditioning. We don't have students attend the College during the summer so we are down to skeleton staff in our library. (most of us are on vacation right now)

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    1. Wow! And I was struggling with 30-32C here over the last few days...

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  9. Hi Pat - it seemed to me that you had a "double whammy" - the revolving door of teachers, as well as the students who were not well prepared in information literacy. In terms of the students I thought there was something in common with some of our students, even though they are Masters level, in that we only have them for 12 months and they are mostly educated outside the UK (particularly China). However the turnover and of staff seemed a big issue - apologies if you said this in the article, but do they have an induction or training programme when they join?

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    1. So yes - the students come very much from a rote learning culture where books and reading are not emphasised.
      That with a lack of pubic libraries makes it even more difficult

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    2. I wouild also say that with students from some cultures it isn't that they are incapable of critical thought, they may actually be thoughtful and critical, but they have not been encouraged to bring this to certain types of academic work, and also they may be used to concealing some of their critical thought in formal academic work

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    3. We have a lot of widening participation UK/home students who fit here. They might not have had the type of schooling that prepares them for university and will probably be the first person in their family to attend so they are not well prepared in information literacy either and need a lot of support.

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    4. Claire and Sheila - we share this challenge. Little attention is given to academic success here, especially in the form of critical thinking and challenging 'norms' in academe or society.

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    5. Same here, Claire. We are thinking of trying to partner with local colleges so that they teach to our IL framework. It'll be difficult, but hopefully the students will be more ready to study when they come through our doors.

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    6. Yes I think we have links with FE and partner colleges in the area but I'm not involved with that side so have little idea about what comes out of the link. It makes sense to do this though, sort of getting in early as it were.

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  10. Yes - 'getting it right' seems to be all they want.

    And unfortunately, we are doing one-shot instructional sessions. There is no bridging program or student success seminar.

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    1. Do you have, or able to have, resources embedded within the VLE that could help top-up the one-shots?

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    2. We encounter a somewhat similar situation here with our overseas campuses, for example we have a campus in Singapore and we only see the students here for a month during their whole programme. So we try to have as much contact with them while they are here (which is usually just 1 day!) and promote the virtual library service to make sure they keep in touch when they go back home.

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    3. We use a product from Credo - the Information Literacy Course Modules. I tend to think of them as my clone.

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    4. @Patricia do the Credo modules you allow any interaction between you and instructors?

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    5. They aren't too bad. Credo has willingly done a lot of customization for us as well. I remain as the administrator for the product and each of the learning objects are tied to the 'old' ACRL Standards

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  11. The staff orientation is quite basic. Mostly related to legal and cultural issues of living in the country.
    We in the library usually get new staff for about an hour session within the first month of their arrival.

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    1. Are those sessions one-to-one or in a group Pat? I'm aiming to have all new starters in for a short one-to-one with someone from my team. They're so valuable for raising awareness about the library doing more than just books, but it does take time...

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    2. Not very much contact! I wondered if there was any way of identifying new staff who might be interested in working on this aspect and somehow latching on to them

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    3. I note that your institution has a few corporate goals that indicate that a 'rounded' education is a key educational goal. I wonder how the staff (and senior staff) see IL in this rounded education?

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    4. Paul - we have a new VP academic who is quite interested. Others come rooted in an industry background and see little value, unfortunately

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    5. I agree, Sheila. This seems like a good approach to take - and one can build upon the good work with their successors.

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    6. I had a chance to meet with that new VP yesterday and was quite impressed. We may have more opportunity in the future.

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    7. We have found a way to follow-up with instructors who teach classes involving research-based assignments. However, we have some that seem to think they can do better than us! Worse - they haven't used the library themselves in years....

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    8. You might be fighting battles on all fronts with this suggestion, but I wonder whether senior leaders in the organisation see knowledge management as an issue with high staff turnover? If you could counter that as your foundation, you could then build IL and good practice on those foundations.

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    9. Do you have an intranet, or a KM system? (it would seem obvious when there is the turnover, to capture knowledge, but academic institutions usually seem rather rubbish at KM!)

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    10. Excellent suggestion. We are still trying to get an institutional repository going and have little success with archives, but KM might be the entre.

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  12. Hello all; apologies for joining the session quite late - IT were shadowing my PC for a pesky issue!

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  13. Thanks Niamh!
    Pat thanks for the fascinating article and blog post - I was wondering if ou find the hour long session for new staff sufficient?

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    1. Helen - the one hour sessions are just too short. We try to have further engagement throughout the remainder of the semester. I've honestly thought of teaching a class to instructors - a full blown IL class - but somehow I just know there would never be the time.

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  14. Hi, I'm an Academic Liaison Librarian at the University of Bedfordshire. I think its quite telling in your findings that 82% of instructors want students to have IL skills but only 35% of them specifically make room for them in their curriculum! I don't think I've ever come across a student who has come to see me who has already worked out a search strategy, maybe those who can get that far on their own don't think they need to see their librarian?

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    1. Hi Claire, thanks for coming along! That's a great question - I'd actually be surprised if someone did have a search strategy in place especially within the first year. I wonder if anyone has researched that particular angle in more detail yet?

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    2. Hi Claire, you are so right. Often we see students at PG level who've studied at undergraduate level (so we know we've taught them), and they've forgotten all about the skills, or didn't take them on board in the first place.

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    3. Hi Karen. I agree, it is difficult. I try my best to time IL interventions with assignments. That, and seeing students a few times a year, has slowly started to turn things around - but its certainly a frustration when I am trying to build skills, not keep re-teaching the same ones!

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    4. Some of those are our Postgrads without a strategy! But maybe they're overseas students, so encounter the issues already outlined. But it does seem if you can catch them as undergrads and they go on to PG they will come and utilise us more.

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    5. Yes and again it's often subject related. We rarely see engineers for individual help, but often get requests from arts, education and medical science I think.

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    6. I think it's particularly an issue when a student can get good enough marks repeatedly without having to engaged in a search strategy. Whilst discovery systems are a good thing on the whole, I think they might also encourage the idea that you don't need a strategy, typing words into the different boxes on the library scereen in turn will get you enough stuff (think I saw a paper that mentioned this this week...)

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    7. Yes Sheila - and as it turns out, many seem to still think the can find their best sources on the open web (Google).
      Our own discovery system seems to overwhelm college level students

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    8. Hi sorry posted a reply in the wrong area. But I agree we still get a lot using Google, if we're lucky GoogleScholar and I often get 3rd years who have never heard of our discovery system, I actually congratulate them for getting so far without it. But it is a worrying situation.

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    9. Agreed Claire. I am constantly and sadly disappointed when I first see students who are in their 3rd year and are just that day discovering the library. We know we could have helped them long before, but I suppose we do our best to take advantage of the moments we are given.

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    10. I do sometimes get some satisfaction as they mutter 'oh I wish I'd known about this years ago'. We are quite good at getting inductions and the odd session in throughout the year and the actual library building is a bit of a give away that we exist, so there isn't much excuse really.

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    11. Hi, I'm a part time FE librarian in Cambridgeshire, sorry I'm a bit late to the party, I was just wondering what sessions people have done with search strategies and if they have been successful/unsuccessful, thanks.

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    12. Hi Charmian, thanks for joining the session! We do sessions aimed at undergraduates and postgraduates that include search strategies. The feedback is generally good, although we have a regular problem with working out what level to pitch it at because some students tend to have done this sort of training before and know what they're doing while others don't. I'm also based in Cambridgeshire - I'm about to go on holiday, but if you'd find it useful to visit and see what sorts of things we do just let me know (nt311 at cam.ac.uk)

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  15. I started in my role as Faculty Librarian for Social Sciences in Maynooth Uni in March and I expected that the IL skills would have been much higher amongst post-grads. Like many of you I found many postgrads need help with building basic search strategies.

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    1. Interesting.... the research I did 'seemed' to indicate that as a student moved through their academic career, their skills would slowly improve over time.
      I did see too though that some areas of study - like mathematics and engineering - took longer to catch up. Maybe the humanities students are better???

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    2. Hi Helen, do you find a difference in different subject strands on the level of engagement?

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    3. Hi Pat, going by what I see in our department, I expect the issue is that those courses focuses far more on building core problem-solving and engineering knowledge in the first couple of years, so the first time many of them need to do 'academic research' is in their third year.

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    4. Hi - apart from many being international, also many of our students did not study their topics at undergrad level - e.g. they will be taking the Masters in Information Management and studies computing or management at UG level. This adds another layer of difficulty, gettinbg to grips with the information world of a different discipline

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    5. I'd say the interactions I had were tailing off in the run off up to exams when I started so I'd a limited enough number of 1-to-1 training sessions with postgrads by the tiem semester ended. I'll probably see more patterns emerge between different subjects in the coming months.....

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    6. Yes - funny how all the work happens near semester end. A worldwide phenomenon!

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  16. I'm a retired academic but with continuing interest in education in the widest sense. Following from Claire's comment; most academics do not know enough about 'information', hand over responsibilities to ICT staff and don't incorporate eg SCONUL ideas in assessing student work. OK thats a bold statment but whenever I have put this to library staff then tend to agree. Do you?

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    1. Hi Brian, I suppose like students we get varying levels of involvement from academic staff. So those who meet with us regularly and involve us in individual modules are aware of what we teach and encourage it. But maybe others make an assumption that students might find their own way or come to the library themselves?

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    2. Brian - I am starting to find that the instructors are feeling our frustration though with irrelevant documents that show up in student papers. We may yet get our toe in the door

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    3. Karen - I think your interpretation is accurate. Motivated instructors need to be our evangelizers when we cannot. A good IL session in a class seems to speak volumes when the staff have their team meetings.

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    4. Thank you for joining us Brian, great to have your perspective on this. I think that's mostly true, especially in terms of mapping onto e.g. SCONUL, but there are a small number who are very engaged and interested in developing that side as well as the subject side. For example we have a engineering education research group within the department and one of the current researchers has hit on this issue from a different angle. In addressing it she used personal knowledge management models rather than information literacy ones, but the problem she was working to solve was what I would call information literacy.

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    5. Hi Brian, to a large extent I would agree, although there are a fair few notable exceptions. I think part of it is the academic perception of what the Library or a Librarian does. Breaking that mould and stop talking in 'library speak' has had real benefits in terms of my interaction with acadmic staff.

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    6. My perception about my institution is that there is a big spectrum in terms of academics' attitudes, including some very engaged academics (not just in the iSchool!) - I wouldn't say it gets handed on to IT people in that our head of IT is proud on the small number of IT staff there are left ... the idea is that the academics are supposed to do the IT themselves....

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    7. I made a note on the paper that instructores are "focussed on workplace skills". I think framing IL in the workplace could allow for IL discussion, although one may not mention "information literacy" at all.

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    8. I agree with Karen, its the patchy involvement with academics. If you have a good relationship with them it makes the whole thing easier but it shouldn't really be like that for a consistent experience for the student.

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    9. Agreed - maintaining a positive relationship with (in our case) instructors, makes a world of difference. I see students come in that have been encouraged by our instructors. The others seem never to cross our paths

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    10. Possibly trying to get involved with staff who have "high impact" parctices? https://www.aacu.org/leap/hips

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    11. Paul - yes - we focus on workplace skills and experiential learning. This is the forte of a technical college. If however, I only focus on workplace skills, I do not look at the student as a 'whole individual,' who is interacting with information on a hourly and daily basis.

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    12. Sheila - thanks for the link to that site. We have and continue to focus on these 'high impact' areas - even without knowing what to call them. The Capstone projects in particular are an area where we usually can do more than one 'one-shot' session.

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    13. Employability is big thing, even in more academic settings so I try to link the IL skills I'm teaching to real life situations, e.g. what would happen if you used unreliable/out of date information in a business report for a company.

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    14. Claire - one thing that is big here in the Middle East are families and children. I think constantly about Jenny McCarthy's anti-vaccination website. What if a parent cannot tell junk science from research??

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    15. Yes anything relevant to capture their attention. Parents and their children are a particularly powerful example. How many times have we been scared by badly researched news stories on this subject.

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    16. Methinks the Brexit 'debate' could be analysed (albeit retrospectively) in terms of resereached data. BBC R4 'More or Less' has plenty of good examples. Many academics seem unaware of this and how it realtes to workplace skills.

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  17. Thank you for your various comments, especially confirming that my view is not unique. But I see lack of awareness in 'info literacy' so ften, u-grad and p.grad, mainly because 'academics' do not (for the most part) leave their reserach boxes and still 'assess' students by exam and essay. They do not undersatnd that imagination in assessment necessarily involves students' skills for the 21C. I could go on.....

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    1. That's so interesting Brian. I would also like to ask you as a retired academic whether you think that students' information seeking skills have got better over time - Google Generation and all that?

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    2. Good Question! I've mostly seen p grads recently but they tend to have better search strategies than u grads. But like lecturers and supervisors (some of whom still have no idea about biblio d bases) they tend to rely on G Scholar. But are unaware of the algorithm used. I see this as an editor, 'previous' work' citations often refer to the latest work. But don't get me started on foraging theory and how Wikipedia actually works...

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    3. Ha ha! That sounds very familiar! Thanks for that.

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  18. So - do we think there is an overall lack of awareness in our faculty about Information Literacy and its importance in today's world? Is this a phenomenon that can be generalized around the world?

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    2. I think lack of awareness about Information Literacy on the part of faculty is certainly an issue in the US even at Ivy League institutions. I think researchers are generally creatures of habit and don't know what they don't know and are often pleasantly surprised when they learn something new from a librarian. Someone earlier mentioned perception of librarians and our roles, still think a lot needs to change there.

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    3. Agreed. Many of our instructors are stuck in the same routine, teaching the same 2 or three courses year after year after year. they honestly don't know that things have changed until a critical event of some sort happens.

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    4. I wouldn't necessarily say so, after all if you gave faculty a list of attributes their graduates should have (as you did in your research) they would tick those attributes that match with our IL frameworks. I think some of it comes to a confusion of who should teach what in a limited time given (in my opinion) the subject being taught comes first.

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    5. And - to bring in a librarian means that it would disrupt the class schedule and take away from instruction of the subject at hand. I just find it frustrating that instructors assign essays and seem to thing that students just 'know' how to search the myriad of information that grows exponentially every day.

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    6. Welcome Nykia! My theory is that academics, by definition, survived the system with little or no support beyond the PhD supervisor so many of them don't remember how much time it took to work this out the long way. I find that it helps if I suggest learning these skills the quick way means more time to focus on learning the subject.

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    7. Yes, Patricia. This is where one has to look at the programme/course level and to have IL scheduled throughout the curriculum in appropriate places. I am fortunate that I work with academic staff that allow that, but there are some for whom the subject comes first which does seem paradoxical given that to get a doctorate requires good IL skills and that these are important university graduate attributes.

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    8. Finding ways to reach faculty especially those that impact many students without the IL speak can be quite helpful. If you meet them where they are both physically and in terms of their skill and need and show they useful skills I've found that this drives them to send their students to me for assistance. Being able to show Ph.D. students IL skills and being able to discuss their importance before they become faculty is a great start to moving folks into the 21C.

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    9. Yes, I completely agree. Developing our advocates is a great approach.

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  19. I notice one of Particia's questions was "Were our instructors jaded, un-informed, un-interested or complacent?" - I suppose I would add "overworked"? "overwhelmed"? to this list (speaking as an academic ;-) But I don't know what their conditions of employment are like? In some countries teaching staff on short term contracts lack sufficient allowance of time for preparation (i.e. they don't get paid much at all for preparation time, so lack incentive), lose out on training etc.

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    1. Overworked and overwhelmed are the reasons the staff don't show up to supplementary sessions the library offers!

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  20. Patricia - it must be tricky to look at the "whole individual" if as you mention in the article the student lacks critical reading skills, etc. or if the culture doesn't allow for that critique. I am interested, if you had to identify one of the SCONUL pillars that you wished your students acquire by the end of their programme, which would you chose in such circumstances?

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    1. I agree entirely with the instructors. I want the students to be able to evaluate content for credibility. I could spend days teaching that skill.

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    2. Well, yes, and in fact it actually takes years, not evn days, to develop the skills and understanding you need!

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    3. At least if everyone is in agreement that must aid some sort of implementation?

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    4. Agreed Sheila - but I think I'll only get hours instead of days weeks or years. Understanding the creation of information and the politicization and commercialisation of information can take a lifetime.

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  21. Well that hour has flown by! Do stick around if you can, but I'd like to thank Pat again for the topic and thank you all for your contributions.

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    1. Thanks Niamh and Pat for this! Having to go to another meeting now, but enjoyed all the discussion and will pop back to see whether there are any more comments

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    2. Yes, thank you all. A facinating article and discussion.

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  22. Thank you all for your interest! I hope to continue to do more research into the skills of college (versus university) students. They are an understudied lot.

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    1. Thanks Patricia, look forward to seeing the research as it emerges.

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  23. Thank you for a really interesting article and hours discussion. I can't stay but I will check back later to see what you've all been blogging about. Many thanks again, Claire.

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