I am venturing back into the world of university, assignments and marks to finish the ever elusive postgraduate degree and learn much along the way. My blog for learning and exploring 2.0 skills for SLNSW, a little behind schedule now, will now be half turned over to reflective practice for CSU. I will still be playing with 2.0 media, mashups and mayhem, but I'll be playing with information literacy ideas as well.
My first reading inspiration is the very apt 'information literacy meets Library 2.0' edited by Peter Godwin and Jo Parker (2008) published by Facet, London. Some libraries are presenting wonderful opportunities for client involvement with new books suggestions, reviews, wiki style catalogue enhancement and other innovative uses for web 2.0. In a large research library, opening resources to clients via digital media is an imperative everyone can agree with; opening access tools and resources up for user participation however gives rise to immense concern. Maintaining the perception of consistently accurate and reliable information that goes with the research 'brand' of SLNSW will always be the prime concern. Concern may be quite justified, given wikipedia's recent tightening of access and edit policy after regular bouts of user sabotage.
I'm pleased that blogging as reflective journal activity will not be directly assessable by CSU, but I'm interested to read that web 2.0 tools are no longer simply under debate in academic information literacy circles; they've been put to good use. Georgina Payne, chapter 6 of 'information literacy meets Library 2.0', describes how 66 management and business students from Uni of Northampton, UK, had to complete a blog posting project in 2006 for library skills assessment. Payne calls her chapter 'Engage or enrage: the blog as an assessment tool". The UK students were 1st year students, so we could assume they were from the "web generation", yet reticence to post thoughts, analysis and comment into the ether was still expressed by about half (p.83). Apparently postings only showed 25% of students to have acquired quality information literacy skills. Payne expresses the skills required in terms of "examining information [for] reliability and accuracy, organization and structure, usability or cultural significance" (p.82). Not surprisingly I think, discussion of 'Big Brother' loomed large in postings, probably demonstrating the show's cultural significance for entertainment deprived students! That discussion showed lack of analytic skill either showed the students' lack of understanding of the assessment task, or showed the great success of 'Big Brother' media hype.
Like the students in the study, I am a bit loathe to be "posting into the blogosphere" as Payne puts it (p.83). Since starting my 'Dragonswalk' I have depended on the fact that there are a million exciting blogs to pursue, so mine will scarcely be noticed. Encouraging my team colleagues at work to engage with the web 2.0 course available to us has been a fine demonstration of how we are NOT from the "web generation". Most of us have no grand desire to put our opinions out there. Yet colleagues have constructed remarkable blogs that clearly point to their expert subject knowledge ... and some unexpected graphic design skills. I have gained ICT literacy experimenting with this blog and have become very much more visually literate. Not without trepidation, I am opening my blog up to my fellow Info Lit forum students and lecturer. I'll be looking forward to any random notes, comments and suggestions.
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Some of the other bloggers have combined specific subject matter with the posts about each week of the learning 2.0 course - it can work really well and you can save yourself a bit of time.
Ellen (PLS)
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