Survey report now available

The CILIP CSG-Information Literacy group are delighted to be partnering with UNESCO to collaborate on a new project to share information literacy open educational resources in the UK. Jane Secker (LSE) and Nancy Graham (University of Birmingham) are representing the group. With this aim we conducted a short survey of librarians in April 2012 to gather information about the OER collections they currently use and to identify people interested in working on the project either in the UK or elsewhere in the world.

We held an event at the University of Birmingham on 14th August and got together a group of interested librarians. We now have set up a mailing list if you are interested and would like to join IL-OERS@JISCMAIL.AC.UK. Many thanks if you filled in our survey, The FindingSharingOERs_reportFINAL is now available.

Building a community of practice

Yesterday we held a workshop at University of Birmingham to get together interested librarians to talk about how we build a community or network to share open educational resources on information literacy in the UK. A great day was had by all and our presentation is available online. More to follow soon as we had loads of great ideas!

DELILA in Moscow

After our exciting trip to Paris (see below), I travelled to Moscow to present a very similar paper at the International Conference on Media and Information Literacy in Knowledge Societies, organised by  the Information for All Programme part of UNESCO.  It was an intensive couple of days, in a very good way! As well as seeing some plenary talks and panel discussions, I was part of a working group to come up with indicators of Media and Information Literacy.

The theme of Media Literacy was a new one for me but it works perfectly well with Information Literacy and it’s easy to understand why the two concepts are being linked more and more.

I was lucky enough to give our presentation as a plenary talk to the entire audience and our project got a really good response from other participants.  We are hoping to keep links made at both conferences going to ensure our project is truly global and to raise awareness far and wide.   Photos to follow.

DELILA at UNESCO

Nancy and I have just returned from a few days in Paris, at the World Congress on Open Educational Resources at UNESCO. The meeting brought together “global governments, educators, NGOs and prominent universities such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).” Find about more about the Congress, which saw the launch of what is called the ‘Paris Declaration on OER’. There is also a full list of presentations with a link to the live streaming on the UNESCO website, and we have also got a link to our presentation online. Nancy and I were thrilled to be speaking about the need to share information literacy resources as OERs and the role that librarians as a community of practice, can play in being advocates for OERs more widely in their institution.

Information Literacy OERs – tell us what you know

The CILIP CSG-Information Literacy group are delighted to be partnering with UNESCO to collaborate on a new project to highlight information literacy open educational resources in the UK. Two former members of the DELILA team Jane Secker (LSE) and Nancy Graham (University of Birmingham) are leading on this initiative and representing the group.

With this aim we are conducting a short survey of librarians to gather information about the OER collections you currently use and to identify people interested in working on the project either in the UK or elsewhere in the world. We would be grateful if you could complete this short survey:

IL OER survey

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 4,300 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 4 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Open all hours

Today I spoke at the 25th Heron User Group meeting with June Hedges (UCL) and Donya Rowan (university of Derby) about our experiences of working on an OER project. We focused on the copyright issues that arose during the projects, which were all turning existing content into an OER. We came up with a number of issues including the difficulties of third party content in teaching materials. I spoke about DELILA and the experience of removing content from our digital and information literacy resources due to copyright. There were a number of common themes that arose in our talks, such as the time consuming nature of clearing content which is often largely decorative. It was also suggested that librarians could compile a list of databases that allow screenshots to be used and licensed under creative commons. This sounds like a useful subject for a wiki to combine our knowledge in this area. Finally we concluded that OERs were a good way of engaging academics about copyright issues. They are also a great way of finding resources to improve your teaching and I have actually made use of some of UCL’s resources when teaching on our PGCert.