Today Sheila Webber/Sheila Yoshikawa at the University of Sheffield (England) hosted a very interesting discussion at their InfoLit iSchool island in Second Life. The discussion was about the research done by two people who had presented at a conference yesterday at Sheffield: Pam McKinney and Yaszdan Mansourian. PowerPoint slide shows for both are available. Here are a few quotes and notes...
"Yazdan was doing qualitative research, using grounded theory approach and he interviewed researchers/academics in the biology/biosciences dept here at sheffield, investigating concepts of failure in web search. and this model was one of the key outcomes... you will see there are different zones that a search might fall into depeneding on, firstly, how certain/not certain the person was that what he/she was searfching for was on teh web, and then the other dimension is whether the information was found or not. So if you thought the info was there and it was - bright zone! You will see from the ppt that we went on to use this with students in sheffield
then in iran where yazdan is now a professor. Students had to think about a time when they had a successful search and a failed search then plot those on the diagram. Then that can be used as a way of helping them reflect on WHY--WHY the search failed or succeeded. At the end Yazdan has sugggested ways it can be used by librarians.... One question that cam up yesterday was why should be people search if the don't think the info us there and Yazdan gave an example from an interview, where someone wanted to double check before submitting a research grant - in this case no information = successful search - so there was still useful information (Ie that noone had done teh work), and then afterwards they can see whether their perception was coorrect... showing that it is important to let people do what they do, makemistakes, and then reflect on failure."
"Annie [McMinnar] is in CILASS...the focus is Inquiry Based Learning and it is a well-funded project with a very small central team and majority of the work going on in real classes in different departments. over 100 projects in different depts/classes and teh library is also a partner, I'll mention for example they had a series of lunchtime training sessions
learning about IBL [Inquiry Based Learning]... Annie highlighhts that information literacy was a key CILASS strand from the start and she identifies 4 ways in which Info Literacy has been incorporated in curriculum design sometimes more thoroughly - example of the English Dept
with info literacy a key point of the project, other times a bit more added in with persuasion. but i would say that now there are faculty (professors, academics, lecturers, whatever you want to call them) whi talk about information literacy....
Annie: "...I think the force of our project funding has really helped me be effective in promoting information literacy..."
Sheila Yoshikawa: "9 million US dollars... that's spread over 5 years and includes some capital funding... Higher education funding council of England... it was part of a programme of centres for excellence in teaching... HEFCE are the major funders of... ENGLISH universities..."
Annie: There is a lot of info on our website: http://www.shef.ac.uk/cilass/
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