Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Call for Second Life Poster Sessions on Info Lit

Hello. I will be teaching “Information Literacy Instruction: Theory and Technique” (IS448) again in Spring Quarter to UCLA Information Studies Department graduate students.  This is a course that Joan Kaplowitz and I proposed in 1989 and have alternated teaching approximately every other year since then.  Each time I teach, I ask librarians from academic, school, public and special libraries to talk about information literacy instruction (ILI) at their libraries. It's always been of great interest to the students, and to me!

In 2009, the last time I taught this course, a number of librarians from various countries and types of libraries responded and created very interesting posters in the 3D virtual world of Second Life (SL). This year I’m asking again if any of you would like to volunteer to participate in an SL poster session by creating a poster that will describe ILI in your library/institution. (NOTE: I can help with uploading images/textures and setting up posters and notecards in SL see details below.) You would also need to staff your poster in SL as you would in RL (real life), during my class, to talk briefly about your ILI and answer questions from teams of my students, who will then do 5-minute oral reports on selected posters.

Please note that you will need to get a free Basic Second Life account and download SL software in order to participate. You can find system requirements here:

http://secondlife.com/support/system-requirements/?lang=en-US

The poster session and student oral reports are scheduled for Tuesday, May 1st, between 1:30 pm and 5 pm SLT/Pacific Time, and both will be open to anyone interested in attending, from anywhere in the world. It will all take place on Stanford University Library’s island in Second Life. (Many thanks to Deni Wicklund at Stanford for her generosity in offering this location!)

Please respond directly to me by Friday, February 10th if you are interested in doing an ILI poster in SL: estherg@ucla.edu  I’ll need your RL (Real Life) and SL names, your position, your library name and address, and a brief description of the types of ILI available at or through your library.

I CAN HELP YOU…

If you haven’t done a poster session in SL before, you’ll need to upload images for your poster, called “textures” in SL. I can provide funding for up to 15 textures per poster (L$150), and I can help with setting up posters, or teach you how to do it yourself. 

Poster session presenters will also have the option of creating free notecards with information about their ILI and links to sites they wish to highlight, in RL and/or SL. Again, I can help you do this or teach you how to do it.

If you have instructional materials that you would like to share with my students and other attendees, you may wish to upload them to InfoLit Global http://www.infolitglobal.info/directory/en/  or submit them to SOS for Information Literacy for possible inclusion http://www.informationliteracy.org/ Then you can include mention of those items on your notecard, along with links.

I would be happy to answer any questions you may have about this. I look forward to hearing from you by Friday, February 15th: estherg@ucla.edu

Thank you!

            Best,

                        Esther