The afternoon saw presentations from Mary Lea and Lesley Gourlay who discussed the work of new literacies and academic literacies, how research into digital literacies is an extension of this. They spoke about their research using Actor Network Theory as a way of understanding what is happening. This allows us to understand literacies as a social practice that occurs in powerful and emerging networks. Mary felt that the JISC definition of digital literacy reduced it to functional skills. Lesley has been working on the JISC Digital Literacy project at the Institute of Education around digital literacy as a postgraduate attribute. She spoke about how universities are clustered around activities with texts and that texts have become entangled now with devices that meditate much of the text. She quoted the work on posthumanism by Hayles, where the status of the face to face is placed in radical doubt. As part of the JISC project they have interviewed students and asked them to draw their day to day activities which reflect a network of practice. Lesley talked about how reading practices are very different and that non-human actors have agency. Some of this research clearly requires some further reading on my part, but a fascinating insight into what I had previously thought to be a fairly typical JISC project!

Finally Bronwyn Williams from the University of Louisville who is visiting professor at the University of Sheffield currently, spoke about popular culture and students’ online literacy practices. He first showed a video made by one of his students which remixed music and images in a highly creative way and then asked us what do you need to understand to be able to create such a video? The technical skills? The knowledge of cultural references, of IP issues? Bronwyn talked about the digital practices that students use outside the classroom including textual poaching and mosaic and how they can apply these in the classroom.

Quoting the popular images of students as lazy, shallow, short attention span. Can’t read and write etc, Bronwyn then went on to consider one student, Ashley, who contributes to fan forums and has written over 40,000 words! But she did this for fun and did not associate it with work, and her teacher did not know. So there is a disconnect between what is happening in and outside the classroom.  In fact students use multiple modes of communication and it is not true to say students don’t read and write – they just don’t read and write in the way that has cultural capital (e.g. books). He observed that there is a lot of print on sites such as You Tube (for example comments).

Bronwyn spoke about audience and how this is something students think about when they go online. Am I going to be misread? Arguably we have always done this – with posters, t-shirts, our bookshelves and record collections. But the difference online is the person is not there. People see ‘you’ without seeing you so you become disembodied. Irony is also important so students have to ask if this is serious or if there is a joke behind a posting.

The idea of textual poaching comes from Michel de Certeau (1984) When we are reading we are looking for new material to appropriate and reuse. Now we can do this very easily and publish it using digital media. Quoting a video put together by students at the American University of Beirut over fees being raised, the video used references to the film 300, which is part of popular culture.

Mosiac and rhetoric: rather than gathering information from a single text to support an argument, this has been replaced by gathering information from a variety of sources. A student will spend a lot of time researching for example whether to go to a movie from a variety of sources. In these practice the line between reading and writing is very blurred. Student can move from reading to composing and these are not distinct activities. But these practices challenge traditional concepts of authorship. Texts are not complete and they can be amended.

What is clear is that students don’t hang up their other life behaviour up when they come into the classroom. So how can we help them make connections between in and outside the classroom? Everyone knows something and many students are putting forward their own point of view, creating content. Not all students are doing this but many of watching this material if not creating it. These practice creates some tensions and students are often less familiarity with print genres so we need to explain how academic texts are set up. IP questions are raised when sampling and quoting – the distinction between these practices needs to be explained. Finally Bronwyn stressed that we need to ask students about their practices and to focus on affordances – different media do different things well. We also need to help students connect new practices to existing practices. He finally concluded that teachers should think about goals and ideas – then technology.I couldn’t agree more!

Kate Vasili from Middlesex University spoke next about the range of licences we now have to deal with in the HE sector. She updated us on the CLA Licence which is due for renewal in August and looked at licences such as ERA, but also Creative Commons 4.0. Meanwhile Professor Charlotte Waelde, from the Law Department at University of Exeter looked to Hargreaves and beyond. She considered new legislation such as the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act (ERRA) which was passed at the end of April and will have an impact on copyright. She also talked about the new Copyright Hub which is designed to make licensing easier. She also considered issues such as orphan works, EU changes and some of the exception to copyright that will come into UK law following Hooper and Hargreaves, such as the exception for parody and caricature. The government are also saying that contracts  should no longer be able to overrule copyright law. She also talked about how the IPO plan to issue guidance notes to help the public understand copyright in complex areas.

The final speaker of the morning was Peter Wienand, from Farrer & Co who spoke about Copyright in the courts. He highlighted a number of interesting cases going through the UK and European courts. A Danish case back in 2009 tested out whether 11 words could be considered original and since then this case has been cited in several other cases, suggesting that originality rather than substantiality can lead to infringement. There is also a case in Sweden around hyperlinking and whether this can be considered infringement – its still going through the European court, so watch this space. A case involving a photo of a London bus has recently shown that originality in photographs is related to the lighting composition, framing etc. and no actual copying needs to take place. And several cases have been through the courts related to football data company, Football Dataco. Finally several cases have been brought against the internet providers, BSkyB andBT for knowing their service is being used for infringement.

After lunch, Dafydd Tudur from the National Library of Wales spoke about their policy not to claim copyright in digitised images and was also advocating the use of Creative Commons licences for sharing material from public collections. He talked about how income from licensing is still very modest and largely subsidised by the public. He looked at why you might want to retain copyright (for control?) and quoting Cory Doctorow said, our greatest fear is not piracy, it is obscurity. A photo of a dog with a pipe the NLW have on Flickr Commons now has over 20,000 views. Echoing much of what Heather said, the NLW realises that their content is out on the web, and so ensuring that the right content is available is important.

Following my own talk on practical issues of dealing with copyright, Suzanne Hardy from Newcastle University spoke about copyright training for staff. She also maintained that internet security was a ‘romantic illusion’ and that we must manage risk, as students will share content whether we like it or not. She had tips for success and showed people small things, such as the Google Advanced search to find Creative Commons images, which could make a big difference to their practice.

Overall it was a fascinating day and a great chance to meet some new people, lots of delegates were from outside of higher education, but also a chance to get up to date with the latest in the law, and what is happening in practice. I particularly liked Naomi’s summing up at the end of the day, and of her believe that knowing about copyright was all part of digital literacy – I couldn’t agree more! And the final moral of the story is, put some cats into any presentation you do, it goes down a storm!

]]> http://janesecker.wordpress.com/2013/05/13/cilip-ecopyright-briefing-report/feed/ 0 lselassie cats and books http://janesecker.wordpress.com/2013/04/30/embedding-digital-literacies-strategies-and-managing-change/ http://janesecker.wordpress.com/2013/04/30/embedding-digital-literacies-strategies-and-managing-change/#comments Tue, 30 Apr 2013 20:56:16 +0000 Jane Secker http://janesecker.wordpress.com/?p=509 Continue reading →]]>

Reflecting the learning landscape

Today I attended a workshop in the Changing the Learning Landscapes series. The event was held at the University of Leeds and several familiar faces from HEA projects and from last year’s SEDA Summer School were facilitating the day. The first session was by Lawrie Phipps, from JISC who spoke at the Summer School last year. He made some good points about, when we speak to students, which students do we hear from? Who are representing students, on committees and in surveys? He asked us to collect our thoughts about what digital literacies students need to be effective learner. They are online and he also made the distinction between scholarly practices, information and media processes and socio-technical processes were are evolving at different rates. Lawrie also recognised that a lot of digital literacy work builds on the work librarians have done for many years around information literacy. He asked us about some of the barriers to change and inevitably the reward structure in HE came up. He also urged against putting digital at the start of things as it focuses the mind on the technology, which is not what we want to do. It’s about underlying practices. JISC have a lot of resources coming out of the Digital Literacies Design Studio, including an audit tool and various models such as the pyramid from Beetham and Sharpe.

The next speakers were presenting the student voice, from the NUS and Student Union Education Officer at Leeds Met. Both Jess and Tashy ran an interesting session which allowed for active participation – we had to undertake a SWOT analysis of student involvement in digital literacy projects. This was a chance to speak to the colleagues from Newcastle University who were on the same table. Tashy also spoke in some detail about a project at Leeds Met to use tablets on a sports science course with 50 undergraduates. She got the idea from the project after watching a Ken Robinson video about education and worked with the E-learning team. Students were also employed as digital champions to help other students and to help staff use the devices and share ideas about how to use them for learning.

After lunch we heard case studies from the University of Leeds and from University of Hull about digital literacy projects and how they helped them formulate strategy and manage change. A team from Leeds spoke about the Digitalis project which was based in the faculty for Performance Arts, Visual Arts and Communication and used digital story telling for student reflection. Carole Kirk spoke about a metaphor for organisational change by Gareth Morgan based on spider plants who send out runner and bumblebees who can go between the fledgling plants to share ideas and network. Some of the Leeds approaches involved giving grants, having a lite touch reporting and having staff to help share ideas and manage the mini projects. The second case study from Liz Cleaver (who worked on the DELILA project with me) at the University of Hull drew on her background as a sociologist and what we know about people and organisations. Some of her insights involved: seeing the bigger picture and other changes in your organisation, knowing how your organisation works, and that perceptions of reality are relative. I also liked the point that you need a communications plan, but that ‘corridor conversations’ are vital – the chance encounters to sell your message. She also spoke about how we work in silos still and don’t assume that people will know about your project.

The final session of the day from Susannah Quinsee Head of Learning Development at City University was about change management and was a great workshop. She spoke about the similarities between change and holidays – the packing, the unpacking and the memories. She also highlighted how many books there are about change management and leadership- more than there are cookery books. She felt Bregman and Kotter are useful books, but both are linear approaches to change and both are based on the corporate sector. Universities don’t work like that and the steps don’t account for the messiness while change is happening. She felt that understanding your organisational culture was key (Johnson and Scholes) and getting people to own a project is also key, so linking it to other intiaitives rather than presenting it as a new project is vital. Susannah had three really great activities for us to work on in groups. We were presented with a scenario and a bag of tools and resources and first had to prioritise which were the most important, which could be discarded and which could be changed. Resources included things like senior management, money, new staff, workshops etc. We were also given postcards and stickers – which was a lot of fun to create a postcard to ourselves about our project, our approach to change. I enjoyed the session a lot but also took away that we need to ditch the ‘technology’ word, that can alienate people or give them the wrong impression. That we need champions, but they can’t be the usual suspects – you need different people to spread your message. And finally Susannah talked about having a vision – not necessarily a strategy, but a vision and talk to people.

Overall the day captured some of the same excitement I felt during the SEDA Summer School. I would have liked more time to talk to more people at the workshop. But I was reassured that we are all struggling with embedding digital literacies into our universities and that changing learning and teaching approaches is not easy. But there is a lot to be learnt from sharing experiences and the time spent talking to colleagues at Newcastle University was really helpful.

Technology has changed a lot since the late 1990s so if you are interested in the needs of distance learners, then we have a seminar next Wednesday at LSE that may be of interest. Lindsay Jordan from the University of the Arts London will be presenting a NetworkED seminar on this topic. Find out more on the NetworkED website. If you wish to attend and are not a member of LSE staff (or a student) then drop me a line and I can book you a place. Also don’t forget as ever, we will be live streaming this event so you can watch from the event page next Wednesday at 3pm GMT. No plug ins or registration is required to watch the live stream.

Mover and Shaker 2013

It has just been announced that I was selected by Library Journal as a 2013 Mover and Shaker. I think it’s quite rare for someone from outside the US to get one of these awards and I was nominated as an ‘Advocate’ for my information literacy work. I’m really excited by the news and you can read the story in full here. I know that I have Emma Coonan and Andrew Walsh to thank for nominating me, both very inspiring people to work with! I also want to thank Nancy Graham who worked with me on the DELILA and CoPILOT projects and is also another person I have the fortune to work with professionally. And of course all the Information Literacy Group, past and present LILAC Committee members and the JIL team. And my fabulously supportive boss, Steve Ryan and the rest of my colleagues at LSE. This is sounding like an Oscar speech so I will stop now!

In honour of the occasion I have been giving my blog a bit of a face lift, so if you can’t find something that’s why!

I was invited with Nancy Graham to take part in a workshop to help UNESCO refine their media and information literacy competencies and today the group were hoping to work on indicators for media and and information literacy. These are hugely important as they will be a way of teachers judging their own (and others) competence in this field. And also be a way of measuring impact. They also underpin the Media and information Literacy curriculum that UNESCO produced a year and a half ago.

It is interesting to reflect on how I came to be sat at UNESCO working with a group of international experts in both media and information literacy. I have Woody Horton to thank in many ways who contacted me shortly after I finished my Arcadia fellowship and invited me to join the international mailing list. I posted a short item to the list (I think in response to a query) about the DELILA project which had just finished and adapted a range of digital and information literacy resources as OERs. After posting this message I received an email from Irmgarda Kasinskaite-Buddeberg at UNESCO who immediately pointed out that both IL and OERs were key interests at UNESCO. Getting to know Irmgarda has been so rewarding and I’m really pleased that she is a keynote at this year’s LILAC conference.

Woody Horton is another great contact and he is also the author of a recent UNESCO publication that both Nancy and I contributed to, and it is a global resource for information literacy in over 40 languages. We helped to compile the English language section and have agreed to help keep it up to date. I was really excited to return to UNESCO this week but also to work on information literacy. I use their definition of IL regularly in talks that I give and feel honoured to be invited back to Paris.

There have been at least two instances in the last week when I’ve been asked to explain what information literacy is and why it matters to people completely outside the education and library world. One such incident this weekend when talking to a friend who was a media and communications specialist really struck me. We really do need marketing professionals in the library world. And I need to work on my pitch.I read a US blog by Howard Rheingold which pitches infolit as “crap detection” which certainly is part of it. Apparently the term was coined by Ernest Hemingway back in 1954! But perhaps “crap detection” is not the way to try and sell it later this week to a university committee. It’s really hard to describe something you think about a lot in some detail in a really simple and clear way. I want a 1 minute pitch for what information literacy is and why it matters for the person in the street! And then a 5 minute pitch for academic staff. Ideas on a postcard please! Or come along to the second meet up of the London Libraries Learning Research Reading group tonight.

I think the saying is “it never rains then it pours” or something and that sums up the last week. After battling with getting some recognition for the importance of digital and information literacies for the best part of 10 years all of a sudden I have a paper at a committee next week! It’s on the back of the ANCIL at LSE study I carried out last year that we finally published in LSE Research Online last week. It’s been circulated internally for a while though.

But in addition, we had a party to celebrate the launch of Rethinking Information Literacy last night. We also have a NetworkEd seminar from colleagues at Cardiff later today on their digital and information Literacy strategy. We’ll be recording and it will in on the NetworkEd website. And an exciting project with a school in Hackney on information Literacy too might be in the pipeline!

Also this week I’ve had a visitor from Norway – Karen Marie Overn who I met at Lilac and who works at Gjovik University College. We have had a great few days talking about embedding information literacy, the role of the librarian and the challenges and highlights of working in this field! So many similarities between our (very different) institutions. What a week!

Approaches to time

Last Friday, Emma and I trekked to York St John University, one of my favourite places not least because some good friends happen to work there! I’m also a big fan of the wonderful historic city centre and some of the lovely shops!

We were invited to present at a CILIP Academic and Research Libraries group event organised by the Yorkshire and Humberside branch entitled Librarians as Researchers. Emma has posted a summary of our talk on thew New Curriculum blog entitled And now for something different. Our presentation is on Slideshare.  It was actually a lot of fun putting together a talk about how to do research as part of your day job. We made it interactive and I hope people found it inspiring and useful. Doing research as part of your day job is hard work, but I think it is also so rewarding and keeps things interesting. I hope our eight tips are useful for other wannabe researchers. And not that Emma and I want to stop talking about ANCIL, because we don’t but it’s equally important to talk about how and why you do something, not just what you found out! However, speaking about findings, the key recommendations from my ANCIL report at LSE are now on our ANCIL at LSE website and I hope our report will be in LSE Research Online by the end of the week.

Simon Kerridge, University of Kent

Simon from the University of Kent and ARMA (Association of Research Managers and Administrators), the professional body for heads of research divisions. ARMA have a professional framework of skills for those supporting research. Simon spoke about some of the work research managers do, such as auditing across the institution and making statutory returns, e.g. for the REF. He also talked about open access and the Finch report. From 1^st April universities will get block grants from HEFCE to support making outputs available open access. Up to them to decide how to spend it.  Some thought that by Ref 2020 there could be a requirement that everything submitted is open access.

At Kent one department has an open access journal, so might be this an option for HEIs to host more titles? He also mentioned RCUK’s requirement for the use of CC – BY licences. There is some concern this might be too permissive – allows commercial use.

Simon looks at the example of University of Nottingham who set up a fund back in 2006 to support open access. Since this date they have spent £6000 on article processing costs. These vary, but on average the price was £1216, but only 4% of Nottingham’s research output is currently on open access.

He highlighted things like the Sherpa Romeo site for listing OA titles and Juliet which shows funders OA policies. Simon also talked about research management and administration systems and a project Kent have been involved in. This has resulted in a procurement tool which is freely available to other institutions who might wish to get a RMAS. See http://www.rcas.ac.uk

Finally he mentioned ORCHID which is the development of a unique identifier for each researcher that helps manage an individuals research output throughout their career.

Moira Bent and Jane Secker, Developing informed researchers

Moira and I were representing the RIDLs (Research Information and Digital Literacy) Coalition. Stephane Goldstein was also attending and spoke briefly about what RIDLs is and then handed over to Moira and I. We introducd ourselves and plugged a few of our books! We then started getting people to consider what researchers do – and the role of information and data in their work. This lively discussion was a good introduction to Moria’s 7 ages of researchers – to show their needs are not the same. We then went on to ask the group what digital literacy and information literacy was to them. Some saw it DL as a subset of IL. We had a discussion about whether there were specific aspects of DL not covered by IL. They overall concluded that if you took a broader definition than librarians might have traditionally then it was all IL! I presented the ANCIL definition of IL, SCONUL 7 pillars and Future lab model of Digital Literacy. We then asked them to think what it was that researchers in their own institution needed. Another lively discussion followed on how we needed to teach researchers to be critical, to be discriminating in their use of information, to realise that Google is not an unbiased source. But also that social media creates all sorts of new issues.

We went on to talk about IL and the RDF – how the IL lens on the RDF might be helpful. But also the various lens of the SCONUL 7 pillars.

Finally we presented a case study from our own institutions on the types of sessions we offer to PhD students and how these map to the RDF. The programmes at LSE and Newcastle are surprisingly similar and cover many of the RDF competencies. We unfortunately ran out of time for the final activity where we had wanted people to think about their own institution, who was doing what, whether there were any gaps and mapping it to the RDF. It was a nice take home piece of work for people to do. We also gave out the various lens and the Informed Researcher booklet. All these resources are also on the Vitae web pages.

A final conclusion from a participant was that information literacy was far broader than he had recognised but that message needed to get out beyond the library community. It was a chance to talk to people who were not librarians, so we were hoping they might help us in the future.

Laurian Williamson, University of Nottingham

Laurian spoke about research data management (RDM) and a Jisc funded project Nottingham were involved in. She looked at what research data is, and who the stakeholders are – its more varied but some groups (e.g. arts and humanities researchers) don’t like it being called data! But the stakeholders are possibly even the general public, but researchers, librarians, ITServices, research office, archivists, funders, publishers – a host of people.

What is driving the sharing of research data is the funders who want this. They want data to be stored appropriately, backed up, shared where possible and ideally published as an output. At Nottingham there was a large Steering Group to oversee the project. The work was then divided into several strands for example to look at developing the service infrastructure and the technical infrastructure. Eprints was straightaway not considered suitable for storing data sets as no repository manager at Nottingham.

It was felt that using the funders were the main way to encourage people to engage in the project. They emphasised the requirement to do this in a leaflet produced for staff. They also logged queries to identify main issues – planning and creating data plans was a big concern. They have a website at www.nottingham.ac.uk/researchdata

There was an issue over who takes on support – subject librarians were one idea but they were already over stretched. Edinburgh have a freely available tutorial for research students called MANTRA which is worth linking to or adapting. It’s available in Moodle. Edinburgh are really streets ahead of everyone else in this arena.

At Nottingham issues include setting up the technical infrastructure which was very difficult, but also who to own the RDM – library and IT have just de-converged. Finally worth remembering not all data is in digital format.

As part of the project they conducted a survey or researchers about research data and Laurian summarised the findings which were fascinating. Research data takes many formats (spreadsheets, word docs, websites, notebooks etc). It’s often not huge in size but a lot of people are using tools like DropBox to store it. Funders ask for metadata but only around 40% of people provide it, which has implications for finding and reusing data. Backing up data is also not something that happens routinely. Only 25% of people were developing research data management plans despite the requirement to have one! 93% of people had not been on a training course and in terms of sharing data only a few people shared beyond their research group or institution. Most researchers didn’t understand IPR issues and who owned their data and there was no clear picture about whether they were using subject repositories or institutional repositories.

Laurian concluded there were clearly areas in which to develop training and a lot of challenges in managing research data. There were also disciplinary differences, issues to do with staff knowledge, skills and culture aside from the massive resources needed to set up an RDM infrastructure. Challenging times!