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Digital and Information Literacy
Information literacy is all about knowing how to find, evaluate, use and manage information. It is part of lifelong learning and an important skill for all students. Digital literacy is all about knowing how to find, organise, evaluate and create information using digital technology.
Both literacies are of paramount importance in learning, teaching and research.
Some staff are concerned that your students may "rely on google" or other internet search engines to find readings without being adequately equipped to evaluate sources properly.
- Moodle, the School's Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), is an extremely useful tool to overcome this concern. By making full-text readings available you can ensure your students are reading the quality resources that you want them to read. You can link to these readings from reading lists created in Moodle.
Some staff are concerned that making too many readings available in electronic format students will not learn how to find and evaluate library resources for themselves.
- The Library offers a range of Information Skills training sessions, both face-to-face and online, which will help your students become information literate.
- The Library and CLT offer a six week training course for PhD students called MY592: Information literacy - tools for research
- The Library and CLT are keen to work with staff to run customised digital literacy or information literacy training for your students, so get in touch with Jane Secker at j.secker@lse.ac.uk or your Academic Support Librarian to discuss your own or your students' training requirements.
New Projects
New projects at LSE:
A New Curriculum for Information Literacy (ANCIL) was developed in 2011 as part of the Arcadia Programme at the University of Cambridge: LSE are carrying out an audit of digital and information literacy training to map what is offered to students at undergraduate level to ANCIL in Apring - Summer 2012. Find out more about the ANCIL Audit at LSE.
The JISC and HEA funded DELILA Project converted LSE's digital and information literacy resources in open educational resources (OER). Find out more about OERs.
The Library and CLT have developed The Library Companion for Students (guest access available), a Moodle course available to all LSE students. We are currently reviewing the Companion as part of LSE's move to Moodle 2 in Summer 2012.
Training (staff & students)
Together with the LSE Library we offer a range of hands-on training sessions for staff and PhD students. Sessions introduce a range of digital resources and tools that can support teaching and / or research and include:
- Introduction to e-resources and e-journals
- Blogging for reserachers
- Organising your favourite websites: introduction to social bookmarking
- Introduction to Twitter
- Collaborative writing with wikis and Google docs
- Managing your web presence
and many others.
See the Digital Literacy programme to access courses. The programme is also supported in Moodle.
More information
I want to:
- Create a reading list in Moodle
- Link to e-journal articles
- Use DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers)
- Creating stable URLs for each e-journal provider
- Use Social Web tools ("Web 2.0" technologies)
Contact
For more information, including one on one training, contact:
Dr Jane Secker,
Learning Technology Librarian,
E-mail: j.secker@lse.ac.uk
Image by sonja grussendorf, permission given.
External links
Information Literacy - a whole site dedicated to this important topic
RIN - Research Information Network, support the development of information strategies for the UK's research community.
JISC 2009 publication 'Learning Literacies in the Digital Age'
A New Curriculum for Information Literacy (ANCIL)
CILIP - Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals