A6 - Information literacy crisis - screen cast, Ian Rowlands

Screen cast is here - http://stadium.open.ac.uk/ stadia/ preview.php?s=31&whichevent=1173.

My notes on this are here - http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dfjp86bs_87cn3pzvgr

Comments:

Conclusions

There is a continuum of ICT comfort across all generations, the google generation is not entirely different to older generations. There is diversity within that generation, educators need to segment that group and respond to their differing needs. Librarians need to bring back the skills of information literacy. We've got to take information skills more seriously.


Which part(s) of the argument are most relevant to you as a reader and a student?

As someone with a background in marketing his conclusions about segmenting the generation for targeting your approach to information literacy, education etc was perfectly sensible. I also was pleased that he recognised the diversity at all ages and that in fact age isn't the key digital divide. Ultimately I think the divide is access, age is an obvious thing to plump for as older people have an obvious difference in their access to ICTs as compared to the under 20s who have always had a computer at home, have mobile technology and do a lot of their everyday tasks by ICTs.

Which part(s) of the argument are most relevant to you as a teacher, trainer or other practitioner or potential practitioner?

That the pre-google generation are very adaptable and can retrain into these new ways easily - as long as they are open to it and being aware that not all of this generation want to or engage with ICTs that much so choices must be made available.I had not considered the issue of information literacy before (not having a teaching/academic background) and will admit to being one of those people who search with sentences and not key words and have lost my information search skills due to becoming used to using sentence based searching for websites and then transferring this searching skill to my academic searches. I'm also guilty of the brand associations made with the terms library being linked to print and search to online. I have experienced using libraries online and using digital resources in an physical library but have developed a preference for searching online rather than physically.

What for you are the strengths and weaknesses of each form of presentation – reading from the report in Activity 4, and listening to a webcast lecture now? We will return to this issue in Week 5.
The written report gives the student/reader critical statistical information to help them understand the paper; the screencast gives you the chance to hear things from the horses mouth in a much more informal and understandable way.