Viewpoints: April 2012

On the 12th April 2012 Alan, Catherine and Vilinda delivered a Viewpoint's Information Skills workshop at Lilac Conference at Glasgow Caledonian University.

This practical hands-on workshop session introduced delegates to the Information Skills strand of the Viewpoints project and demonstrated how staff and students can be supported in the digital age.

The project showed how the Viewpoint's Information Skills theme can help academic staff consider their students’ information skills needs for a module or course and how librarians working with teaching staff or students can also use this theme to raise awareness of how the demand for information skills/digital literacy is distributed throughout a course or module.

Library staff have commented on the usefulness of the Viewpoints approach and the Information Skills resource set. After a brief introduction to the Viewpoints process in a workshop setting, an Assistant Librarian at Ulster commented that the value of Viewpoints outputs and resources is the “wealth of practical examples”. They added that as a result of the session they were going to “implement ideas when supporting module/course information skills classes”.

The workshop demonstrated how Librarians and other related information professionals can be assisted to use the Information Skills themed resources to support staff and students in the classroom. It shared some experiences from past workshops as rich media has been used to capture outputs via ‘digital stories’, photos, video etc. It demonstrated how workshops have stimulated constructive dialogue and fostered collaboration among both informal groups and teams, helping them build ideas towards a student-centred curriculum design model.

Attendees were invited in groups to participate in an activity designed to give some experience of using the Information Skills strand of the Viewpoints resource suite. This activity was guided but flexible as the groups had to plan how they might use or adapt ideas to meet a given objective. Reflective prompts were provided to aid discussion and promote reflection. There was frequent opportunities to share experiences, compare outputs and discuss how the Viewpoints approach may be applicable to Librarians and other information professionals.