Welcome comments for the co-sponsored ACRL CARL SEAL and LILi STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) information literacy, held at California State University, Northridge and in Second Life on December 4, 2009.
12/3/09: Hello, everyone in real life at the California State University, Northridge, & to Second Life attendees from all over the U.S. and elsewhere! For those in Second Life, the text of my 5-minute talk is on a notecard & this slide show will be up on slideshare.net—just search for Grassian I’m so happy to be here, representing LILi, the co-sponsor of today’s program I have about 5 minutes to tell you… What LILi is & our mission Why I started it & how we’re going about our mission
Ok, I’m guessing that all of YOU in RL & in SL have heard the phrase “information literacy” before Just to review, a basic definition is this: The ability to identify, locate, evaluate and use information effectively and ethically Adapted from the ALA Presidential Committee on Information Literacy’s 1989 Final Report
What is LILi? It stands for Lifelong Information Literacy It’s a group of librarians from many types of libraries, investigating IL in California I established this group a few years ago to help me do a better job of information literacy outreach to the community for the UCLA College Library
Our goal is to to investigate information literacy definitions, standards and instruction in California, so we can develop sequential curricula for Lifelong information literacy instruction…”
We have Advisory Board members from California… public libraries, public & private high schools, universities, colleges, community colleges, and a special library
In 2006 did an informal survey as a first step to gather data on what California libraries were teaching their users We view ILI broadly as including offering classes & homework help, developing online tutorials, answering reference questions, & more
We tried to reach 8,856 California libraries of all types by email & listservs only, since we had no money There are many more libraries than that in CA, But we had problems getting figures & contact info for all types of libraries & we got just 247 usable result.
Although we could not generalize because of the low response rate Several of us did a presentation of the results at the 2007 LOEX (Library Orientation & Exchange) Conference & a reprise in Second Life We called it “Teaching in a Tea House” because that’s just what they reported doing at USC (University of Southern California)… They taught information literacy (IL) skills in this popular wireless area on a campus of 33,000 students. You can find a copy of our presentation in the 2007 LOEX Proceedings & other information about the survey on the LILi web site
LILi members saw this as a fruitful first step toward investigating sequential lifelong ILI, identifying gaps and overlaps, and making curricular suggestions to address IL needs. We’re currently looking into other funding agencies to support a formal IL survey of LA County libraries & additional research
We invite you to join us for very interesting meetings & programs that rotate to different institutions, with some phone conf call meetings & meetings to be held in SL Next Friday from 11 to 1, we’re going to help people get Second Life avatars at the UCLA College Library On March 19 th , we’re hoping to offer a Zotero workshop and a workshop on library anxiety & information literacy for senior citizens, also at UCLA Check out the LILi blog and website, and
I hope to see some of you at LILi meetings in RL or in SL…