Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Discussions and talks from the Centre for Information Literacy Research

1) There are more discussions planned in Second Life, the virtual world. Each discussion lasts an hour. On Thursday 24th January 2008 (N.B. Now rescheduled to 14th February) at 8pm UK time (12 noon Second Life time) there is a discussion on Evaluating educational interventions in Second Life. On February 7th 8pm UK time (12 noon Second Life time) there is a discussion on Information Literacy for researchers. I will start off the latter session with some feedback from the SCONUL/CONUL event in Dublin on that topic. As usual with these discussions, they are held on Infolit iSchool (in the CILR building, pictured here: coordinates Infolit iSchool 102, 212, 22). In order to attend you will need to have a Second Life avatar and to know how to teleport to coordinates, do basic movement and use the chat function (I'm not being funny there, they're the only requirements really).


2) We also have a programme of research seminars in my "physical" Department; mainly aimed at staff and students in the Department of Information Studies, but I could have been mentioning them here as anyone is welcome. The next one is given by Dr Andrew Madden, on Internet search practices of the general public: 12-13.00 on Friday 25th January 2008 in the Department of Information Studies, 211 Portobello Street, Sheffield (pictured). "This talk reports the findings arising from a study of searches by 103 volunteers. They were observed and interviewed as they performed a number of search exercises. In the course of each session, the subjects carried out several tasks: some were self-selected, others were set by the researchers. Searches were recorded and analysed. The problems encountered by searchers,and their strategies for resolving them, are discussed."

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