Primary Research Group have released a report based on information from "more than 110" North American universities College Information Literacy Efforts Benchmarks. The cost is 75 US dollars (you can download the pdf for this price from their website) and the ISBN is 1-57440-099-1. It has statistics on various things such as whether the university requires an information literacy test for graduation, what sessions are provided by librarians and (since this is a North American publication) information relating to IL in english composition classes. The Primary Research home page is at http://www.primaryresearch.com/ and you can find the item by selecting Publications and then Library publications. The press release giving some highlights is at http://www.primaryresearch.com/release-200803141.html Photo by Sheila Webber: Primroses in snow, Sheffield, March 2008
Thanks to Gerry McKiernan for highlighting this presentation given by Andreas Brockhaus and Martha Groom on Tuesday, March 18, 2008 at the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative 2008 Online Spring Focus. Using Wikipedia to Reenvision the Term Paper "To enhance the learning experience of a term paper, students were required to publish their papers in Wikipedia. Publishing for a large audience provided authentic feedback and encouraged students to do their best work. Using Wikipedia also allowed students to connect with a vibrant community and share their knowledge by making their papers publicly accessible." You can see the ppt (and, I think, the ppt with audio but I was doing this blog entry at a computer that had sound disabled ;-) at http://www.educause.edu/content.asp?page_id=15031&PRODUCT_CODE=ELI082/SESS07&bhcp=1 You might want to look through the rest of the programme at http://www.educause.edu/Program/15029
If you haven't heard about the markets before, or simply lost track, then you might like to know that openDemocracy is running a set of predictive markets to tap into the collective knowledge of the oD community in order to predict events around the world.
In the past few weeks we've added a number of markets covering a broad range of topics. Starting with the our series of Russia markets for the opening of the 2008 markets we've gone on and posted markets on economic matters, elections and the Olympics, among others.
Our latest market is China and Olympics related: Will any countries boycott the Olympics?. It's an interesting question in light of recent events and the past history of Olympic boycotts.
We're planning to hold a China series to coincide with the Olympics in August and would like to hear from you about the markets you'd like to see and trade in. What do you think are some of the big questions and uncertainties in China today? With a booming economy and rapidly changing social circumstanes there are certainly plenty that can be asked.
For those with more interest in short-term markets (or who are after a quick buck!) we will also be accepting markets on the sporting side of the Olympics, so feel free to submit those as well. Create your market on the Inkling Markets or send me an email with your ideas.
All you drivers who left their email address and phone numbers for the ice road trucking post... here is a way to make some extra money with out ever leaving America. A production company contacted me, they are looking for candidates for a T.V. show - read on. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Dear Truckers,
Do you have a passion for the open road, America and sharing your travel stories with others? Could you see yourself hosting a travel series from the driver's wheel of your truck?
Tapestry International Productions is an Emmy and Oscar winning television production company that specializes in family-friendly programming for channels like The Discovery Channel, TLC and TBS. We are currently developing a travel series entitled: STORIES FROM THE ROAD: THE TRUCKER'S GUIDE TO AMERICA and are look for a host (or hosts) to take us along for the ride. We are looking for a sincere, articulate trucker between the ages of 30 and 55 who loves America and can take us to some of the country's most beautiful places. This is a paid position.
If you are interested, please contact Karen Carlson. Include information about why you think you'd make a good travel guide as well as a photo of you AND your truck (remember, your truck is a big part of the series). Please feel free to ask questions. kcarlson@tapestry.tv
This isn't some hokey poky scam. If you are interested give her a call. This would probably work best with an owner operator. I mentioned to her the fact that owner operators need to keep the wheels moving in order to survive and they do not always have time to stop check out the world around them. And i mentioned how truck payments are sometimes larger than mortgage payments. Her reply was... Surprising. Call her to discuss the details. You do not have to be an owner operator, you can be a company driver too if your company approves. Fee free to pass this along if you know a guy or lady who might "fit the bill". Good luck!
Yesterday it was impossible until late evening to access the site. Kept getting 'Server busy', which is a new one to me. It's just happened again resulting in multiple posts being sent. I'm using Windows Xp Pro, Firefox, Madasafish broadband.
Barack Obama's speech on race this Tuesday is already being hailed in quarters of American public opinion as one of the finest pieces of oratory in the country's history. The embattled Democratic presidential candidate turned the pitfall of his relationship with the volatile Jeremiah Wright into a transcendent meditation on the role of race in American society and politics. Few politicians of his stature and exposure have ever dared venture into these dusty corridors of the country's identity. And few will ever be capable of both the eloquence and the probing seriousness that Obama mustered in speaking the previously unspoken (YouTube video below).
As Michael Tomasky observed in the Guardian, the speech was perhaps too brilliant for its own good. But it is a measure of its impact that the bastions of conservative thought have been unable to respond to the newness of Obama's remarks. With their knives out and the table laid, conservatives were ready to carve up the expected, feeble "distancing" act. Instead, dinner was cancelled, and Obama, resplendent in his best smoking jacket, held court in the drawing room.
Take, for instance, the bludgeon and dudgeon of FoxNews' popular "O'Reilly Factor". The grating Bill O'Reilly led both programmes on Tuesday and Wednesday nights with "Talking Points" on Obama's address. In the first, O'Reilly had the grace to praise the speech, but then asked quite curiously if "Obama's deeds matched his words" (curious in so far as the words were quite significant deeds in-and-of themselves). O'Reilly's answer was predictably "no", but only because Obama refused to appear on FoxNews. The following night, O'Reilly touched on the speech again, but only as a platform to launch a bizarre and misplaced attack on the aging Jesse Jackson. O'Reilly trotted out the familiar straw-men, failing entirely to engage with the substance of Obama's speech, probably because he didn't know how.
Nor did Dean Barnett of the neo-conservative The Weekly Standard seem to be able to parry the speech's real thrust. Barnett missed the point altogether.
Obama brilliantly answered a question that virtually no one is asking... What the analysts who are gushing over Obama's sentiments regarding race relations are missing is not only did Obama fail to accomplish the mission he needed to, he didn't even really try. He made no attempt to explain his relationship with Wright and why he hung around a man who habitually offered such hateful rhetoric. Obama instead offered a non-sequitur on race relations.
Only blinkered, wishful thinking could think of race in this context as a "non-sequitur". One of the great victories of Obama's speech is that he rose above the foam, addressing the intrinsic problems that on one level frame race relations and on a lower level generate the kind of media frenzy that made Jeremiah Wright a household name.
Never mind that Obama did more than adequately "explain his relationship with Wright" – in unflinching, human terms. Never mind that Obama's relationship to Wright should not be the preoccupation of a country mired in war, debt and division. Never mind that no Republican leaders are expected to account for their flirtations with Armageddon-seeking evangelicals. Obama cut through the chaff to address the question that should have been confronted long before. That the question was unasked is not an indictment of Obama, but of a polity (and an intelligentsia) that continues to choose fluff over fact.
One need look no further than Byron York's meek effort in the conservative National Review for an example of this kind of stilted attention. Clearly unsure of how to respond to Obama's weighty speech, he proceeded to cull quotes of support for Jeremiah Wright from members of the speech's audience, and tar Obama by association – scabrous hackery at its most desperate.
The grey lady of the right, the Wall Street Journal, seemed more equipped to weigh the import of Obama's Philadelphia address. Its editorial on the speech sought to slice through "super-structure" to a material "base" of sorts.
The Senator noted that the anger of his pastor "is real; it is powerful," and in fact it is mirrored in "white resentments." He then laid down a litany of American woe: "the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man who has been laid off," the "shuttered mill," those "without health care," the soldiers who have fought in "a war that never should have been authorized and never should've been waged," etc. Thus Mr. Obama's message is we "need unity" because all Americans are victims, racial and otherwise...
And the cause of all this human misery? Why, "a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favo[u]r the few over the many." Mr. Obama's villains, in other words, are the standard-issue populist straw men of Wall Street and the GOP, and his candidacy is a vessel for liberal policy orthodoxy -- raise taxes, "invest" more in social programs, restrict trade, retreat from Iraq.
Obama's speech about race was, in effect, about material realities and histories, which he dwelled on particularly in minutes 18-22 and 28-32. Obama insisted that Wright's "anger" and the sense of alienation amongst American minorities (and other groups) was not only "real" but derived from real conditions and events. Suggesting that there are tangible culprits – the WSJ's scarecrow audience of "Wall Street straw men" – does, yes, have a whiff of the "populist" about it. But by speaking in historical and economic (and not just social) terms, Obama has set out a bolder political project, one in which a clear vision of race in America is not simply a box to tick, but an integral and necessary part.
A new report aiming to protect women and girls in eastern DRC argues that policies to prevent sexual violence be closely linked to established and ongoing conflict resolution and peacemaking initiatives already underway.
In a roll-call of the world's bloodiest and most intractable conflicts, the decade-long civil war fought in the Democratic Republic of Congo will surely rank depressingly high. Despite an official ceasefire declaration in 2002 and a further peace deal with rebel factions in the east at the start of this year, a cycle of deadly violence continues. DRC is also the site of an epidemic of sexual violence against women and girls, where rape, routinely used as a weapon of war by nearly all forces involved in the conflict, has become endemic.
This ongoing humanitarian crisis is not news to the international community. A 2002 Human Rights Watch report detailed the "culture of violence against women and girls" labelling it "the war within the war". Yet still very little progress has been made on tackling the epidemic, and there has been a lack of a unified effort to protect women and girls in DRC.
A new report out today from Enough, a US-based project working to end genocide and crimes against humanity entitled "Getting Serious about Ending Conflict and Sexual Violence in Congo" aims to change this by calling for an integrated approach to ending the violence through the peacemaking process:
"Because rape is used as a weapon of war in Congo, bringing one of the most complex conflicts in the world to an end will ease the suffering of women and girls and, if sufficient resources are made available, enable women and girls to participate in the healing and reconstruction of their families, communities, and country."
Due to its roots in conflict, much of the violence against women and girls is perpetrated by soldiers, former combatants, police forces and even criminals taking advantage of the fragmented nature of society. It is so accepted that sexual violence is committed with near-total impunity. Because of the threat posed by the police and military, the Enough report argues for a commitment to security sector reform (SSR) from the international community, including strengthening vetting, training of and justice within the military.
Recent figures released by the International Rescue Committee estimate that the conflict in DRC has so far cost 5.4 million lives, largely from war-related yet preventable disease, infection and starvation. The ongoing war against women and girls, particularly in the east, is destroying communities, families and lives for years to come. There can be no future for DRC until this war is halted, and women and girls can begin to heal, and to contribute to the healing of their nation.
This is the second report on the LILAC (UK information literacy) conference which is taking place in Liverpool, UK, 17-19 March. In this post I’ll concentrate on workplace information literacy. Firstly, the photo is part of a poster which gave results of a survey of Australian Government librarians, that was carried out a few months ago (authors are Jennifer Kirton, Lyn Barham and Sean Brady, Wollongbar Agricultural Institute).
Some of the questions asked the librarians the extent to which they saw each of the six information literacy standards (as outlined in the ANZIIL framework) as being their job to develop with departmental staff. They also asked about the information literacy training that was carried out. On Monday of the conference I attended a presentation from John Crawford on the study Christine Irving and he had been doing into workplace information literacy. This is part of their overall project in Information Literacy looking at the spectrum of sectors and including development of the Scottish Framework for information literacy (which I’ve blogged about before and which was the subject of a conference keynote). Their project website is at http://www.caledonian.ac.uk/ils/ and there is a page specifically on workplace IL.
John started by highlighting some of the previous research into workplace learning, giving a summary which stated that “All theorists (e.g. Lave and Wenger) agree that learning in the workplace is a form of social interaction”, but that there is disagreement as to whether learning is exclusively situated in the particular workplace (or whether it is more amenable to influence from and to the outside world). John noted that the library literature and educational theory literature don’t connect (well, actually he talked of a “complete disjunction”) and one aspect which pedagogic literature neglects is that of intellectual property.
Another couple of points I’ll pick up are that he felt that “the daily round of tasks” could substitute for the curriculum in developing information literacy. This fits in with things I’ve blogged before about tying IL training in with workplace tasks or forms (such as linking into project cycles). The issue of “professional ideologies” was also raised, and I think there are parallels here to study of academics, where conceptions of information literacy are seen from the perspective of someone within an academic or professional grouping (e.g. a chemist’s perspective of information literacy).
John reported on findings from interviews with care home staff, staff at the Scottish Tribunal, Scottish Government, and Social work and NHS staff. As I would have expected, people were an important source of information in all cases, and this means that the role of human relationships in information activity needs to be taken into account. Adult literacies training was seen as "powerful driver" that might encourage information literacy.
Also unsurprisingly (I'm afraid), public libraries were not seen as relevant to people's workplace information needs. One point made in the conclusion was that "an understanding of what constitutes information literacy is widespread in the workplace but is often implicit rather than explicit and is based on qualifications, experience and networking activity." There was a lot of interesting material in teh presentation and John & Christine intend to write it up and also are pursuing follow up activities.
Finally I will briefly mention the i-skills in the workplace initiative, which Netskills have been carrying out. (NB for US readers this is not the ETS iskills, it is something that was called "i-skills" first ;-) This initiative is aimed at non-academic staff in further and higher education in the UK. There have been a number of workshops (firstly free, latterly with a modest fee) in which staff could reflect on their own i-skills and aim to develop them further. One tool that has been developed out of this work is a self-evaluation form online, so that people can identify which information literacy or information management skills they most need and how well they think they are doing in them. This is not a test, it is self-rating, but the profile gets stored online so you can refer back to it. This is in the final stages of development and should be made freely available. The website for this initiative (with information on resources and workshops) is at http://www.netskills.ac.uk/content/ themes/infoskills/index.html
It took a German to bring France to heel in the latest attempt by France to extend its self-interest beyond the borders of the EU with no regard for ‘Union’. While Sarkozy dismissed criticism that he had planned the union as an exclusively French project, saying that "I never had the idea of excluding any EU states […] I never regarded it as a rival to the EU". However, he admitted that "a compromise had to be found with the EU countries not in the region, and I perfectly understand that they wanted to feel involved". It was only the intervention of Merkel that caused Sarkozy to change his stance and say that, "It made me happy to see how she defended the Union for the Mediterranean […] That was really the German-French axis." So EU leaders have given the green light to a compromise, struck by French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, to create a 'Union for the Mediterranean', an initiative aimed at upgrading the EU's relations with its neighbours from North Africa and the Middle East. Sarkozy had originally envisioned the new Union as an exclusive club, involving only the EU's Mediterranean countries and its neighbours but not the EU as a whole.
Our friends at Avaaz (including openDemocracy's co-founder, Paul Hilder) have been working at getting a global and significant petition to represent world opinion about events in Tibet. Pasted below is their latest request, which I fully support.
Avaaz's work at Bali, in Gaza and in Burma has been really impressive. They have been able to deliver strong, credible messages representing global opinion very rapidly at moments that can count. I am reminded of an observation by Arthur C Clarke:
"A hundred years ago, the electric telegraph made possible - indeed, inevitable - the United States of America. The communications satellite will make equally inevitable a United Nations of Earth; let us hope that the transition period will not be equally bloody." (First on the Moon, 1970).
Avaaz are making use of the possibilities of the Internet - the new telegraph - in just that way, and the events in Tibet are part of the bloody transition.
Dear friends,
Our petition for restraint and dialogue in Tibet is exploding, with 253,353 signers since yesterday! Add your voice to the outcry now:
Sign the Petition!
In just 36 hours, 253,553 of us have supported the Dalai Lama's call for dialogue and human rights in Tibet. This is an incredible response--if each of us can get 4 more of our friends to sign the petition, we'll hit 1 million this week!
After decades of suffering, the Tibetan people have burst onto the streets in protests and riots. The spotlight of the upcoming Olympic Games is now on China, and Tibetan Nobel peace prize winner the Dalai Lama is calling to end all violence through restraint and dialogue--he urgently needs the support of the world's people.
China's leaders are lashing out publicly at the Dalai Lama--but we're told many Chinese officials believe dialogue is the best hope for stability in Tibet. China's leadership is right now considering a crucial choice between crackdown and dialogue that could determine Tibet's--and China's--future.
We can affect this historic choice--China does care about its international reputation, and we can help them choose the right path. China's President Hu Jintao needs to hear that the 'Made in China' brand and the upcoming Olympics in Beijing will succeed only if he makes the right choice. But it will take an avalanche of global people power to get his attention. Click below now to join 250,000 others and sign the petition--and tell absolutely everyone you can right away--our goal is 1 million voices united for Tibet:
http://www.avaaz.org/en/tibet_end_the_violence/22.php
China's economy is dependent on "Made in China" exports that we all buy, and the government is keen to make the Olympics in Beijing this summer a celebration of a new and respected China. China is also a sprawling, diverse country with much brutality in its past, so it has good reasons to be concerned about stability -- some of Tibet's rioters killed innocent people. But President Hu must recognize that the greatest danger to Chinese stability and development today comes from hardliners who advocate escalating repression, not from those Tibetans seeking dialogue and reform.
We will deliver our petition directly to Chinese officials in New York, London and Beijing, but it must be a massive number first. Please forward this email to your address book with a note explaining to your friends why this is important, or use our tell-a-friend tool to email your address book--it will come up after you sign.
The Tibetan people have suffered quietly for decades. It is finally their moment to speak--we must help them be heard.
With hope and respect,
Ricken, Iain, Graziela, Paul, Galit, Pascal, Milena, Ben and the whole Avaaz team
If you feel depressed because of the shocking amount of effort it involves to discover what you're searching for, relax because you're one step closer to your goal.
Primary Research Group have released a report based on information from "more than 110" North American universities College Information Literacy Efforts
