research

Embedding Digital and Information Literacy in Undergraduate Teaching report

The latest piece of research by CLT on Embedding Digital and Information Literacy in Undergraduate Teaching compared strategies being used by three projects that are part of the JISC Developing Digital Literacies programme and the opportunities and threats for adopting some of these strategies as part of the work to embed the ANCIL framework into undergraduate teaching.

The report recommends a dual approach for Information Literacy and Digital Literacy skills to be successfully embedded into undergraduate teaching at the LSE. As explored in the CASCADE programme, student change agents provide contextualised, peer-to-peer support, but also important feedback on the kinds of issues faced by students, and the tools and technologies being used to overcome them and gain IL skills.

The ‘top down’ approach advocated by McGuinness (2007) is also needed to complement and support change agents. There needs to be increasing communication between academic faculty, academic support staff and librarians to better understand each others roles and remits, and find areas for effective collaboration.

We have already starting to explore some of the recommendations of this report, and have got the ball rolling through the ‘Student Ambassadors for Digital Literacy project’ (SADL), which will be looking at the role of student ambassadors to support digital literacies, and provide vital feedback to the project team on the embedded approach.

The report is now available via LSE Research Online.

References:

McGuinness, C. (2007). Exploring Strategies for Integrated Information Literacy: From “ Academic Champions ” to Institution-Wide Change. Communications in Information Literacy, 1(1), 26–38. Retrieved from http://www.comminfolit.org/index.php?journal=cil&page=article&op=view&path[]=Spring2007AR3&path[]=14. Accessed 26 July 2013.

July 26th, 2013|Reports & Papers, Research Skills, Teaching & Learning|Comments Off on Embedding Digital and Information Literacy in Undergraduate Teaching report|
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Exploring Social Media as data sources for research

Last Wednesday, CLT ran a workshop on Exploring Social Media as data sources for research as part of our NetworkEd series.

There was an excellent turnout of around 35 academics and PhD students from across the LSE’s departments attending, which shows that there is real interest in developing effective research methods to analyse the wealth of data social media can provide.

Some of the tools we explored can be found here. We got the ball rolling by discussing the advantages and disadvantages of using social media data for research, which Jane presented below:

advantages and disadvantages of social media for research data

July 1st, 2013|Events & Workshops (LTI), NetworkED, Research Skills, Social Media|Comments Off on Exploring Social Media as data sources for research|
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Neurodiversity and Lecture Recording survey

Steve Bond and I have been reviewing some of the research on how students use lecture recordings for their studies, and we noticed that several papers mention that lecture recordings could be helpful for neurodiverse students, particularly students with dyslexia, without actually measuring how. A bit more delving revealed that, although research has been done on dyslexic students’ views on Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), and studies have looked at note-taking by dyslexic students, little research exists about how dyslexic students actually use lecture recordings in their studies.

We got in touch with Sophie Newman, the Disability Officer with the LSE Student Union and Linda Kelland at the Disability and Well-being office for some more information. Their advice has been really helpful in highlighting some of the challenges neurodiverse students face at the School, such as lack of access to lecture recordings and lecture notes, and how students are using apps such as Notability to help make notes in lectures, which has really helped us get some insight into this topic.

So we thought we’d do a bit of research on this, and we need your help. We’d be most grateful if you could take our survey at http://tinyurl.com/p4eb5s9, but we’d also like your opinions and experiences on questions like:

  • What are the challenges you’ve faced making notes or recordings?

  • What are your experiences with lecture recordings on Moodle? Do you find them useful? And

  • What do you think would make life easier for your studies at the school (lecture recording wise, of course)?

There’s also a chance to enter a draw to win a £50 Amazon voucher, so if you’d like to help out, please comment below!

May 28th, 2013|Uncategorized|Comments Off on Neurodiversity and Lecture Recording survey|
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Using Social Media Data for Research

Last Friday, I attended an excellent workshop on ‘Anonymity, Identity and Credibility: Challenges of Using Social Media Data for Research’, run by the Social Media Knowledge Exchange (SMKE), based at Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at Cambridge University. It was organised by Dr. Ella McPherson, an LSE fellow in Media and Communications and an SMKE scholar at Cambridge University, and the workshop was attended by PhD students and academics from institutions around the UK from a variety of disciplines, including History, Sociology and Media.

The workshop featured four presentations from speakers from NGOs at the forefront of using data from social media data for campaign activities, policy making and advocacy; especially from areas where conventional sources of information may be difficult or impossible to get (such as conflict areas or disaster zones). The workshop also highlighted some of the techniques these organisations use to verify the credibility of social media data, many of which could cross over to how academic researchers use social media sources. These included:

  • Verification: what is the actual source of their information? Can this information be validated by offline sources?
  • Triangulation: how many other sources are reporting the same information? Do their views align?
  • Authentication: who is re-posting this information? Has this information been picked up by traditional media sources?
May 21st, 2013|Social Media|4 Comments|
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