Research Skills

Information Literacy support for LSE PhD research students

  • Need help researching academic resources for your major review?
  • Want to pick up new tips on using a range of academic databases and online resources?
  • Need advice on citing materials and structuring your bibliography?
  • Looking for statistical data for your research.

Why not book a place on MY592: Workshop on Information Literacy
This six week programme (part of the Methodology Institute’s Workshop series) is taught by the Library and Centre for Learning Technology. There are six 2 hour ‘hands on’ workshops which enable you to build up your research skills as we cover:

  • Literature searching, citation searching and finding materials using such databases as IBSS, Scopus, Web of Science, Econlit, etc.
  • Getting the most out of the internet for research
  • Managing information – citing references and using software to manage your information, e.g. EndNote, Zotero, Mendeley
  • Dealing with data – resources for data and how to use them
  • Finding newspaper, conference, theses, research and specialist publications
  • Next steps, keeping up to date, sharing your research and building a network.

MY592 is supported by a course in Moodle and all participants receive feedback on resources for their individual research topics. The course is ideal for first and second year PhD students.

This term the programme will start on Tuesday 6 November 10-12 in STC.S018 for 6 weeks. Further information is available at http://www2.lse.ac.uk/library/services/training/MY592.aspx and places can be booked on the LSE Training System.

Please email Library.Enquiries@lse.ac.uk if you have any queries about the course. It will run again in Lent and Summer term.

October 16th, 2012|Events & Workshops (LTI), Research Skills|Comments Off on Information Literacy support for LSE PhD research students|

Supporting LSE Undergraduate Skills

CLT and LSE Library are leading a project to review the support for undergraduate students in terms of digital and information literacy skills. Recognising the importance of developing a wide range of literacies in undergraduate education, the project seeks to build on existing good practice across the School, for example in the LSE100 course.  Find out more about the project from our website – it builds on research that was completed last year between Jane Secker from LSE and Emma Coonan from the University of Cambridge. 

How can you help?

We are looking for LSE staff and graduate teaching assistants who are involved in undergraduate education to take part in this research. If you are willing to take part in a short interview then please email us. Alternatively you can complete the online questionnaire which is available until 29th June.

Email: Maria Bell, m.bell@lse.ac.uk; Jane Secker, j.secker@lse.ac.uk;

June 1st, 2012|Announcements, Research Skills|Comments Off on Supporting LSE Undergraduate Skills|

CLT launch short series for researchers

Later this term CLT will be collaborating with LSE Library and the Legal and Compliance Team to deliver a series of three short workshops for PhD students and researchers focusing on the legal issues you need to consider when undertaking research. The sessions cover:

  • Freedom of Information requests
  • Data Protection
  • Copyright issues

If you wish to book a place on any of the workshops visit the Training and Development System to find out more. Alternatively full course descriptions and links to each course are included below.

January 31st, 2012|Events & Workshops (LTI), Research Skills|Comments Off on CLT launch short series for researchers|

Form an orderly queue for your copyright queries

I just wanted to report that I am now back at LSE, in my role as Copyright and Digital Literacy Advisor in the Centre for Learning Technology. My new job title more accurately reflects the support I offer to staff at LSE, so please do get in touch if you have any queries!

I spent last term at Wolfson College, Cambridge, where I was an Arcadia Fellow carrying out research into the skills and needs of undergraduate students over the next five years in relation to information literacy. The main output of my research was designing what is being called the New Curriculum for Information Literacy. The Executive Summary actually says as much about the way such a curriculum should be implemented, as the content that should be included. However, working with my project associate, Dr Emma Coonan, the Research Skills and Development Librarian at Cambridge University Library, we hope to have designed a revolutionary curriculum for the future. We interviewed a wide range of experts as part of our research and have drawn up a curriculum divided into 10 strands. It should be of particular interest to anyone teaching undergraduate students, in particular the LSE100 team. The outputs and reports from the project are on our wiki and I will shortly be depositing them into LSE Research Online.

If you’d like to know more about my research, or if you have any copyright or digital literacy queries, please do get in touch with me.

July 28th, 2011|Announcements, Reports & Papers, Research Skills|Comments Off on Form an orderly queue for your copyright queries|

Blogging & Twitter Workshops

Due to popular demand we have scheduled two additional workshops next week. A handful of spaces remain for each.

  • Introduction to Twitter – Wednesday 22nd June @ 12:00 – Uses of Twitter in education, including a hands-on session to get you up-and-running or develop your existing use. Details & Booking
  • Introduction to Blogging – Thursday 23rd June @ 12:00 – Covers blogging for researchers as well as other uses in education such as newsletters & teaching. Includes the opportunity to create your own blog. Details & Booking
June 13th, 2011|Announcements, Blogging, Events & Workshops (LTI), Research Skills, Social Media|Comments Off on Blogging & Twitter Workshops|

Review of social citation tools

I have recently reviewed a number of social citation tools to see how they might support the work of a large research team. I thought my notes on these tools might be of interest.

Mendeley http://www.mendeley.com /

Mendeley is both a reference management tool and an academic social network. It is a desktop application as well as a website. Some of the features that Mendeley supports include:

  • Automatically generate bibliographies
  • Collaborate easily with other researchers online
  • Easily import papers from other research software
  • Find relevant papers based on what you’re reading
  • Access your papers from anywhere online

The desktop application allows you to keep all of your citations, references, and papers sorted, searchable, and neatly filed away on your hard drive. You can tag them, search the full text and annotate your PDFs using the Desktop application. You can also use it to create bibliographies.

LSE Teaching Day

LSE Teaching Day 2010Last week was LSE Teaching Day, which was the second time we ran an event focusing on good practice in teaching for LSE staff. The day was opened by Dr Jonathan Leape who is the Course Director for LSE100, the new core course for undergraduates, which teaches them to ‘think like a social scientist’. Jonathan gave us an overview of lessons learnt from the pilot this year and spoke of the challenges of running a core course. These include the heterogeneity of the students, coming from different disciplines in the school, but also the diverse nature of the teachers on the course. He talked about the extensive teacher training that has been undertaken for the course tutors, the need to promote active learning and raise student engagement and the importance of feedback and evaluation from staff and students involved in the course. The course has used a variety of new technologies, including audio feedback, lecture capture, PRS and texting of ‘muddy points’ from lectures. In addition Moodle is used to provide support and resources.

Our keynote was given by Professor Nicola Lacey, from the Department of Law, who told us she was going to be controversial. She talked about the skills agenda and asked whether teaching skills was at cross purposes with research led teaching at LSE. She asked why there was a pressure to teach skills now, and gave us four reasons for this, which she emphasised were her beliefs and not based on research. Her reason included changes in schools and education, the expansion of higher education, the emphasis on research (which has led to less emphasis on teaching) in universities and the reaction of universities to student surveys. Interestingly she didn’t mention technology, which I would have seen as underpinning all these factors. Nicola believed that teaching quality is actually far higher now than ever before, but felt students have heightened expectations of what university education can give them. She also questioned the value of lecture capture, believing it can make lecturers more cautious, and students more inclined to see the lecture as being a definitive tool for revision – rather than reading books and journal articles. She also worried about hyperlinking every reading in Moodle, seeing this as spoonfeeding . She finished by illustrating how they are dealing with this in the Law department, by developing a skills module for students embedded into the core course for undergraduates. Resources are available in Moodle and there are lectures about study skills and surgeries for students who need help with essay writing.

We then went into parallel sessions and I was involved in a debate with colleagues Dr Claire Gordon, Dr Ernestina Coast and two students, where we debated whether we were teaching the Google Generation. We started by playing the Michael Wesch video: A vision of Students Today. Claire then introduced the session and talked about what the Google Generation might be, and what are the characteristics of this generation. I spoke about my experience of teaching information skills at LSE, including the areas where students seem to struggle – with citing and referencing, with good searching, with knowing how to find scholarly sources. Each of the panel talked for a few minutes and we then took questions from the floor. It was a fascinating session which Claire and I hoped would start a debate over the support and training that students at LSE might need, and what assumptions teachers might make about them in terms of what they know (often incorrectly).

Other sessions I attended during the day included, ‘Using social software tools for teaching Geography’ by Dr Hyun Shin. He had used an amazing range of tools to engage his students, from making his own You Tube videos, to using Facebook and Google groups. His research on cities and urban processes in south east Asia could be shared beyond LSE using many of the tools, and he felt Moodle could be quite restrictive. He was a keen advocate of open access.

The final session I attended was the Lecture Capture debate, where an academic and student took opposing sides to discuss the motion ‘This House Deplores Lecture Capture’. Dr Michael Cox from International Relations, argued that lecture capture was a bad thing while Dr Tim Leunig from Economic History argued it was a good thing. It was a light hearted look at what has been vexing many staff at LSE and is the subject of some research that CLT are currently undertaking. Students generally like lecture capture, but for a range of reasons some staff are opposed to it.

The day ended with a presentation of teaching excellence awards and a wine reception on the eighth floor of our New Academic Building. Well done to my colleague Athina and everyone who made the day interesting and good fun.

May 25th, 2010|Events & Workshops (LTI), Research Skills, Teaching & Learning|Comments Off on LSE Teaching Day|

Coming soon-ish

The annual Horizon reports track emerging technologies that are likely to have an impact on teaching and learning in the future.  The predictions of earlier reports are available elsewhere on this blog: 2009 2008 2007 and if you want to go further back see the Horizon website.

A short preview of the 2010 report (PDF) is already available.  The technologies it highlights (time frames for becoming mainstream to be taken with a pinch of salt perhaps) are:

  • Mobile Computing & Open Content (mainstream in the next year)
  • Electronic Books & Simple Augmented Reality (2-3 years)
  • Gesture-Based Computing & Visual Data Analysis (4-5 years)

If you want to know more about any of these then the preview is short, worth a look and has links to examples.  The other aspect of the Reports are the key trends and challenges that it highlights:

December 10th, 2009|Open Education, Reports & Papers, Research Skills, Teaching & Learning|Comments Off on Coming soon-ish|

on reading

Last night on Radio4’s Front Row novelist Susan Hill, talking to Mark Lawson about her new book (which charts a year in which she resisted buying new books, instead finally reading or re-reading those from her own  collection), revealed that she had also used that year to restrict her use of the internet, in particular her internet reading.

She had previously become aware that her concentration was not what it used to be and  suggested that “if you use the internet a lot you notice your concentration begins to become fragmented and you don’t have that complete concentration for two or three hours.”

With these comments she was not making a moral judgment, she was not condemning the internet for its pernicious, ruinous effects on the human ability to read; rather she was explaining how reading on the internet can embed the habit of skim-reading, of flitting from hyperlink to hyperlink, as most web pages encourage sound-bite (or rather: vision-bite) reading.

making it personal – 7th annual @greenwich conference

Yesterday I attended the 7th annual eLearning @greenwich conference “Making IT Personal“, which focused on the practical and theoretical, technical and pedagogical issues surrounding the notion of “self-regulated learning”, summarised by the key notion of “personalisation”. How can optimal (pedagogically beneficial) personalisation be achieved using eLearning tools? I missed the first ten minutes of the keynote by Professor Jonathan Drori: “Personalisation – the good, the bad, and the ugly”. The first thing I learnt today was to remember never to underestimate Deptford traffic gridlock. Leaving the house at eight to arrive at ten for a journey that would have taken me only 30 minutes to cycle is one of those valuable offline lessons life insists on throwing at me. I bat them away.

The morning keynote set the tone very gently. Learning is (obviously) an experience, but unlike personal pleasurable ones to which we return on our own accord, learning experiences are often imposed; worse, they are generally ill defined, their relevance to the students left unclear. Asking the audience to shout out some pleasurable personal activities, Jonathan used the answers to illustrate key adjectives that explain why theses activities are engaging. (I was one of the few to participate and shouted “having a political discussion in the pub”, which earned me an “aw, how sweet!” and giggles from the audience. An outrage! ). Pleasurable, personal experiences can be characterised as being:

1. Defined

2. Fresh

3. Accessible

4. Immersive

5. Significant

6. Transformative.

This is an assertion by Jonathan, but judging by the tweets, many in the audience agreed that this was a useful list. Learning experiences however often don’t fit any of those adjectives, they can be imposed, badly designed, irrelevant, indifferently presented, repetitive. They are not personal, they lack the personable. (So far, so fairly obvious. The ideal of personalisation is old and almost intuitively right: better teachers are engaging, performing, personable and pay attention to each individual student. They are also rare – what can we do to improve the situation?)

Professor Drori maintained that “the harder the concept, the more personal the learning experience needs to be.” If you want learning to be effective, or indeed at the very least to “actually take place”, then the best teaching emulates what we now know good experiences to be about. Thus, any tool, particularly eLearning tools need to be chosen according to how much they support this ideal of personalisation. Finishing on ‘the good, bad and downright ugly use of technologies’, I was struck by his unquestioning allegiance to the common instrumental definition of technology; and he was not above using the dreaded comparison that technologies can be like, say a kitchen knife: it can be good (for chopping onions) and bad (for stabbing people) – in effect employing the tired “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” argument characteristic of the neutrality view of technology. But issues surrounding technology – including their use in an educational setting – are rarely this simple and need much more critical appreciation. I wasn’t too bowled over by the speech, and found a final almost fatalist note surprising. Commenting on the importance to engage our children from an early age (fair enough), he asserted that if you start a bad habit early enough, be it smoking, disrespect, or indeed a bad attitude towards learning, you will continue to practice this bad habit. Which, I would suggest, does not bode well for any idealist conception of adult education. I will listen to it again, to see if I missed some salient points. I have been told it will be available as a podcast soon.

After coffee I attended a very interesting presentation on eLearning & social inclusion by Alan Clarke, formerly of NIACE. Alan was enthusiastic and almost overwhelmingly positively charged: IT can do so much to support those whom he prefers to call disadvantaged, rather than excluded: prisoners and ex-offenders, adults with almost no formal education, teenage mothers, disabled students… people, aged from 16 to death who have often very poor basic skills, the lowest confidence in their own abitlies and a history of educational failure. Due to the very nature of the learners NIACE supports, the approach can but be personal: these learners have no common learning skills, if they have anything in common it is a deep-seated suspicion of the processes of formal learning. He told us a variety of positive stories to illustrate how elearning, and the adaptive use of technology in a variety of settings has had an enormous impact on bringing disadvantaged learners “back into the fold”, giving them back confidence.
My second chosen presentation, led by Mary Kiernan and Ray Stoneham, both of Greenwich University, considered the dichotomy between socialisation and personalisation: The Danger of Impersonalisation in Mass Personalised Learning: Can Socialisation and Personalisation Co-exist? As an ice-breaker we were asked to write down our names and answer the question “if you had to ask one question about personalisation what would it be and why.” Our neighbour was then to introduce us with that question. Becki, to my left asked why personalisation was such a difficult task to accomplish, and I had her read out “is personalisation only this year’s buzz word to be replaced by a cool new one next year”, which had started to crystallise even before we were asked to perform this little “socialisation task”. We’ll be sent a list of the other questions, most of which were pertinent.Their key thesis in a nutshell: we have a basic human need to socialise but tend no longer to do this on PLEs (VLEs). There may be personalisation, but no socialisation. The question is: what happens when we neglect the social integration? Lack of connection will lead to demotivated students. Of course personalisation is nothing new, denoting the effort to personalise learning for large cohorts of people, whilst aiming for the same goal but with different routes and different starting points. Plato’s Socratic dialogues often embody the principle, the Oxbridge model is another example, and special educational needs another. But within these models, socialisation is implicit. In PLEs, socialisation is often left out, or at most paid lip service to. Further, personalisation itself brings up a set of dichotomies: individuality versus mutuality, social learning versus isolated learning etc. The issue for elearning is therefore to prevent that social learning, community learning falls by the wayside. An interesting discussion followed on from here, with participants sharing their experiences, worries and ideas about how social software can be integrated into PLEs, and what potential hurdles must be overcome. (My thinking is that our focus needs to be on the teachers – they need to understand the use and abuse, the potential and dangers of social software to make informed choices about how to use them in their teaching. I don’t think the burden of choosing tools for learning delivery should lie with the students).

Lunch was edible and fresh fruit abounded, and stimulating chats with colleagues were had, so that was me happy.

After lunch I decided to do a little writing and thinking before I joined the herd again for the final keynote, by Serge Ravet. It was fast and furiously delivered in a heartening French accent, challenging conceptions about personalisation. It touched on a myriad of topics and ideas, flitted from worries about personal data management to social networks, from hosting to aggregating, the concept of the “Internet of Subjects”, individualisation, Jean-Claude Kaufman’s book The invention of the Self (available in French or German…). A key message of his was that not only is there much more to personalisation than many contemporary discussions (in education, for example) will have you believe – data management, regulation, ownership, creation, sharing – but also that it may be the wrong concept to focus on: Ravet emphasises the importance of individualisation, and instead of personalised learning, which he considers old, trite, adaptive, he favours self-regulated learning, which is both individuation and individualisation, and thus a type of identity construction. I liked his challenge to the idea that we all speak of having different identities, an online identity, an offline identity. I do think this is a dangerous metaphor to perpetuate, as it gives rise to the idea that we are becoming fractured, split personalities, schizophrenics, or superheroes (Bruce Wayne/Batman) – and that the source for this clinical “wrong” is our being tied to technology. Our identity may be fragmented, but it is not therefore broken.

He was quick, and touched on various ideas I will have to follow up in the near future. Hopefully there will be a podcast of his talk too.