Yesterday I ditched the car and jumped on the train to London to attend an Information skills for Library Staff, CPD25 event at Birkbeck, University of London. The day did not get off to a good start. I arrived just as the event was due to start and didn’t get the opportunity to grab a cup of tea and a muffin before the first speaker! I was not happy and hoped the day was not set to continue in this fashion. Luckily it turned out to be an interesting day…
Sarah Arkle from the University of Bedfordshire was first up and she gave an introduction to LolliPop. LolliPop is an information literacy (IL) course for enquiry desk staff. The programme develops IL skills and teaches enquiry desk staff to transfer these skills into the work place. The programme originally called POP-i was developed for public library staff and with a few changes evolved into a tutorial for HE staff. Sarah provided feedback from the first pilot which tooko place at Loughborough University and University of Hertfordshire. The course ran for 13 weeks, with 27 participants and covered 10 units. Staff were given 1-2 hours a week to complete the course. Various activities were included such as: keeping a reflective journal; forums and formative quizzes. Feedback from staff included: too much reading and not enough doing; liked content; liked quizzes; liked informs tutorials and they liked the forums. Following on from the pilot a second version called Evidence Based LolliPop was developed. This time it included tools for learning such as wikis, blogs, Flickr, Twitter, Delicious, YouTube etc. The pilot group for version 2 were University of Bedfordshire, University of Worcester and Worcester College of Technology. The aim of the course was the up-skilling of staff over the summer for the new academic year. This looks like an interesting course that we could perhaps deliver to our front line staff? The advantages of LolliPop is that it has been written in HTML, therefore can be uploaded into any Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) or onto a website. Content changes can be made easily using Dreamweaver. LolliPop is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. The disadvantage is that some staff will not enjoy learning in an online environment (you can’t please everyone).
Next up was Craigie-Lee Paterson and Helen Stephen from Goldsmiths and they talked about their experiences of studying for the Open University course “The Evolving Information Professional: Challenges in a Digital World“, a course which is wholly delivered online. The course was based around the concept of the ‘magic triangle’ consisting of you, your users and your service and how they connect together. Overall they enjoyed the course and thought it was relevant to their job. They felt there was a lack of collaboration with no interaction with other students. The course states that it will take around 30 hours to complete but it took both of them much longer than this.
After a well deserved coffee break and opportunity to network we heard from Anne Pietsch and Brian Kilpatrick from Roehampton University who provided an evaluation of the LolliPop scheme at their University. They condensed the course into an 8 week course and did a HUGE amount of editing for it to work within WebCT (you wouldn’t need to do this for Moodle). I think their approach to the course worked well as pre-course they had a training day for participants. There were six onine learning units to be completed which were released weekly. The advantage of this was that everyone was at the same place. At week 3 the group had a feedback session with tea and cake (i particularly liked this approach) and at the end they had a project evaluation survey and quiz. Feedback from the participants was good. Overall the volunteers enjoyed the experience and learned from it.
Over the course of the day it was quite clear that a lot of University libraries are removing their enquiry desks and replacing them with one desk staffed by library assistants. The frontline staff are then expected to deal with enquiry work and with this comes a need for a systematic approach to enquiry based training.
University of Sussex are one such institution which are going through a library refurbishment which will result in the ‘information hub’, a one-stop point of contact for enquiries. Some library staff at Sussex have raised concerns about the planned changes and have asked for additional enquiries training. Emma Walton, Learning and Teaching Support Manager took the opportunity to look at new ways of training staff to reinforce exisiting enquiries skills and she came up with the University of Sussex Library – “Pub Quiz”. The staff worked in teams with use of a laptop. Questions were organised into rounds consisting of 3-4 questions. Prizes were given to all participatns with a larger prize for the winning team. As a fun way to end the afternoon we all took part in a short CPD25 Information Skills for Library Staff Quiz to give us a taster and prizes were awarded all round! I really liked this as one approach to staff training as it allows groups to work together, it’s informal, it’s fun for both participants and the host and it’s just a different way of delivering a staff development session. I am already planning on running a similar session for library staff at RHUL and thinking about how I can combine this with the clickers?!
