Day 3 feedback from Catherine

I felt I got a lot out of the course and it has open my eyes to how social media can be used as a tool to engage and communicate with our students and staff.  The course was well run and Sangeet was a good teacher, who clearly explained digital literacy and used interesting and relevant examples to illustrate this. 

I did feel that for academic librarians, the final day of the course was quite wordy and spent too long focussing on issues that are more important for children rather than students.  I would have like more practical experience exploring how to use other social media - like prezi, wiki and wordpress, maybe some examples illustrating how how teachers use it to engage with their students. However, I do understand that the issue is of huge importance for other types of libraries and it was right that so much time was devoted to it that day. 

As a suggestion, future courses could be run for different types of library, i.e. academic, public and commercial?  And then the content could be tailored to meet needs and interests of those particular institutions.

All in all, it was a great course and I hope that WISE KIDS and Cymal continue to provide more of them in the future.

Stay safe and be CyberSavvy at Cardiff Met

More than half our students are school leavers, and are officially adults.  That is not to say that they don't need being made aware of how their behaviour online may affect their reputation and safety.

Although the welfare of students is mainly the responsibility of Student Services, the library can enlighten students through information literacy sessions, covering cybersavvy topics closely connected to successful study, i.e. critical evaluation and thinking skills - or sorting out the cyber good, bad and ugly.

For example, using images - most students don't know that downloading images without copyright permission is illegal.  This can be tied in with some interesting examples, perhaps showing what happens when an image is copied without the owners consent, etc. 

As students are adults, the last thing they need is a lecture.  It has to be done subtly.... We need to find out what other departments are doing to educate students on u and work closely with them to enhance this.

Cardiff Met Uni Libraries - Creating a simple wiki for Textile Students

I've set up a Wiki for a specific module that's starting in January.  It is for year 1 Textiles and aims to provide inspiration, ideas and where to go for further resources and information.  They can also contribute and share ideas and practices as well.

It's very much a work in progress as I only got the go-ahead a few days ago, so the 'look' of it and overall content will certainly not be completed by Monday.  But if you want a sneaky peak, it's up there on Wikispaces.

Any other tips, or suggestions duly appreciated!

Look forward to seeing you all on Monday. :)

Setting up a collaborative blog or wiki for distance learning students

I'm Catherine Drake and I'm the information advisor for Art & Design at UWIC.  We've just done a round of library inductions, so it has been very busy here.

My job involves teaching information literacy skills to students based at Llandaff, managing the book budget, stock collection, enquiry work and a bit of cataloguing.

For this project, I'm going to look into setting up a wiki or a blog for a group of doctoral students that I will be teaching early in October.  Many of these students live and work abroad, so this will enable them to access the presentation with links to useful sites & information.    I'm focusing on a small group of guinea pigs to assess how useful and successful it will be.  If it's something that students appreciate and want, then we can use this as a case study to show management that we need to embed social media more into overall library policy, particularly relating to how we inform and teach our students.

Social Media - what areas of academia & student life would it be most suited for?

This mind map is looking at where social media would be most useful for students & academics.  I did a very rough map yesterday of the ways that we could use social media to promote our library services.  A couple of hot topics in the academic library at the moment are Information Literacy and Academic liasion.  Wisekids has got me thinking about how social media can be used to spread information and awareness.  But you can't just do the social media for everything.  Much time and effort must be invested in how we invest in social media and where it's most likely to be effective.