Loughborough University Library: Open Journals
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Online Course Design Using Iterative Workshops on Computer-Supported Collaborative Design for Engineering Design Students
Full text linkBased on observations of global design classes at different institutions, students selected technologies without justification for the suitability of the technology to support their collaborative design activities. To best support students in their collaborative endeavours, a short online course in computer-supported collaborative design was developed. The process of the creation of the short online course was unique using students’ identification of their gaps in knowledge during workshops, iteratively over three years to develop a complete educational experience. Workshops were conducted with students to identify gaps in students’ knowledge that were addressed at future workshops, by filling these gaps and conducting the same gap finding activity the researchers can identify if these gaps can be filled through an educational intervention. Surveys were used to evaluate the success of the development of an online course in Computer-Supported Collaborative Design (CSCD). The method for the development of the short online course was logical and successful based on feedback from students during surveys. The outcomes of this method can have implications for those developing novel courses in familiar teaching environments or new digital media. This research has identified the interventions required to prepare students for global design projects in a novel way. Lessons from this research will support other educators to consider their course development practice.  
Book review of Mackey, T., and Jacobson, T. 2022. Metaliteracy in a connected world: Developing learners as producers
Full text linkIntegrating information practices into everyday teaching
Full text linkThis paper reports on the information practices and information literacy (IL) skills of South Korean elementary school students from the perspectives of working teachers. Key to this investigation was the notion of information practice, and how this is shaped by the practice architecture found in an educational setting. A sequential mixed design was undertaken to investigate these ideas which consisted of exploratory interviews with 4 elementary school teachers and was followed by a questionnaire which analysed the responses of 314 elementary school teachers. Findings indicate that in this setting, teachers, students and pre-set curricular content serve as the most frequently used information sources for students during their everyday classes. We pay specific attention to the ongoing centrality of the textbook, in its traditional paper format, to the ways in which teachers design learning activities, and suggest that this limits the diversity of informational approaches to which young South Korean learners are exposed. While these learners are engaged, they are limited in terms of informational genre since teachers and textbooks were found to be dominant information proxies. Activities in which students engage in active seeking or scanning are rarer. Contexts with such a configuration may be hindering the development of critical information literacy skills that are vital in dealing with the abundance of information faced by individuals today
Why Draw Pictures that Already Exist?
Full text linkIt is widely held that, due to its causal nature, photography is the visual medium best suited for enabling individuals to form a sense of perceptual contact with distant or deceased subjects, and so to mitigate against the loss of the subject. Yet, a number of artists, who have meticulously recreated photographs by a slow, laborious process of drawing, have reported that this manual activity has afforded a richer sense of connectedness with the distant or lost subjects. In this article, I produce a phenomenological analysis of this experience, which I term the “presence phenomenon”. To explain this phenomenon, I employ recent work from philosophy of perception and philosophy of mind to argue that the act of drawing, unlike looking at a photograph, presents affordances for bodily action that, in combination with the realism of the work, trigger sub-doxastic associative mechanisms that produce an enhanced sense of connection to the subject
The faculty-focused model of information literacy
Full text linkIn a faculty-focused, or “teach the teachers” (TTT) model of information literacy (IL), librarians would spend a significant portion of their time on faculty development. To support the adoption of this approach, there needs to be evidence that librarians can act effectively as faculty developers and that faculty development (also referred to as academic or educational development) can produce positive changes in teaching practices and student learning. This paper explores the faculty development literature in order to better understand the potential of the faculty-focused model of IL. Two research questions guided the review. What can the literature on the effectiveness of faculty development tell us about the potential of the faculty development approach to IL? Additionally, what insight can the literature on the background, experiences, and identity of faculty developers provide to our understanding of librarians acting as faculty developers?
The analysis provides indications that a model of IL instruction focused on faculty could support increased integration of IL into the curriculum, as well as additional evidence that faculty development should be considered a viable role for librarians. However, the review also surfaced concerns about the identity and status of developers and the challenges of assessing faculty development that are relevant to librarians’ adoption of the faculty-focused model of IL. By exploring the faculty development literature as part of a consideration of the TTT approach to IL, this paper provides a valuable perspective to the ongoing debates about the future of IL
Technical practices used by information literacy and media information literacy services to enable academic libraries to handle the COVID-19 pandemic
Full text linkThis study analyses the techniques and procedures that were developed and the changes that took place in the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and the Autonomous University of Puebla (BUAP), both in Mexico, and the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD), in the United States of America. To face the crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic, librarians in these institutions improved their Information Literacy (IL) and Media Information Literacy (MIL) programmes.
Design / methodology / approach
This study has a mixed methodology with a comparative analysis. For this purpose, data shows the universities’ contexts: the communities of students, teachers, researchers, and librarians, and the e-learning strategies of IL and MIL programmes.
Findings
As part of the results of the crowdsourcing collaboration between the UMD, UNAM and BUAP, the study shows the different online learning communities and their innovations.
Originality
Although there is theoretical knowledge about IL and MIL in Mexican universities and University of Minnesota Duluth, the e-learning strategies used by their librarians in this document sought to provide technical solutions and other options for a virtual work scheme that responded to the specific problems presented by COVID-19. In this case, the framework for creating online library services was designed by their librarians for their communities in the context of the current crisis, even when online services had already been established for more than ten years.
Research limitations / implications
The technological infrastructure, the professionalisation of the library staff and a lack of knowledge of the new virtual teaching-learning needs.
Practical implications
Analysis of tools for virtual teaching-learning services, description of strategies used by library staff, results and feedback.
Social implications
IL and MIL strategies created in a variety of contexts can be enhanced by library collaboration in a fully virtual setting. Libraries with better technological infrastructure play a decisive role.
 
Do Not Scale
Full text linkProducing scaled artefacts — models, maps, and especially drawings — is crucial to design fields that anticipate and mobilise projects beyond the scope of a single human body to perceive, encompass, or enact. To consider intermediary drawings is to confront the remoteness and loss of immediacy produced by displacing the human body. But if physical presence and warm human bodies are sacrificed in the abstraction and distancing of schematic drawings, they return in displaced and peripheral ways through scaling. That is, scale becomes a means to recuperate loss. In this article, I consider the losses of scaled drawing and confront a large unscaled work, Monique Jansen’s Overcast (2017), using it to prompt a reconsideration of scale. I suggest that although Overcast does not have a scale (in that it is not referential), Jansen’s Overcast can be considered to scale, because it participates in circuits that take us beyond the scope of an individual human body. 
Students, academic reading and information literacy in a time of COVID
Full text linkReports on a panel discussion held at LILAC 2022 on student academic reading during the COVID-19 pandemic. Draws on data from two surveys, but also discusses the implications of this research for teachers and information literacy (IL) practitioners. In summary, students carried out almost all their academic reading in electronic format, due to the restrictions in place. However, in common with research conducted prior to the pandemic, their preferences for reading in print format remained. Students also report doing less of their assigned readings, feeling more tired as well as reporting other negative health benefits from excess use of screens and devices. The study has implications for librarians, learning developers and for academic staff assigning course readings to students. Ongoing research in this area is recommended. 
Have a CCOW: A CRAAP alternative for the internet age
Full text linkThe CRAAP Test is a popular tool for teaching students to evaluate information. Its simplicity and ease of understanding make it suitable for teaching in the limited time of a typical one-shot library instruction session. However, it has recently come under criticism for being unequal to the internet age. Critics hold that students treat the CRAAP criteria as a checklist, rarely leaving the source under evaluation to gather more information to aid their assessment, an activity crucial for internet factchecking. This paper details a new set of evaluation criteria that seeks to retain the convenient conceptual packaging of CRAAP while encouraging an investigative mindset. Students are asked to actively investigate the Credentials, Claims, and Objectives behind the information they are evaluating. A fourth criterion, Worldview, prompts metacognition and builds the self-awareness critical to making good judgements about information. This paper explores the CCOW criteria and details a flipped, online guide and exercise which has been successfully used to teach information literacy (IL) to college students in their first year of study using CCOW