LIL-DEM stakeholder report released

Posted on October 3, 2017 by Bruce Ryan

Click the graphic to download the report

We are very pleased that we can release our report on the LIL-DEM project. This report is based on our initial examination of the data from a Scotland-wide online survey of community councillors. Please click the graphic on the left to access the report.

Over the next few weeks, we will explore some of the issues raised in this report, but for now we want to thank the 1300 community councillors who responded to the survey, the community councillors who helped publicise it, and the people who helped us refine the questions. (These include Improvement Service staff, colleagues here at Edinburgh Napier University’s Centre for Social Informatics, and some Edinburgh community councillors.)

‘Practices of community representatives …’ presentation at i3 #i3rgu

Posted on July 4, 2017 by Bruce Ryan

Peter Cruickshank‘s presentation on our paper Practices of community representatives in exploiting information channels for citizen engagement is available from his slideshare site. This presentation, delivered at information: interactions and impact, was based on some of our work for the IL-DEM project. Peter discusses:

what community councils and who community councillors are; why they are interesting; how this motivates our research
a necessarily brief history of information literacy (IL); the recent-ish SCONUL model of IL; and Activity Theory (Wikipedia)
how we did the research; and our findings, set out in order of the SCONUL pillars:
- about how community councillors learn about their roles.
  - For example, it was noticeable how few stepped far from the information and training provided by local authorities. (There are issues with that – see the next blog post.)
- about how they keep up to date with local issues, and gather information on citizens’ opinions. (The latter is their main statutory duty.)
  - For example, planning to fill information gaps lacks rigour, and there are noticeable variations in information-gathering practices.
  - But information-gathering and sharing can help build much-needed social capital (Wikipedia)
how Activity Theory can help explain these ‘broken pillars’
some thoughts on IL as a measurement and explanation tool
some policy implications.

We are grateful to CILIP‘s Information Literacy Group for funding this research, and to the organisers of i3 for this opportunity to publicise our work.

PS: other Centre for Social Informatics presentations at i3 are showcased on Hazel Hall’s blog-post.

Napier research conference slides

Posted on June 21, 2017 by Bruce Ryan

Come and see our ‘digital poster’ at #NapRes17. ‘A tale of two models talks about our IL-DEM project

If you can’t make it, here are our slides.

IL-DEM abstracts accepted for I3 and ECIL conferences

Posted on April 4, 2017 by Bruce Ryan

We’re pleased that our submission on the results of IL-DEM project made to information: interactions and impact (I³) has been accepted. Edinburgh Napier University’s Centre for Social Informatics will be strongly represented at this conference, which takes place in Aberdeen in June.

Our i3 presentation will cover a range of findings including the means by which community councillors learn about their roles, and how they discover and share information about local issues. These results derive from our investigations based on SCONUL’s 7-pillars model of information literacy (PDF).

We have reported practical aspects of our results in our Stakeholder Report for the IL-DEM project. At I³ we look forward to reporting the results in an academic context. We also plan to extend the I³ presentation as a full journal article for submission to the Journal of Library and Information Science.

We’ve also learnt that our abstract on our use of Activity Theory as a data-analysis tool has been accepted for the 2017 European Conference on Information Literacy (ECIL). This conference takes place in St Malo, France in September. It is also our intention to develop this second conference paper into a more substantial output. We’ll blog details of this in due course.

LIL-DEM – examining our survey responses

Posted on March 27, 2017 by Bruce Ryan

The online survey for the second Information Literacy for Democratic Engagement project has been running for about three weeks now. We intend to keep it live for another week, so we can’t say anything about what community councillors have told us – yet! However, we can say there are some interesting patterns in how people tackled the survey.

As of Saturday (25th March) evening, 747 people had completed the survey. We want as many people as possible to take the survey, so if you’re a community councillor who hasn’t taken the survey yet, please click here. It may be slightly complex to complete all questions but it really should only take about 15 minutes, and you’ll be contributing to a major piece of work contributing to knowledge of practical ways to support community council work. If you’re not a community councillor, please pass on this link to any you know: https://survey.napier.ac.uk/n/LILDEM.aspx. Continue reading →

Survey of community councillors now live

Posted on March 8, 2017 by Bruce Ryan

Our survey investigating community councillors’ information literacy is now live. If you are a community councillor, please go to https://survey.napier.ac.uk/n/LILDEM.aspx to take the survey. If you’re not a community councillor, please pass on this link to any community councillors you know.

Starting more research into community councillors’ information literacy

Posted on February 27, 2017 by Bruce Ryan

As we said in a previous post, we are very pleased that we successfully finished the IL-DEM project. We’re even more pleased that we have just started a follow-up project called LIL-DEM (longitudinal information literacy for democratic engagement). This will also investigate community councillors’ information literacy, but it will sharply focus on the interaction of SCONUL’s information literacy pillars and life-roles that are likely to affect development of information literacy. Continue reading →

Community, Knowledge, Connections

Tag Archives: Community Councils