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)
- about how community councillors learn about their roles.
- 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.
