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:

1. what community councils and who community councillors are; why they are interesting; how this motivates our research
2. a necessarily brief history of information literacy (IL); the recent-ish SCONUL model of IL; and Activity Theory (Wikipedia)
3. 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)
4. how Activity Theory can help explain these ‘broken pillars’
5. some thoughts on IL as a measurement and explanation tool
6. 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.