Information School News

Last Wednesday Sheila Webber , together with Bill Johnston and Stuart Boon of Strathclyde University, gave a workshop session on The Phenomenographic approach at the Higher Education Academy workshop Introducing educational research , held at Strathclyde University in Glasgow. Sheila is currently attending the i3 conference in Aberdeen, held at Robert Gordon University. On Monday she and Bill Johnston gave a presentation on their research Chemistry academics teaching information literacy: Conceptions and implications . Today she chairs one of the confernce sessions.

Our framework for PDP ("Personal Development Planning) entitled REAL ("Reflection, Learning And Learning") is now described at the CRA in their Issue 10 newsletter and at the University's LTE ("Learning Teacher Exchange").

Someone sent me this link - Everythings miscellaneous.... It is well worth watching. The video is 53 minutes long. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2159021324062223592 Some good comments on organisation of data, cataloguing, libraries, wikipedia.

The SINTO AGM and members day was held at Sheffield Hallam University on the 19th June. The focus of the afternoon was on skills for the future. Link to the SINTO website for news of the event. http://www.sinto.org.uk

The Fourth Joint Sheffield Conference on Chemoinformatics takes place this week here, in the Octagon Centre, University of Sheffield, UK, 18th to 20th June, 2007. It is under the aegis of The Chemical Structure Association Trust and the Molecular Graphics and Modelling Society. The Chemoinformatics Research Group in the Department has naturally taken a key role in organising the conference. http://cisrg.shef.ac.uk/shef2007/

Dr Miguel Nunes and Dr Ana Cristina Vasconcelos are attending the South East European Research Centre's (SEERC) Doctoral Student Conference (DSC 2007 - http://www.seerc.org/dsc2007/index.html ) as part of the discussion panel. Six PhD students, from the Department passed the peer-review procedure and are presenting either full papers or posters, as follows: Agustero, Nora - Academic Library Consortia in the Philippines: Current Practices and Future Needs (poster) Alajamy, Maram - Role of Academic Librarians in University-Wide IS Strategic Planning: in Syrian Governmental Universities (poster) Al-Mamari, Salim - The Barriers Associated with CRM Adoption in the Banking Sector (Full Paper) Idrees, Inaam - Knowledge Sharing Barriers in Multicultural context: Hotels in Saudi Arabia (poster) Katakalos, George - eLearning Environments: Group Interactions in Culturally Diverse Collaborative Learning (Full Paper) Lihong Zhou, Nick - Knowledge Sharing in the Convergence of Tradition...

On Saturday Sheila Webber gave a presentation Information literacy: marketing and educational views … and some research , at the British & Irish Association of Law Librarians ( BIALL ) conference, held here in Sheffield. It included highlights of a delphi study undertaken by two students on the Information Literacy Research module, James O'Brien and Christopher Rhodes. As noted already, James had been awarded a free place at this conference.

Last week we enjoyed a research seminar from Professor David Frolich, University of Surrey Digital World Research Centre( http://www.dwrc.surrey.ac.uk/ ), who talked about the Role of sound in domestic photography.

Last week Dr Val Gillet spoke on "Selecting Drug-like Compounds for Biological Screening" at the first meeting of The Gregor-Mendel-Network, an association aimed at promoting computational biology in infrastructure, science and education in the Vienna-Brno area, which took place in Brno, Czech Republic. She attends a project meeting at Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre, Cambridge on 7th June.

On Monday, Sheila Webber gave the keynote talk at a seminar at the University of the West of England (Bristol, UK) on Information Literacy, reflective practice and critical thinking: how do they inter-relate? Sheila was talking about the research project on UK academics' conceptions of information literacy and pedagogy for information literacy. Last week she participated via the web in the conference on Web 2.0 na Ciência da Informação , taking place in Oprto, Portugal. Her presentation was on Blogging in LIS teaching and learning .