Information School News

Last week saw the first presentation in a series of joint talks between the Information School's Health Informatics and Information Systems Research Groups in Sheffield. and Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda.The talks aim to promote research collaboration and knowledge sharing. Dr Laura Sbaffi and Dr Efpraxia Zamani are organising this series and chairing the Sheffield presentations, and Prof Josephine Nabukenya will be chairing the presentations from Makerere. In this first session, PhD student Liliana Sepulveda offered the audience a great overview of her PhD research on "An experiential study of the human-technology relationship between informal caregivers of people with dementia and assistive technologies". There will be similar virtual meetings every month and the next schedule one is for Tuesday 11th June, when a PhD student from Makerere will be presenting their work. More details will be forthcoming. You can view the recording of the session here: ...

Pamela McKinney, Sheila Webber and Peter Holdridge represented the iSchool at Sheffield University's annual celebration of Technology Enhanced Learning: TELfest .   McKinney and Webber gave a presentation Comparing use of TEL in an on campus class and a distance learning class , reporting on ways in which Technology Enhanced Learning is used in the on-campus and distance versions of the core Information Literacy module. The presentation is available here: https://www.slideshare.net/sheilawebber/comparing-use-of-technology-enhanced-learning-in-an-oncampus-class-and-a-distance-learning-class Sheila Webber (one of the educators on the University of Sheffield Exploring Play MOOC ) contributed to a panel on Learning Through Play . She talked about Dr Peter Stordy's innovative use of Lego in the Information Organisation module, and about learning playfully in the 3D virtual world, Second Life (including learning through virtual dance! ) Peter Holdridge was a panel membe...

At the i3 (information interactions and impact) conference held in Aberdeen, Scotland, there were two presentations from the iSchool. Sheila Webber presented a paper coauthored with Professor Nigel Ford, Dr Andrew Madden and Mary Crowder , reporting on quantitative findings from a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) on Deep critical Information Behaviour . The paper was entitled Mapping the development of critical information behaviour through school and university and the slides are at https://www.slideshare.net/sheilawebber/mapping-the-development-of-critical-information-behaviour-through-school-and-university Jessica Elmore , who had ealier received the Mark Hepworth Award for Best paper at i3, presented on Information sharing in the ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) classroom: a case study . Sheila Webber (who co-supervises Jessica's PhD with Dr Peter Stordy) liveblogged her talk at http://information-literacy.blogspot.co.uk/2017...

Information School lecturer Pam McKinney and PhD student Jess Elmore will be attending the 2017 Librarian’s Information Literacy Annual Conference LILAC  in Swansea next week. LILAC is organised by the CILIP Information Literacy Group, and brings together Information Literacy practitioners and researchers with the aim of improving approaches to IL teaching across the world. Pam has a long history of presenting at LILAC with colleagues and students and is delighted to be representing the Information School at this year’s conference. Pam and Jess will be available in breaks and lunchtimes for delegates to discuss the on-campus and distance learning Masters programmes, and options for full and part time PhD study with the Information School.

Matt Seddon, PhD student in the Chemoinformatics research group, has won the CINF Scholarship for Scientific Excellence at the American Chemical Society meeting in San Francisco, April 2-6. The scholarship program of the Division of Chemical Information (CINF) is designed to reward graduate and postdoctoral students in chemical information and related sciences for scientific excellence. The award was made for his PhD work which he presented as a long abstract and in poster format: Global spectral and diffusion geometry descriptors of 3D molecular shape for virtual screening Authors: Matthew Seddon, David Cosgrove, Martin Packer and Val Gillet Matt also gave an oral presentation. Matt Seddon (second from right) and colleagues Matt's PhD is being funded by a BBSRC Industrial CASE Partnership Studentship in collaboration with AstraZeneca. He is supervised by Professor Val Gillet.