Information School News

On Wednesday 1st October Maryam Nazari is visiting the giCentre (Department of Information Science) at City University, London, to talk about her Model of Geo/Spatial Information Literacy (MG/SIL): an innovative model for GI education and research .

Sheffield summer intern Thomas Arni will be presenting his work at the international CLEF meeting in Aarhus, Denmark, September 16-19, 2008. Thomas has had an excellent summer, helping run the imageCLEFPhoto track of CLEF this year, which has had its most successful run ever.

Maryam Nazari is presenting at the EUGISES 2008 Sixth European GIS Education Seminar taking place 11-14 September in Cirencester, U.K. The paper, based on her current doctoral research, is: Nazari, M. and Webber, S. (2008) Model of Geo/Spatial Information Literacy (MG/SIL): an innovative model for transforming learning in GIS education . http://www.eugises.eu/proceedings2008/nazari.pdf

Mark Sanderson is an invited speaker at the MLMI conference, held in early September in Utrecht in the Netherlands. The title of Mark's talk is "Measuring interactivity on search engines is hard, unless you're Yahoo, Microsoft, or Google". http://www.mlmi.info/index.php?id=invited_speakers

Another one of our DIS PhD students, Rob Pasley, has been successful in publishing at a top international conference, this time in the field of GIScience. Rob has a full paper accepted at the 16th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM GIS 2008). This is quite an achievement with an acceptance rate of around 1:6 papers. Pasley, R., Clough, P., Purves, R. and Twaroch, F. (2008) Mapping Geographic Coverage of the Web in Great Britian, In Proceedings of 16th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM GIS 2008), (in press).

The Department is currently being visited by Dr Yazdan Mansourian, a former doctoral student who is now Assistant Professor at Tarbiat Moallem University, Tehran, Iran. Yesterday he gave the keynote talk at a Centre for Information Literacy Research event here in Sheffield, with four other presentations from current or former postgraduate students. The photo shows (l to r) Yazdan Mansourian, Phussadee Dokphrom, Maryam Nazari and Pam McKinney (the remaining speaker was Helen Dobson). There are two of the powerpoints online in pdf form: Dr Mansourian's Implications of the Information Visibility Model in Information Literacy Research and Practice at http://dis.shef.ac.uk/sheila/mansourianCILR2008.pdf ) Pamela McKinney's Inquiry-based Learning and information literacy at http://dis.shef.ac.uk/sheila/mckinneyCILR2008.pdf

Centre for Information Literacy Research: summer event Date: August 13th 2008, 1.30-4pm Place: Department of Information Studies, University of Sheffield, Regent Court building, Regent Street, Sheffield (see http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/visitors/mapsandtravel/university_big.html (Building 166 at G3) or http://tinyurl.com/5tmfyz (Multimap) Description: This free half day event presents a keynote from a visiting academic plus reports on research and activities in progress. With a focus on higher education, the talks will appeal to anyone interested in information literacy in different disciplines and contexts. People can attend for just part of the programme if they wish. Please email information.literacy.research@googlemail.com if you would like to attend so that we can order the right number of teas and coffees for the break! 13.30 Welcome and keynote. Welcome from the seminar chair: Sheila Webber (Director of the Centre for Information Literacy Research) Dr Yazdan Mansourian , Ass...