ECIL, the European Conference on Information Literacy, is in Prague from 10-13 October. In its fourth year, the conference is more international than European with almost 300 delegates coming from as far away as Japan, New Zealand, Brazil and the US. The theme this year is ‘Information literacy in the inclusive society.’
The keynote speaker on day one, Tara Brabazon from Flinders University, Australia, started the conference with a bang. Her speech, ‘3D librarian: information literacy in an accelerated age’, dealt with 3 Ds: digitization, disintermediation and deterritorialization. She sees the flattening of expertise online and calls for librarians to provide a scaffold to help users evaluate the accuracy of information online. An inclusive society requires not only citizens who can search online, but citizens who can critically select and analyse that information.
The rest of the day until 6 pm was spent attending various sessions and participating in Pecha Kucha. A Pecha Kucha presentation is comprised of 20 slides, 20 seconds each slide so each presentation is quick and focussed. My presentation, ‘Two-way learning with IOE LibQuizzes at UCL Institute of Education,’ was one of 13 in a 2 hour slot. It was a bit of a whirlwind and that was just the end of day one!
With three days ahead, there will be a lot more sessions (180 in total!), library visits and sharing to come. What is reassuring is that we at UCL are part of a diligent and hard-working community of librarians sharing good practice and research. Our countries and contexts might be varied, but we’re mostly reading from the same book.
