Information literacy for Postgrads : why the study bubble no longer exists

In our library, we have as much, if not more, contact with postgraduate students as with undergraduates, especially outside the incredibly short Cambridge terms. What has become apparent to me, particularly as postgraduate life looms large personally, is that it is simply not possible to succeed by locking yourself away in the library and occasionally venturing out to find your supervisor. Unavoidably our age is the digital one, and if you're not information literate, it's impossible to comprehend how much you're missing out on. You're deaf to a vast part of your field.

With this in mind, LiT (Librarians in Training) ran a seminar on training postgraduates on Thursday of this week (5th May). The speaker, Jane Secker, is the Learning Technology Librarian at LSE (her job title has just changed but I can't remember what to!) and runs courses on digital and information literacy specifically aimed at staff and postgrads ("digital literacy" is apparently the preferred term at LSE, though it wasn't entirely clear why...is it because digital sounds more techy? This is not the place for a discussion on onomastics, however...)

The talk flagged up the theory behind such courses, which are based upon SCONUL's increasingly renowned 7 pillars model of information literacy, and particularly the innovative way that LSE are presenting the courses: that is, as a full module with a home page and resources on LSE's Moodle VLE, six 2 hour sessions and a suitably baffling alphanumeric course code (the snappily-titled MI512). The course was not credit-bearing, but rather than seeing it as a sap on their limited time, postgraduates from across the institution flocked to it, to the extent that feedback showed "word of mouth" to be one of the most effective ways of marketing the course.

The content ranged from the most basic academic uses of IT such as literature searching, to some of the more obscure uses of electronic resources, such as online social bookmarking. As the undercover postgrad-to-be at the session, it was incredibly useful to see the kind of things I will need to get involved in and how best to go about this. It would have been interesting to see more of the more practical side of the LSE course for use in the short term, such as the kinds of resources and exercises contained within the course. The debate about digital vs information literacy also baffled me a bit because as far as I could see, the definition for one could work equally well as the definition for the other. But on the whole the talk really got me thinking about how I could better enable the Classics postgrads to effectively research and communicate with their peers in the short term, and improve my prospects in the longer term.

Finally, as a reminder for myself when I read these posts back, here's some context of what's happening in the world today:
-- The British people rejected the Alternative Vote system, with about 69% of voters saying "no".
-- The Scottish National Party enjoys its first day of majority governance and announces its plans for a referendum on Scottish independence towards the end of its term.
-- Golfer Seve Ballesteros died of cancer aged 54