Diversifying Information Literacy Research : An Informed Learning Perspective

This article uses the idea of informed learning, an interpretation of information literacy that focuses on people’s information experiences rather than their skills or attributes, to analyse the character of using information to learn in diverse communities and settings, including digital, faith, indigenous and ethnic communities. While researchers of information behaviour or information seeking and use have investi- AU :2 gated people’s information worlds in diverse contexts, this work is still at its earliest stages in the information literacy domain. To date, information literacy research has largely occurred in what might be considered mainstream educational and workplace contexts, with some emerging work in community settings. These have been mostly in academic libraries, schools and government workplaces. What does information literacy look like beyond these environments? How might we understand the experience of effective information use in a range of community settings, from the perspective of empirical research and other sources? The article concludes by commenting on the significance of diversifying the range of information experience contexts,for information literacy research and professional practice.

Why new media reforms are bad news for Australian content

Two of the government’s six media reform bills passed in the House of Representatives with multi-party support on Tuesday 19 March. While most attention and debate has focused on the regulation of the news media and ownership, the changes approved on 19 March are both significant and far-reaching.

Social media metrics : are we measuring business value?

Over the past few years many organizations that directly or indirectly interact with consumers have invested heavily into a social media presence. As a consequence some success indicators are openly available to users of many social media platforms, such as the number of fans (or followers, members, visitors and others) or the amount of content(tweets, images, shares or other content). Many organizations additionally track their social activities internally to understand audience reach, consumer influence, brand image, consumer preference or other key metrics that make sense for a business. However, most of the immediately available social media success metrics are activity-based and many organizations are struggling with establishing a direct relationship to business success. This paper systematically reviews some of the common social media metrics/ratings used by organisations, critically analyse its business value and identify gaps formulating research questions for empirical study and concluding with recommendations and suggestions for future research.

Lessons from media reporting of natural disasters : a case study of the 2011 flash floods in Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley

Practice-led journalism research techniques were used in this study to produce a ‘first draft of history’ recording the human experience of survivors and rescuers during the January 2011 flash flood disaster in Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley in Queensland, Australia. The study aimed to discover what can be learnt from engaging in journalistic reporting of natural disasters. This exegesis demonstrates that journalism can be both a creative practice and a research methodology. About 120 survivors, rescuers and family members of victims participated in extended interviews about what happened to them and how they survived. Their stories are the basis for two creative outputs of the study: a radio documentary and a non-fiction book, that document how and why people died, or survived, or were rescued. Listeners and readers are taken "into the flood" where they feel anxious for those in peril, relief when people are saved, and devastated when babies, children and adults are swept away to their deaths. In undertaking reporting about the human experience of the floods, several significant elements about journalistic reportage of disasters were exposed. The first related to the vital role that the online social media played during the disaster for individuals, citizen reporters, journalists and emergency services organisations. Online social media offer reporters powerful new reporting tools for both gathering and disseminating news. The second related to the performance of journalists in covering events involving traumatic experiences. Journalists are often required to cover trauma and are often amongst the first-responders to disasters. This study found that almost all of the disaster survivors who were approached were willing to talk in detail about their traumatic experiences. A finding of this project is that journalists who interview trauma survivors can develop techniques for improving their ability to interview people who have experienced traumatic events. These include being flexible with interview timing and selecting a location; empowering interviewees to understand they don’t have to answer every question they are asked; providing emotional security for interviewees; and by being committed to accuracy. Survivors may exhibit posttraumatic stress symptoms but some exhibit and report posttraumatic growth. The willingness of a high proportion of the flood survivors to participate in the flood research made it possible to document a relatively unstudied question within the literature about journalism and trauma – when and why disaster survivors will want to speak to reporters. The study sheds light on the reasons why a group of traumatised people chose to speak about their experiences. Their reasons fell into six categories: lessons need to be learned from the disaster; a desire for the public to know what had happened; a sense of duty to make sure warning systems and disaster responses to be improved in future; personal recovery; the financial disinterest of reporters in listening to survivors; and the timing of the request for an interview. Feedback to the creative-practice component of this thesis - the book and radio documentary - shows that these issues are not purely matters of ethics. By following appropriate protocols, it is possible to produce stories that engender strong audience responses such as that the program was "amazing and deeply emotional" and "community storytelling at its most important". Participants reported that the experience of the interview process was "healing" and that the creative outcome resulted in "a very precious record of an afternoon of tragedy and triumph and the bitter-sweetness of survival".

Gay men, social media and self-presentation : managing identities in Gaydar, Facebook and beyond

This study analyses young gay men's identity management in social networking sites Gaydar and Facebook. It examines the expanded opportunities for identity management made available through the convergence of these spaces, as well as new privacy and safety concerns. Findings from this study are discussed in terms of their significance for gay men's digital culture, the approach to gay men's mental health taken by GLBT organisations and support groups, and within broader concerns around social networking sites and digital inequality.

Information quality in social media : a conceptual model

Social Media (SM) is increasingly being integrated with business information in decision making. Unique characteristics of social media (e.g. wide accessibility, permanence, global audience, recentness, and ease of use) raise new issues with information quality (IQ); quite different from traditional considerations of IQ in information systems (IS) evaluation. This paper presents a preliminary conceptual model of information quality in social media (IQnSM) derived through directed content analysis and employing characteristics of analytic theory in the study protocol. Based in the notion of ‘fitness for use’, IQnSM is highly use and user centric and is defined as “the degree to which information is suitable for doing a specified task by a specific user, in a certain context”. IQnSM is operationalised as hierarchical, formed by the three dimensions (18 measures): intrinsic quality, contextual quality and representational quality. A research plan for empirically validating the model is proposed.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia, education and health literacy

Health literacy is a vital tool to build health knowledge and enable empowerment in health decision making at a community and individual level. There are different views of what constitutes health literacy with the most inclusive addressing broadly the skills and competencies required “to seek out, comprehend, evaluate, and use health information and concepts to make informed choices, reduce health risks, and increase quality of life” (Zarcadoolas 2005). Poor health literacy has been shown to impact health seeking behaviour, access and awareness to preventive health.

Discovering how scientific literacy has been positioned in the new Australian curriculum : science

Through the use of critical discourse analysis, this thesis investigated the perceived importance of scientific literacy in the new Australian Curriculum: Science. It was found that scientific literacy was ambiguous, and that the document did not provide detailed scope for intentional teaching for scientific literacy. To overcome this, recommendations on how to intentionally teach for scientific literacy were provided, so that Australian Science teachers can focus on improving scientific literacy outcomes for all students within this new curriculum.

Workplace experiences of information literacy

The idea of information literacy, broadly deÞned as the ability to recognise information needs and identify, evaluate and use information e¤ectively, has been of growing concern in the education sectors for a number of years; whilst in the workplace, employers and managers have perhaps attended more to the need for computer and information technology skill. New descriptions of information literacy, that may be of value to the business sector, are now beginning to appear as a result of qualitative research into how professional employees experience the e¤ective use of information. This paper summarises the outcomes of an investigation into the experience of information literacy amongst various types of professionals; and explores the possible di¤erences and interrelations between individual and organisational information literacy suggested by these outcomes. Seven di¤erent ways of experiencing information literacy were identiÞed. These experiences are closely related to important workplace processes such as environmental scanning, information management, corporate memory, and research and development; conÞrming that information literacy should be considered a signiÞcant part of the character of learning organisations as well as being a key characteristic of the organisationÕs employees. Implications of individual and organisational information literacy for beginning and continuing professional education are explored.

If you build it... film studios and the transformative effects of migrating media production

In the years since the release of the film Field of Dreams, the phrase “If you build it, they will come” has become a cliché beloved by journalists, boosters of speculative land developments or remediations and misty-eyed enthusiasts of a host of unlikely schemes. It is one of the articles of faith of the location interest, the coalition of actors motivated to work to attract film business to a particular place. The phrase is full of optimism and potential. It seeks to instill confidence that the construction of production infrastructure like studios and the nourishment of conditions for local service providers will drive the (economic) locomotive and open the (celebrity) stargate. Unfortunately sometimes, it is just a crazy dream.

Rethinking the literacy capabilities of pre-service primary teachers in testing times

As a group of committed literacy teacher educators from five universities across three Australian states, the authors bring professional critique to the problematic issue of what counts in current and possible future measures of pre-service teachers’ literacy capacity. In times when normalising models of literacy assessment ignore innovative developments in technologies, we provide an example of what is happening at the ‘chalk-face’ of literacy teacher education. This paper describes a study that demonstrates how responsible alignment of teacher accreditation requirements with a scholarly impetus to incorporate digital literacies to prepare pre-service teachers will help address changing educational needs and practices (AITSL 2012; Gillen & Barton 2010; Hattie 2003; Johnson, Smith, Willis, Levine & Haywood 2011; Klein 2006; Masny & Cole 2012; OECD 2011).

Write vs. type : tangible and situated media for situated engagement

Digital media is often criticised for being intangible, transient and ephemeral. These characteristics limit the provision of long-lasting social experiences, as it is through the use of all our senses that we attach meaning to space, creating a sense of place. This paper presents a comparative study of the affordances of two design interventions, one tangible paper-based, called Print + Talk = Love (PTL), the other digital screen-based, called Discussions in Space (DIS). The emphasis is on a) how tangible media, such as paper, provides different and meaningful collective experiences, and b) how it can stand on its own as an interactive design intervention and as a comprehensive data-gathering tool in urban public places. By positioning PTL and DIS within the context of urban public places and testing their abilities to engage participants, we examine their particular situated engagement abilities through a mixed method approach. As a result, the digital aspects of DIS, e.g., using Twitter, extend the situated experience beyond the actual location of the intervention. Moreover, informing a hybrid approach, we also found that the physical aspects of PTL and its tangible presence, kept the user experience focused on the actual place and event surrounding the intervention.

Information literacy : a theoretical framework for higher education

Information literacy has been a significant issue in the library community for many years. It is now being recognised as an important issue by the higher education community. This theoretical framework draws together important elements of the information literacy agenda specifically for tertiary educators and administrators. The frame-work examines three areas of primary concern: the possible outcomes of information literacy education (through outlining the characteristics of information literate people); the nature of information literacy education; and the potential role of stake-holders (including information services, faculty, staff developers and learning counsellors) in helping staff and students to be information literate. This theoretical framework forms part of the Griffith University Information Literacy Blueprint. The Blueprint was designed between June and August of 1994. The project, a quality initiative of the Division of Information Services, was led by Janice Rickards, University Librarian.