In the last of my series of blog posts from the European Conference on Information Literacy, I am going to talk about a couple of my favourite presentations from the conference. Of course, all the presentations I’ve discussed are ones that stuck in my head for various reasons! But the ones below are the standouts for me, that didn’t necessarily lead to any practical ideas, but that I just really enjoyed.
Visualising online search processes
This was an absolutely fascinating presentation. It was highly visual and sadly I didn’t think to take any photos, but will do my best to describe it!
Luca Botturi, from the Scuola Universitaria Professionale della Svizzera Italiana in Switzerland, has been part of a team that developed a visualisation technique for analysing search behaviours. The team gave a group of 16-20 year old participants search tasks to conduct in their own time, on their own devices, with browser software installed to track their searches. The search scenarios were all topics that would require exploration, e.g. a friend has heard that basil is carcinogenic, would you advise them to eat pesto or not based on the information you can find? (As an aside, I love how incredibly Italian that search task is…) Some tasks were open (multiple possible answers), some closed (only one correct answer). Alongside recording their search activities through the browser software, students were asked to provide their answer (which was marked and scored for accuracy), and give a rationale of how they came to that answer.
The software recorded what terms had been searched for, how many different searches were conducted, how long the student spent on the results page, what they clicked on, and how many items they clicked on. This resulted in a visual representation of typical patterns of search, making visible what is usually opaque.
Luca shared examples of some of the search pattern visualisations on screen, and I was struck by how easy to “read” they were. They represented lots of complex information, but once you knew what the bars and colours referred to, it was easy to see the difference between, for example, someone who types in lots of variations on a search term but never leaves the results page, relying on the snippets/summaries to inform them; and someone who does one search, clicks on a couple of results and spends a bit of time reading them, then comes back and searches again, having used the first information they find to refine their search. I’m hoping the slides from this presentation will be shared online, and if they are I will come back and update this post with a link.
As well as analysing the search patterns themselves, the team also brought the visual patterns back to the class to share with the students, and used them to help the students reflect on their search practices. Luca noted that people often don’t know what other ways of searching exist as they never see others do it, so this was valuable for broadening students’ understandings of how search could work. Seeing each other’s search techniques enabled them to learn from each other, as well as reflect on how they were searching and why.
One key finding was that among the secondary school students in the sample, the most common search pattern was staying on the search page, using the previews to gain info rather than clicking on the results. This often led to students encountered misleading or decontextualised information. However most still managed to come up with good answers to the questions. The researchers also noted that most of the searches were very fast – the average time spent on one query was just nine seconds to come up with an answer! This surprised the researchers as many of the search scenarios were complex questions, however in most cases the participants were able to answer them adequately even with very little time spent on information gathering.
The main conclusion from the research was that searching is extremely varied and personal, and there is no optimal method for doing so. There was no correlation between patterns of search and scores on the answers. However using a variety of methods for different needs may be beneficial, and users may learn new techniques and develop their own skills by observing others. Seeing that your peers are doing things differently is likely to be more effective than being taught “better” techniques by librarians or teachers.
School libraries project in Kazakhstan
In one of the last sessions I attended at the conference, Yelizaveta Kamilova and Zhuldyz Orazymbetova from Nazarbayev University, Kazakhstan discussed a project they had been involved in to develop media and information literacy knowledge among school librarians in Kazakhstan. They noted that in Kazakhstan, there is a lack of national policy or materials to do with information literacy, and what is available internationally is usually in English which is not widely spoken among the population (Kazakh and Russian are the most common languages).
This project, carried out with very minimal funding, involved delivering online and in-person training workshops to school librarians across the country, as well as workshops delivered directly to schoolchildren. The team reached more than 800 librarians and 2,500 children through their workshops! They also produced a media and information literacy “manual” to share with librarians, and built a Google site to host this and all the workshop materials online.
I was incredibly impressed with the scope of this project, and the amount they had managed to achieve with so little funding. The authors also noted that although in Kazakhstan librarians are considered administrative staff rather than teaching staff, they took the initiative to apply for a teaching award for the project at their own university – and won! So one consequence of the project has been to raise their profile within their academic institution, and gain recognition for the pedagogic knowledge and skills of librarians more broadly.
Organising Chaos 