Gig review: Information Literacy with Heidi Julien

It's very very fortunate that we were able to arrange an evening seminar and discussion on Information Literacy with Heidi Julien on Wednesday evening.  Much appreciation and thanks must go to Philip Calvert, Dan Dorner, Timothy and anyone and everyone else in the SIM faculty and community who organised for Heidi to talk with us.

To my recollection, I've never attended a discussion on information literacy with a scholar before, and not to my surprise I found Heidi's discussion quite accessible.

Questions raised afterwards when discussion was opened, were very realistic questions, from the practitioners themselves, such as this bit of reality from a librarian at Victoria University,

"Can we call it something else?" [to lure them in] 

(verifying this for accuracy when Twitter is back up)


A great time was had by all, I'm sure.  And I managed to snaffle a colleague at my workplace away from apathy to make the venture into town with me!  Also, I finally met Tom Avery face to face, whom I've been communicating with on the Twitterverse, which was cool.  And of course, lots of networking was had by all.

I must mention that Tom raised a good question in his tweet:

"Is information literacy a social construct?"

(verifying this for accuracy when Twitter is back up)


A valid point that was seconded by others listening in.

One overriding and pertinent question Heidi posed to the group (of 35+) regarded the difference between scholarship in informaiton literacy and what practitioners are wanting out of the research.  Is the information researched usable?  Or is the gap between scholars and practitioners too big?

What are your thoughts?  Tell us what you think