Digital and Information Literacy

Digital literacy is how to find, organise, evaluate and create information using digital technology. Information literacy is knowing how to find, evaluate, use and manage information. It is part of lifelong learning and an important skill for all students. LSE recognise that both digital and information literacy are of paramount importance in learning, teaching and research and essential skills for students and staff.

To help students succeed professionally, courses across all disciplines should encourage students to solve real-world problems using available technologies—creating a blog using scripting in an English composition course, for example, or visualizing the impact of demographics on an event in a history class. Using these skills, students become self-directed learners who can identify relevant information and assemble technologies to create solutions
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The Digital Literacy Programme
These hands-on workshops are aimed at staff and PhD students to help them use technology to support their teaching and research. They run each term and scheduled courses are listed in the training system. The workshops cover topics such as:

Using tools and technologies such as social media (Twitter, blogging) for teaching and research and managing you online identity.
Understanding copyright, licensing and how to find resources you can use in your teaching.
Finding and using scholarly resources for your teaching and research, including literature searching, keeping up to date and using reference management tools;

Research Support

We run workshops for researchers on copyright, data protection and bibliometrics and citation analysis in conjunction with the Library. LTI contribute to the six week course MY592: Information Literacy: tools for research offered to PhD students in the early stages of their research and available each term.

Online Support

The Digital Literacy programme is also supported in Moodle which contains a range of course materials.

SADL

SADL (Student Ambassadors for Digital Literacy) is a programme for undergraduate students originally funded by the Higher Education Academy to explore the concept of students as ambassadors for digital literacy. Working with colleagues in the Library, this project / programme ran from October 2013 – June 2016. Find out more from the SADL website.

A New Curriculum for Information Literacy (ANCIL) was developed by Dr Jane Secker and Dr Emma Coonan in 2011 as part of the Arcadia Programme at the University of Cambridge: LSE carried out an audit of digital and information literacy training to map what is offered to students at undergraduate level to ANCIL in Spring – Autumn 2012. Find out more about the ANCIL.

The JISC and HEA funded DELILA Project converted LSE’s digital and information literacy resources in open educational resources (OER). Find out more about OERs.

Supporting Student Learning

The Library run an exciting programme of Information Skills workshops for students. LTI and the Library can also offer advice to academic staff about embedding digital and information literacies into their own courses: either face to face or online using the Digital and Information Literacy framework to fit in with your teaching.