6.6.3 Identify ways of further developing your IL skills Think about your overall IL skills and suggest areas where you feel you need to improve, based on the experience you have gained. You might find it useful to discuss with your tutor, manager, another student or work colleague how you might do this. There may be changes you feel you need to make so that you can move forward, such as trying to extend the facilities and resources available to you, changing the way you study to make best use of the time you have, or focusing on improving your own
6.6.2 Evaluate the effectiveness of your strategy Using the records in your Skills File, look back over your information literacy development work and think about how your decisions, and the facilities and constraints of your working environment influenced the way you tackled the task. How effective was your strategy in improving your IL skills? Identify what was and was not helpful in achieving your goals and outcomes, and assess how your own IL strengths and weaknesses contributed to this. Assess your achievements against the criteri
Interpret results and identify your main findings In interpreting your results, think about the coverage of your searches and whether you have missed anything or left out important areas. You cannot find everything, but you should be confident that you have located sources recognised for their accuracy, authority and authenticity. How will you judge the quality and coverage of your material? Be aware that while your information may be accurate and reliable, it may not be unbiased. Look carefully at the sources of your information (ask yourse
6.5.1 Explore different information sources Where and how are you going to look for your information? Finding information effectively involves being aware of techniques for locating and digging out the relevant information. Find out about how the sources you have identified are organised and indexed, and formulate your questions appropriately. Set up different search strategies and criteria to explore alternative lines of enquiry. If you need to search for, evaluate and select information from the Internet or other databases, fin
6.5 Monitoring progress This stage of the framework is about keeping track of your progress. Are you using your information literacy skills effectively for your purposes? How do you know? Could you have done things differently: made use of different facilities and expertise, taken more advantage of tutorials, training sessions or local expertise, or recognised that such support would have helped you? Monitoring your own performance and progress needs practice; try to stand back and look at what you are doing as if y
6.3.3 Identify and research relevant sources of information Spend some time finding out about what you will need to help you complete you IL work and who you will need to consult. You may need to arrange access to a library, the Internet, databases online, or specialist training or publications. If you need to learn about specific aspects of IL (for example how to reference correctly articles, papers and books, or how to put together a bibliography), then look first at your course material and then at study guides or notes aimed at your area of intere
6.3.2 Identify the outcomes you hope to achieve An outcome is the result or consequence of a process. For example, you may want to select information from a number of sources for a report, and to do this you may need to improve your use of information search facilities and your critical skills in comparing and contrasting information. In this case your report is an outcome and using and improving your information literacy skills is part of the process by which you achieve that outcome. A more focused outcome might be related to recog
6.3.1 Identify opportunities for using IL skills Where and how will you use information literacy skills over the next 3–4 months? You may need IL to help you identify, search for, evaluate and present information for a specific task, such as an essay or project report. You may have to visit and learn how to use an academic library, or need to search for, select and evaluate information from specialist databases or the Internet. Spend some time thinking about your study or work requirements and what opportunities you will have or can creat
6.3 Developing a strategy In developing a strategy for improving your IL skills you are aiming to: identify the opportunities you can use to develop and practise your IL skills; establish the outcomes you hope to achieve and the targets for meeting them; identify the resources you might use for developing your skills, including people who might be able to help you as well as books, study guides, tutorials, specialist training, databases, libra
5.5.4 Evaluate the effectiveness of your strategy Using the records in your Skills File, look back over your IT development work and think about how your decisions, and the facilities and constraints of your working environment influenced the way you tackled the task. How effective was your strategy in improving your IT skills? Identify what was and was not helpful in achieving your goals and outcomes, and assess how your own IT strengths and weaknesses contributed to this. Evaluate your achievements against the criteria you establishe
5.5 Evaluating strategy and presenting outcomes This stage of the framework focuses on identifying what you have achieved and how well you have achieved it. It involves you in evaluating your overall strategy and presenting the outcomes of your work. As you evaluate and assess your strategy, identify aspects of your IT skills that you want to develop further. At the end of this stage, use the records in your Skills File to complete the activity ‘Evaluating your use of IT strategy and presenting outcomes’ and pull together this final st
5.4.4 Monitor and critically reflect on your use of IT skills As you use IT in your work, refer back to the outcomes you hope to achieve and the goals you have set yourself. Ask yourself questions such as: am I on track to achieve my outcomes? what difficulties in using information technology have I experienced and what have I done about them? how have the choices and decisions I made impacted on the quality of my work? do I need to make any changes in the way I
5.4.3 Gathering and producing new information As your work progresses, what new information are you gathering or producing? For example are you using IT to handle ideas, plans, working documents, results of calculations, designs, predictions, evaluations and so on? Review the types of information you are dealing with and think about what IT skills you are using to bring together information and data from different sources to help you make decisions or draw conclusions. What new IT skills would help you handle this information more effect
5.4.2 Develop and exchange relevant information to meet your purposes How does the way you communicate information affect the way you work? What opportunities do you have for developing or exploring different ways of working or sharing information using IT (e.g. using email, computer conferencing, video conferencing, web pages, sharing documents)? Depending on your requirements, you may need to consider factors such as the security, archiving and back-up of your data. What steps do you need to take to guard against the loss or misuse of your information? Can yo
5.4.1 Set up and use IT In using IT effectively you may need to learn how to use particular features of the software applications involved. In word processing, style sheets and templates help you set up consistent formats for essays, reports and other documents. In spreadsheets, macros – sets of instructions that can be repeated as often as necessary – can help you to perform complex numerical operations more easily. In databases, you may need to know how to set up structures so that you can store and retrieve i
5.2 Developing a strategy In developing a strategy for improving your IT skills you are aiming to: identify the opportunities you can use to develop and practise your IT skills; establish the outcomes you hope to achieve and targets for meeting them; identify the resources you might use for developing your skills, including people who might be able to help you as well as books, study guides, tutorials, specialist training, databases, libraries
4.4.3 Identify ways of further developing your communication skills Think about your overall level of communication skills and suggest areas where you feel you need to improve, based on the experience you have gained. You might find it useful to discuss with your tutor or another student or work colleague how you might do this. There may be changes you feel you need to make so that you can move forward, such as trying to extend the facilities and resources available to you, changing the way you study to make best use of the time you have, or focusing on impro
4.4.1 Organise and clearly present relevant information You need to know how to present information in ways that best suit your purpose, subject and audience, that is how to structure coherently what you say so that a sequence of ideas may be followed easily; how to use a range of techniques to help present information and support your argument (such as diagrams and models), and when to use technical vocabulary and conventions. Check that your work meets relevant guidelines and conventions. You may have guidelines about this at work and different
4.3.5 Adapt your strategy Often, plans run into difficulties because of unforeseen or changing circumstances. For example, it may have taken you longer than expected to get the information you needed, or just as you were ready to print off your final version of a report, the computer crashed. Plans are only a means to an end and frequently need to be modified. If you run into difficulties, think about how they affect the production of your immediate work and your overall goals. Do you need to modify your short-term pl
4.3.4 Monitor and critically reflect on your use of communication skills You need to know how to track and record your progress on your use of communication skills. Try to assess the overall quality of your written and oral work and the way you produced the work. Checklists and criteria provided as part of the project or assignment and those set out in the Bookmark can be very useful tools in helping you to assess for yourself precisely what you are doing and how well you are doing it. Unless you know what you are doing wrong, it is very difficult to improve.
