Top tips for new UCP students

Welcome to new degree students at UCP

This week we started delivering some inductions and tours to new degree students at UCP. Next week we will have a stand at UCP Freshers.

Once you go to University, the emphasis changes to you doing far more of your own research rather than just being given information. You need to learn how to search for information in a range of different resources.

Some pointers to help you start using Library Services 

• Degree students are allowed to take out 14 books from the Learning Resource Centre at Peterborough Regional College. We are your main print library.
• UCP students have their own PC area (please book at the desk) but can use any computers in the LRC if they wish.
• The LRC is open until 7 Monday to Thursday and in vacations and it's much quieter then if you want to get some work done.
• UCP students have access to books at Anglia Ruskin University but must collect and return them to Guild House. (You can request them online).
• Black and white printing in the LRC is free, but you need to use your PRC login to get on to the computers in the first place.
• The LRC librarians deliver some of the Study Excellence Sessions at UCP on Mondays and Thursdays 1-2 pm. Do come and see us. Topics include Beyond Google, Using images, Evaluating information, E-books and Box of Broadcasts.

UCP student PC area in the Learning Resource Centre

Anglia Ruskin Digital Library

• You have access to a wealth of resources through this online library.
• When you are outside the UCP building, you need to login first to see the text of the resources.
• We strongly advise you look at the subject guide for your course as it will show you key databases and resources relevant to your subject.
• Familiarise yourselves with searching the catalogue and the databases now while you don't have any assignments so that when you come to do some research you can spend time actually researching rather than learning how everything works.
• Follow the instructions on the screen for accessing different resources to ensure you have full access.
• Staff in the LRC can help you if you are unsure or have trouble finding what you need.

Top tips for starting university

To finish I found this article from the BBC featuring their Top 10 tips for starting university

Freshers' Fair 2018

Welcome back!

Welcome to the LRC blog for those who are new to the College and welcome back to everyone returning for another year.

This week, LRC staff have been busy giving tours of the LRC and also manning a stand at Freshers' Fair.

For those of you who have had a tour, we won't have had time to tell you about everything so please ask the LRC staff if you are unsure of anything. For those of you who haven't had a tour, why not have a look at our annotated induction video and then try our quiz. For more detailed questions and answers, you can look at our Frequently Asked Questions document. Both this and the induction video and quiz are found on our LRC 24/7 Moodle page along with lots of other resources to help you with using the LRC and our resources.

Freshers' Fair

This week, we attended the FE Freshers Fair on Tuesday and Wednesday and gave out free books, signed many of you up to our fiction Loyalty scheme. Lots of you took part in our Hook-A Duck game/ competition. We asked you to hook ducks from a bowl of water and those with the highest scores over the 2 days won a prize. Thank you to everyone who took part and we enjoyed meeting everyone who came to the stand. We hope that you come and see us in the LRC too over the year.

LRC Pick 'n' Mix event and planning ahead for next year

Planning ahead for next year

With most of the teaching and exams over for this year, many of you are planning ahead for next year and the LRC is keen to support the curriculum with this.

LRC Pic 'n' Mix Event 12th July 2018

The LRC is hosting this event as part of the Carousel of Learning event run by the Quality team during staff development week. We would love to meet you and help you as you plan

The event includes:

• An opportunity to order new books for the LRC from specialist FE and HE suppliers. This will run from 9am to 12 noon. Come and see the books before you order.  Books chosen at the event will then be ordered once the new year's budget is released.
• A chance to book LRC tours for your new students in September.
• The option to speak to LRC staff about electronic resources/ eBooks and how to use them.
• The opportunity to be the first people to see the LRC's new H5P resources on their Moodle page and give your feedback and ideas for future resources.

Pic 'n' Mix event poster
Image:  Peterborough Regional College

Other ideas for integrating the LRC and different resources into your planning for next year

Why not....

• Add the links to relevant eBooks to your course pages on Moodle. You could create a resources block, for example, at the top of your course or integrate the links in to your modules.

• Add links to useful electronic resources relevant to your subject area on your course pages. 

• Create some clips and playlists on Box of Broadcasts to support the curriculum modules you will be teaching ready to add to your course pages (using the links) as you start each module.

• Plan to show all your students the LRC pages as part of their induction. Why not give them time to view the LRC induction video and complete the quiz as part of introducing Moodle and the LRC? It won't take long. You can book a tour too.

• Show students how to register on Box of Broadcasts so they can view clips and playlists as well as record and watch programmes that interest them throughout their time at PRC.

• Consider how to promote reading and the LRC loyalty card to students who are interested in reading fiction as a leisure activity. Reading helps improve language skills too.

• Consider what stationery students will need and promote the stationery available for sale in the LRC.

• Do your students need to understand plagiarism and referencing? You can plan to use the online package and quizzes on the LRC 24/7 page with your students or LRC staff can come and deliver a short session.

• Do you want to do some research as an activity with your students? The LRC can provide a book box on your topic which you can take and use in the classroom.

• If you teach at UCP, do your students know how to use the Anglia Ruskin Digital Library? Book a demonstration with LRC staff.

This is the last post of the academic year. Blog posts will resume in early September once term starts. 

The LRC is open over the summer if you need to come and see us or work here, but please check Moodle or twitter first if you are making a special trip.

We wish everyone a good holiday and hopefully restful time over the summer!

New Information Literacy Definition

Information Literacy

Earlier this year, the CILIP Information Literacy Group updated the original 2004 definition of information literacy. Teaching and fostering information literacy is something information professionals (e.g. librarians) and teachers collaborate on.

To be information literate means having a range of skills involved in seeking, evaluating, using and presenting information and doing this ethically. More and more it involves digital literacy (e.g. using the internet and digital environments to find information) and is relevant not only to the academic world but also the workplace and in everyday life. It is key to lifelong and independent learning.

To see the definition (less than 4 sides of A4), see the document here.

Some of the skills involved in information literacy are:

• Critical thinking and problem solving.
• Questioning techniques
• Evaluating information including identifying fake news
• Using information/ images ethically (copyright).
• Understanding the limitation of online reviews and information
• Plagiarism and referencing
• Identidying and understanding bias.
• Identifying what information you need before you look and being able to express this in the right way for the tool you use to search for it.
• Understanding where the best place/source is to get the information you require.
• Identifying the best resources for the information required.
• Presenting information in the best way.

Staff in the LRC are keen to help students and staff develop the skills to help them handle information both in the academic setting and also as a life skill for everyday life and in their future employment.

Image used under Creative Commons Licence CC0
 http://www.tes.com.c.timeshigheredprod.ent.platform.sh/news/smart-glasses-teachers-help-pupils-learn

Chester's first year at the Learning Resource Centre

This week’s blog is an interview with everyone’s favourite LRC puffin…Chester!

So Chester, to start why not introduce yourself…

Hi all. I’m really glad to finally be able to talk to you all and introduce myself. My name’s Chester and you’ll usually find me somewhere in the LRC, generally with my beak in a book. If you haven’t met me yet you can ask to see me at the main desk! 

How do you like the LRC?

I love my home here! I’ve been learning to use the LRC all year and I love how many resources I can access. I’ve learnt how to use the catalogues so I can always find what I want and if not the staff are always really helpful.

What’s your favourite area of the LRC?

My favourite place is the fiction area, it’s really cosy and lots of people sit there to read their favourite books. I also like the silent study area though because nobody talks in there.

My Harry Potter "shelfie"

What are your interests?

I like the seaside, reading and most of all fish, especially herring!

What do you think of the rules in the LRC?

I sometimes wish I could eat my lunch in the LRC but I understand that the students don’t want the place to smell of fish whilst they’re studying.

Not everyone is as fond as
my tuna fish lattes as I am!

What has been your favourite event this year?

I liked Star Wars day. It was so much fun and everyone worked so hard. I also really enjoyed dressing up and I got to be a Jedi knight and Darth Chester! Also did you know that Porgs were based on puffins?

What side do you choose the light or the dark?

Tell us a fact about the LRC that you think many people might not know?

The LRC has a returns box just outside the main door, this way you don’t need to return items to the desk. I have even used it myself!

Me using the returns box!

What would your advice be to students coming back/starting next academic year?

Come and explore the LRC early. Find where your books are, look at the PC rooms and just enjoy the space. It’s one of the best resources available in the college.

I love all the different study areas that the LRC has to offer.

Learning Styles - do they matter?

Learning Styles

For a long time, it has been accepted thinking that everyone has a preferred learning style (as originally described by Kolb). According to the Skills you Need website, there are 8 styles (but different models have different numbers of learning styles):

The linguistic learner

The naturalist

The musical or rhythmic learner

The kinesthetic learner

The visual and spatial learner

The logical or mathematical learner

The interpersonal learner

The intrapersonal learner

You can do a simple quiz here to help you identify which style(s) you prefer and the Skills you Need website outlines definitions for the different learners.

Theory of Learning Styles challenged.

However, more recently this accepted theory has been challenged. It is now considered by many to be a "neuromyth". An article published on the BBC last week called Exams 2018: The 'myth' of the visual learner outlines the latest research that matching teaching to a student's preferred learning style doesn't necessarily help them learn any better. If you are taught in the way you prefer, then you may think you've learned better but in fact this may not have any affect on your ability or your resulting marks in an assessment. Research suggests that other factors have an influence on this such as what subject it is or whether we are new to a subject or not.

Carol Lethaby's article "Four reasons to avoid learning styles - and one alternative" on the British Council website summarises the research and recommends helping learners make connections with what they already know.

Photo: CC0 from https://pixabay.com/en/learn-word-scrabble-letters-wooden-1820039/

Learning styles and revision

Some references to the research which is summarised in these articles would be useful so that the argument for both sides could be followed up. There isn't the time to look further in to this here, but some advice from the BBC article for revision may be more useful to finish with:

• Test yourself
• Spread study over time
• Make you revision varied - mixing up problem types and topics. 

Just reading through notes is unlikely to be the most effective way to revise.

Presenting numerical information and misleading graphs

Presenting numerical information/ data.

Information can be presented in many ways and it is a skill to decide which is the best way to do this depending on its purpose. Directions may be best shown on a map, what someone looks like is best shown in a photo (than a written description) and the different parts of the heart, for example are probably best shown in a diagram. Numbers or statistical data are often best shown in graph format.

Numbers on their own can be difficult to interpret and so don't obviously mean something to the reader. See below for a table showing the number of visits we had in the LRC this year so far.

	Sept	Oct	Nov	Dec	Jan	Feb	Mar	Apr	May	Totals
Totals	14666	16333	20823	11721	18611	13963	17732	10377	16719	140945

On their own the numbers mean little especially if you don't know the College. If you know the College, you may decide that from these figures we have a lot of visitors.

However, if I present this information as a graph like this, you can more obviously see the ups and downs throughout the year.

The information means even more if it is then compared with last year. It becomes more obvious to see that we have been busier in some months but quieter than last year in other months. This can be down to when holidays fall. It is then more useful to look at the total figures to see that this year we have been busier overall than last year. (140945 this year compared with 135101 last year for the months September to May only).

Misleading Graphs

Lots could be written about the usefulness of statistics and graphs and how they can be used to argue anything (that's a blog post for another day!), but have you thought about how the layout of a graph can be helpful or not so helpful. If I include the totals in the graph at the end, the scaling is less helpful and the difference in the bars for each year disappears.

Have a look at this quiz by the BBC on misleading graphs. Can you see what is wrong with how the information is presented and how this can skew how the information is read and understood.

The skill is to be aware of this, not only when presenting information, but also when looking at statistics and graphs as part of research. Check the facts and also check how this has been presented. Would it show a different picture if presented in a different way?

With our figures we have assumed that the people counter has been working properly and that the figures are as near as correct as they can be. Also the figures themselves are just quantitative data and just show numbers/ amounts. We have no information from this on what people do in the LRC, how long they stay, what they do and whether they like it. We have to collect that another way - usually through comments and interviews. This is known as qualitative data. Last week's blog post contained some of this from comments made in the UCP student survey, for example.