At midnight on Friday 31 October, my Napier laptop locked me out, telling me that my account had expired. This wasn’t a malfunction: I had just transmuted from a Senior Research Fellow to a Senior Visiting Fellow.
Continue readingThis report (download link) reports the results of a survey, carried out in early 2022, of the public internet presences of potentially over 1300 Scottish community councils. It gives an update a decade after similar surveys in 2012 and 2014 (Ryan & Cruickshank, 2012, 2014). This report focuses on the timeliness and content of community council websites, and the timeliness of community councils’ Facebook and X/Twitter presences.
Searchable maps visualising the findings are available online.
In summary, there has been little positive change since the 2014, except that the number of CCs with public Facebook presences has increased noticeably.
Continue readingPeter Cruickshank (very much lead author) and I are delighted that our paper An information literacy lens on community representation for participatory budgeting in Brazil is now published. Check it out on the Journal of Information Literacy’s website or Edinburgh Napier University’s repository[1]. Also check out Peter’s post on the Social Informatics research group blog.
Continue readingPeter Cruickshank, Marina Milosheva and I have just delivered the final report on the impacts of information literacy (IL) research on society. It’s available on the Media and Information Literacy Alliance (MILA) website. That post contains the executive summary, and a link to the full report. The report will also soon be available on my Napier web-page, and is already available in my publication list on this blog.
Continue readingI usually write these pieces every 6 months, although I appear to have not done so at the end of 2022. They have tended to be my contributions to Social Informatics Research Group all-centre gatherings, because I tend to be incapable of speech by the time it’s my turn to report[1].This is mostly because I hate public speaking.
Click this link to see all the pieces in this series.
Continue readingI’ve had a bit of involvement with a visit to Edinburgh Napier by Professor Brian Detlor, culminating in the RIVAL Reunion event on 25 May. One of the events during Brian’s visit was lighting talks by members of the Social Informatics research group on 19 May.
Hazel has blogged about the content of these talks but the picture below doesn’t show me – thus relieving your eyestrain!
From left to right: Professor Diane Pennington, Drew Feeney, Maria Cecil, Tomasz Stupnicki, Aleksander Bielinski, Rachel Salzano, Dr David Brazier, Dr Peter Cruickshank, Emeritus Professor Hazel Hall and Professor Brian Detlor.
Five years ago – in 2018 – Dr Wegene Demeke and I were awarded £10,000 from the Global Challenges Research Fund for a visit to São Paulo City, Brazil, to begin to investigate the extent to which participatory budgeting (PB – Orçamento Participativo in Portuguese) benefits the very poor. Our research visit took place in January 2019, but it has taken to now – May 2023 – to get a paper accepted for publication. So why did this process take 5 years?
Continue readingI’ve just updated my list of projects (on my CV page) to include 5 projects that are now current or imminent. They are
I’m also doing some marking in April, and contributing to outputs from some previous projects. This includes waiting to see what changes the reviewers want me to make to a paper submitted to ISIC 2022. I can’t tell you how much I want to go to Berlin!
And a big shout out to my colleagues on these projects and outputs: David Brazier, Alison Brettle, Peter Cruickshank, Pritam Chita, Wegene Demeke, Paul Gooding, Hazel Hall, Ingi Helgason, Iain McGregor, Marina Milosheva, Jon Mortimer, Gemma Webster, Marianne Wilson, 2 MSc students on the MSc/CPP programme.
I write these pieces every 6 months, usually for the Centre for Social Informatics’ all-centre meetings. (I’m usually incapable of speech by the time it’s my turn to report.[1]) I’m still really miffed that we still can’t get together in person. Click this link to see all the pieces in this series. There is a history of my academic work so far on my personal blog. Continue reading
I’m very, very happy to report that Workplace information literacy: measures and methodological challenges has now been published in the Journal of Information Literacy. This paper is available at https://doi.org/10.11645/15.2.2812. You can read more about the paper in at least 3 blog posts:
So here, I just want to thank Gunilla Widén, Farhan Ahmad, Shahrokh Nikou and Peter Cruickshank for the opportunity to write together on our work on workplace information literacy. And of course thank you to all at JIL for the opportunity to publish.
Reference
Widén, G., Ahmad, F., Nikou, S., Ryan, B., & Cruickshank, P. (2021). Workplace information literacy. Journal Of Information Literacy, 15(2), 26-44. doi:10.11645/15.2.2812
Bruce's IT-ish world 