Library news for the School of Education

Do you spend much time considering your online profile? Have you googled yourself and spent some time looking at the various places and sites that your professional or private information displayed? We may not give this much thought but as professionals, particularly in field such as teaching and education, we should really be concerned about our e-professional profile. E-professionalism – Why is it important? An increasing number of professional organisations recognise the importance of using social media and the possible benefits, including:  Increasing audience engagement and promotion  Widening and improving communication  Providing professional development support and networking opportunities  Engaging with partners and stakeholders, including service users and consumers It is important for you to think about how you manage your activity online in the context of your emerging professional identity (or identities) and what you need to do to manage an effective online

With social media and a myriad of devices on which to post and view, we may have the impression that many of us are digitally literate.  As an academic librarian, I can see first hand how fast developments in information publishing and accessing are changing and the challenge is to ensure that academics and students that I deal with have the skills to find, retrieve, analyse and evaluate the information that meets their needs. This may be for research purposes, writing, publishing or assessment purposes.  Hence I am currently doing the 23 Things of Digital Literacy from Edinburgh University and hope to be able to utilise knowledge and skills from this course into my everyday working practice. I think the quote below sums up my sentiments nicely. "It has become a truism that the information landscape is an ever changing environment. However, one aspect of that landscape which remains constant, is the need to develop the research skills of graduates in order to influence their in