Web 2.0 Untangled: Peter Godwin, Web 2.0 and Information Literacy

“Web 2.0 Untangled” was a day-long conference organised by CILIP’s UC&R BBO and CoFHE MidWest Circle, held at Wolfson College on the 24th November 2010. It featured 7 speakers on a variety of topics. I attended thanks to Oxford staff development funding. A condition of this funding is to write-up your experience of the session to pass around your colleagues in Oxford- which is what I'm doing here!

The first speaker was Peter Godwin (http://infolitlib20.blogspot.com/, http://twitter.com/touchthecloud), talking about the impact of Web 2.0 and the information literacy issues it raised. This talk was exciting and enthusiastic, looking at the possibilities Web 2.0 raises. He begun by wowing us with stats- did you know there are 50 million tweets a day, 500 million Facebook accounts and over half of US students have a handheld device that can access the internet? Web 2.0 is mobile and social, focussed on user participation.
To be a librarian in 2010, according to Peter, means focussing not on books but on people and technology. But how far have we actually changed? Is the change just superficial? The early adopters of Web 2.0 in libraries went over the top claiming it was the solution to all our problems, now is the time to reflect.
Web 2.0 means more and more information is flooding towards our readers- we can help teach them search skills, information literacy, scoping the topic and the importance in seeing both sides of the argument.
Peter also introduced us to lots of interesting Web 2.0 tools I hadn’t seen before- the ones I’m planning on investigating are Netvibes http://www.netvibes.com/en, Screenr http://screenr.com/ (for making short video tutorials- “how to use the online catalogue” etc) and Quick Response Codes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_Code (these little box barcodes that people with smart phones can use as URLs that then immediately load on their phones).