Thing 16: Information interview: Information client / information consultant exercise

This is the exercise you will do after Pam's talk in week 8.

Every team will be both an information client and an information consultant. Every team will identify an information need; its partner team for this exercise will carry out an information interview to identify the need, and then find some relevant information. The information will be handed over and the teams must give feedback on the performance in identifying, scoping, planning, gathering and presenting the information.

These are the steps
1) Decide on who will undertake the following roles (everyone has to have a role: if there are 3 people in the group, share the evaluation role between you and allocate the other 3 roles; 2 people should take 2 roles each; if there is just one person then tell Sheila or Pam!)
- - a. Lead "client", who takes the lead in presenting, and answering questions, on the information need.
- - b. Lead interviewer; taking the lead in interviewing the client to identify the information need
- - c. Lead evaluator, who develops criteria to identify which information is most suitable
- - d. Lead presenter, presenting the information to the client team

2) Each team decides on a question that it wants the other team to answer. It does not have to be to do with your studies, and it must not be something that someone could directly use in coursework (i.e. you mustn't do someone else's coursework!).

3) Each team interview the other in turn

4) Whole team seeks information to answer the information need. Be prepared to explain how you found it and why you chose it.

5) Present the information to your client and explain why you think it answers the information need.

6) Have a review of each team's performance as an information consultant. In each case firstly the information consultant team should say what they felt went well and what needed improving. Then the client team should add any praise and criticisms they have.

7) Team blogs. Each team blog a piece of advice on what to do or what not to do when interviewing.

Thing 5: The New Information Universe: Preparation

In week 3, 9th October, you will have a class session on “The Information Universe” with Pam McKinney. This class will focus on Information Resources. Understanding the different types of information resources and their relationships will help you to use information in your assessed coursework.

The preparation for week 3’s information universe session is as follows:

1. Think about a time when you needed to find information – for yourself or for others (for example, for a course assignment or a library enquiry). Make notes on the kinds of information that you used in that particular search.

2. Review your notes and identify the different types of reference resources or sources of information found. (By types of resources, we mean categories of material – such as “blog”, “directory”, “report” or “textbook” – not specific titles.)

This is not a competition, so you can discuss it among yourselves if you wish, but you must produce your own list of types of information resources. You can use your own words to describe the types of resource; there is not one particular list of types we want you to use.

3. Please post your list as an individual entry on your team blog, by the end of Monday, 8th October. As you are doing this outside class time, you may prefer for each person to post separately. However, each person should be posting to the team blog.

We shall be looking at examples from different blogs in the class.

Ask Sheila Webber for help, if you have problems with your blog. If you have questions about the task, put them below, as comments.
Also Sheila will be in the Regent Court Lab RC205 4.15-5pm on Monday 8th October to help anyone who has trouble in making their blog post! What she cannot do, if it hasn't already happened, is invite you into your team's blog, so ask her about that before Monday.

Here are a couple of examples from last year's exercise. Your blog post does not have to be as long as these, but it gives you an idea of what we have in mind:
- From Hanan: http://w-teaminf6350.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/new-information-universe-preparation.html who was in last year's Team W
- From Jen Fox http://i23things.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/thing-4-preparation-jen-fox.html who was in last year's Team I