Four Passages to Information Use Related Phenomena in Bachelor Theses at the Finnish Universities of Applied Sciences

Abstract

This year the theme is information literacy and related phenomena in different arenas of people's everyday life. This is a research area whose body of studies is still quite limited. The presentations will increase our understanding of information literacy in terms of conceptual and methodological development and application in professional practice that aims to enhance learning, coaching, and teaching. They may inspire us towards novel approaches for getting hold of the phenomena in different everyday life environments and contexts. This year we had the total of 234 original initially submitted proposals, of which 180 were finally accepted for presentation and are thus included in this Book of Abstracts. The major part of the presentations is formed by papers, 98 in total. We have 38 presentations of best practices, seven workshops, 19 posters, 11 PechaKucha presentations, and three doctoral students' papers. We have three distinguished Keynote Speakers from the broad field of information sciences. Frans Mäyrä has investigated games and digital cultures for more than 20 years, Karen Fisher's research interests are in refugees' information behaviour and people's experiences of information in their everyday life, and Peter Bath is an expert of health informatics and sharing of information in online environments. Our Invited Speaker, Kristiina Kumpulainen from educational sciences, has studied young children's learning, development and wellbeing in formal education and beyond, as well as multiliteracies, dialogic learning, agency and identity, and teachers' professional development. All these 180 presentations of ECIL 2018 will provide us an opportunity to deepen our professional competence and widen our views of information literacy and related issues when the context is familiar to all of us, but the studies of these phenomena are rather rare.It is delightful to tell you that this year Finnish National Commission for UNESCO is a patron of ECIL along with IFLA's permanent patronage. ECIL's sponsors are the City of Oulu, the Finnish Library Association FLA, the Finnish Research Library Association, the AMKIT Universities of Applied Sciences Libraries in Finland, the Librarians' Foundation, and the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies. Furthermore, the Finnish Association for Information Studies is in charge of the Doctoral Forum that is organized with the support from the Finnish Association of Scholarly Publishing. Moreover, besides providing working hours, our Department of Information and Communication Studies has financially contributed in organizing ECIL 2018. We would like to thank all these bodies for their valuable support.Most of all, we are grateful to the initiators and pioneers of ECIL, Serap Kurbanoglu and Sonja Špiranec, for providing us this possibility to organize ECIL in Oulu. We also thank Joumana Boustany for her expertise with the finances and the conference management system, and Denis Kos for his support. In addition, ECIL would not take place without the Standing and Programme Committees' ...