Supporting research through information literacy programmes: SMU Libraries' learning journeys
Singapore Management University (SMU) has been building its research programmes towards high-impact and larger scale research. The number of postgraduate students has grown from 615 students in 2010 to 1,260 students in January 2015. The growing population of postgraduates, especially those with research requirements, has posed both opportunities and challenges to library’s resources, facilities and services. Library is committed to provide resources and services that support research. This includes developing and implementing Information Literacy (IL) programmes that are relevant to researchers and postgraduates. The IL programmes were structured and offered within an Information Literacy Framework that SMU Libraries have been using for the past five years. With changes in graduates’ population, diversity in graduate programmes, advances in technology, and complexities in research information literacy; the Framework, eventually, required re-evaluation and re-alignment. The main goal of the Framework was still to achieve the IL competency standards as outlined in ACRL’s Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education (2000). However, the ways to develop, implement and promote the IL programmes, would benefit from a more flexible, yet practical Framework. By observing and critically evaluating the IL practice at SMU Libraries, this paper put together best IL practices that work well with postgraduates and molded them into a flexible IL Framework that supports research information literacy.
Providing Information Literacy Instruction to Graduate Students through Literature Review.
As future professionals, graduate students must be information literate; however, information literacy instruction of graduate students is often neglected. To address this need, we created literature review workshops to serve graduate students from a wide range of subject disciplines at a point of shared need. Not only did this strategy prove to be successful in reaching a large number of students from a wide range of subject disciplines, the data gathered from the students identified some of the gaps graduate students have in their knowledge about library services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Emotion, religious practice, and cosmopolitan secularism
Abstract Philip Kitcher has recently proposed a form of ‘cosmopolitan secularism’ which he suggests could enable the members of a future secular society to continue to access and benefit from the moral and existential resources of the world's religions. I criticize this proposal by appeal to contemporary work on the role of emotion and practice in religious commitment. Using the work of John Cottingham and Mark Wynn, two objections are offered to the cosmopolitan secularists' claim that the moral resources of a religion could be both preserved by and employed within a secular society whose members lack emotional commitment to and practical engagement with the religions in question. I conclude that, pace Kitcher, cosmopolitan secularism cannot fulfil its promise to preserve the moral resources of religion in the absence of genuine religious traditions and communities.